The recent victory of a supercomputer called 'Watson' against the human champions of quiz show Jeopardy! marked a milestone for the elite mainland scientists of International Business Machines Corp.
IBM's China Research Lab, led by senior technical staff member Pan Yue, is credited with developing key software over the past three years that improved Watson's learning capability and accurate processing of answers to questions posed in natural human language.
Watson is a high-performance computer the size of 10 refrigerators named after IBM founder Thomas Watson. In three telecast rounds of Jeopardy! from February 14 to 16, it beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the two most distinguished contestants to win in the popular United States television game show.
'The Watson project demonstrated the world-class capabilities of IBM China Research Lab, and its contribution to the advancement of science and technology worldwide,' Pan said.
Three other mainland researchers were part of the Watson project. Qiu Zhaoming helped Watson formulate 'a confidence level' for its answers. Zhang Lei worked on using so-called 'open-linked data as a source of knowledge and strategies for multi-layer machine-learning'. And Ni Yuan integrated open-linked data as a source for forming Watson's text answers.
'They have contributed pieces of software that can accelerate the 'thinking' behind Watson,' John Kelly, an IBM senior vice-president and director of its global research operations, said.