linkedin.com: Artificial intelligence has a name. It’s Watson, the IBM cognitive computing system of Jeopardy! fame. Watson’s creators have teamed up with Cleveland Clinic to help train it. Once it graduates we’re going to put it to work wherever we can in the clinical setting. With our knowledge and experience, and Watson’s ability to provide doctors with fast, efficient access to relevant knowledge buried in huge volumes of unstructured data, we expect clinical decision-making to get faster, better and more efficient than ever – with substantial benefits for patients everywhere.
Here’s the deal: IBM has asked students at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine to help enrich and refine the cognitive computing system’s decision-making capabilities. The New York Times called it “controlled-crowd sourcing.” Watson will submit data evidence on medical problems to be corrected, re-corrected and enhanced by our students and clinicians. They’ll help Watson understand the nuances of language in the medical context. They’ll help it to interpret and weigh the information in the electronic medical record. They’ll make it a more valuable collaborator by giving it the sapience to make semantic distinctions – for example “cold” may be a temperature or a condition depending on the context.
Critics of Watson point out that a computer can only be as good as the information that’s being fed into it, and question whether there is enough quality medical data out there to give computers the medical savvy they need. That’s why IBM chose the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine to help educate Watson. Our students are among the top in the nation. They’re attracted by the College’s innovative problem-based learning program and clinician-researcher career path. They’ll have access to Cleveland Clinic’s vast outcomes registries and electronic medical records. Best of all, they’ll be able to draw upon the wisdom and experience of their teachers all of whom are working members of our medical staff.