One of the amazing achievements of IBM Research is the recent triumph of the "Watson" program, whose avatar is seen above in the Jeopardy! game, beating two human champions. This raises back the question whether computer thinks, and whether we are getting closer to the "singularity" vision between human and machine intelligence. While this game is a question answering one, a complete machine intelligence will also require the ability to detect events and contexts, and react within a changing environment. I suggested (as a joke) that the next game that a humanoid robot should strive to is the "survivor", which requires other capabilities, like social capabilities, but I think that this challenge is somewhat beyond even the current wildest dreams.
Have not written for the last week, spent some of it in the IBM La Gaude site, near Nice, in South France, the La Gaude site is on mountain and can be seen in a bird eye's view here. The meeting was an internal meeting of "technical leaders" (whatever it is) in IBM South and West Europe, and was kind of educational and networking session. Back home - occupied by some family matters, so now I found some time to catch up. First looking at the Blogland, one can find two old bloggers returning after long silence, one of them is Brian Connell, who returned to blogging after a long time, the other is Marco from Rulecore, who also returned to blogging after a long silence. In a comment to my Blog, the Rulecore guys are wondering why Rulecore is not mentioned in the ACM Computing Survey upcoming survey on event processing while other are mentioned. I think that the reason is quite obvious, while I am familiar with Rulecore (they participated in the implementation of the EPIA example; my students used them in project several times), if one wants to be known by the academic community, then one has to participate in the research oriented conferences, publish (at least industrial) papers etc --- in our world, visibility is the name of the game, so you might consider sending an industrial paper or experience report to DEBS 2011, or participate in the DEBS 2011 challenge.
Another blog (Jason Irwin's) that I don't typically follow provides a new review of the EPIA book.
My next trip is planned for late March in the USA, I was invited to give a tutorial on event processing as one of the highlights of the OMG Technical Conference, I might also do some other meetings in the USA (customers' meeting, IBM meetings, university visits), but still working on the plan.
