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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, December 9, 2013 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Melodie Ding

"IBM Watson Technology"

ABSTRACT -- In 2006, IBM Research took on the grand challenge of building an open-domain question-answering system, called Watson. DeepQA is the software architecture used inside Watson for deep content analysis and evidence-based reasoning.  In 2011, Watson competed on the Jeopardy game show and beat former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings in a landslide victory. Watson represents an impressive leap forward in system design and analytics, a new class of cognition that can quickly sift through large volumes of Big Data. Outside of the Jeopardy game show, Watson technology greatly improves decision-making across a variety of use cases and industries such as medical health care, smartphones, financial industry, customer service, and etc.

SPEAKER -- Melodie Ding joined NASA last year as the development lead for the JPSS Interface Data Processing Segment (IDPS) in the Science Data Systems Branch.  She received her Master's in Computer Engineering at Wayne State University and worked as a senior application architect in the auto industry for more than 10 years to design/develop large-scale applications using databases, client/server and web technologies.  After moving to the Washington DC area in 2009, she was a principle software engineer working on intelligence services using cutting edge web/cloud computing technologies. Before NASA, Melodie worked at IBM where she helped bring its Watson technology out of the Jeopardy studio and into the real world.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov