IBM's Watson Gains Presence at Top Technical Universities

by Darryl K. Taft

 

IBM is taking its Watson cognitive computing system into the curricula of seven of the nation's top technical universities.

IBM’s Watson cognitive computing system is finding its way into the classroom at some of the nation’s top technology oriented educational institutions. Big Blue announced that it is partnering with some of the country’s leading technology universities to launch cognitive computing courses that give students access via the cloud to Watson.

Enrollment is now open for fall 2014 cognitive computing courses at Carnegie Mellon University, New York University (NYU), The Ohio State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan and the University of Texas in Austin. Co-designed by the IBM Watson Group and leading academic experts in fields such as artificial intelligence and computer science, the courses will empower students with the technical knowledge and hands-on learning required to develop new cognitive computing applications fueled by Watson’s intelligence.

Enrolled students will form a business team and together they will have access to their Watson instance via the Watson Developer Cloud. As a classroom, they will select an industry to focus on, such as retail, travel or healthcare, and then will work as a team to ingest relevant data into Watson and train it. Ultimately, the students will break into teams and develop prototype apps and a business plan based on their Watson industry of choice.

“All of the courses are designed to be hands on and project based, like mine at Michigan. Each class will get access to version of Watson delivered as a cloud service”, said David Chesney, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan, in a post on IBM’s “Building a Smarter Planet” blog. “Classmates will split up into teams, identify uses for Watson, develop apps and also write business plans—as if they’re entrepreneurs creating startups. Think of it as Silicon Valley in the classroom”.

 

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