

Building the Team That Built IBM's Watson - kanamekun
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/jobs/building-the-watson-team-of-scientists.html

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kingkilr
I had the opportunity to visit the Watson Research labs a few weeks ago and
meet with several researchers working on dynamic languages there. IBM is not
like any Silicon Valley company, researchers have individual offices, there
isn't tremendous shared space, and you pay for stuff in the cafeteria. But
they have brilliant scientists and engineers there. It sounds like Ferrucci's
attempts collaboration were much closer to a Bay Area startup than the IBM I
saw.

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mjwalshe
Well my first Job at a high end RnD place it was all small 2 or 3 person
offices.

Some times you need a quiet place to think - though we did have some
interesting brainstorming sessions in my office - one on the best way to
measure the efficiency of flushing toilets was one I remember.

I remember looking into using machine vision to help with this but when the
base cost of the kit was £250,000 we had to give that up (this was in teh
early 80's)

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ximeng
Pity there's not really any detail here on who they chose and why.

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davyjones
I had the exact same question popup in my head. I browsed through the IBM
Watson page to get an idea.
[<http://www.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/research-team/>]

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zone411
I think this Jeopardy challenge was so interesting in terms of general AI that
it'd be a shame if the original team completely shifted their focus onto new
fields. There are a lot of goalposts left, such as beating humans without the
advantage of the instant reaction time or beating humans assisted by the
Internet.

