PROVIDENCE – Jennifer Wood, chief of staff for Lt. Gov. Elizabeth H. Roberts, recently journeyed to Yorktown Heights, N.Y., home of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, to participate in a brainstorming discussion of how IBM’s new supercomputer, Watson, might be employed in the health care sector.
Watson had been featured as a contestant on the TV game show, “Jeopardy,” besting two former top players.
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Wood, the only Rhode Islander invited to participate, was part of a group that included about 80 regional thought leaders, including physicians who coordinate emergency responses and directors of large social service agencies. The visit had been arranged in part by Paul Brackett, IBM’s senior client representative in the public sector serving Rhode Island.
“IBM has clearly been thinking about health care applications … and how health care problems and challenges can be alleviated,” she said.
Wood envisioned that Watson, with its 2,200 high-powered processors, could serve as an important resource because of its ability to respond to questions with great speed and specificity to both medical and public health questions. For instance, Wood said, in a policy research setting, Watson would be able to correlate data immediately about the effectiveness of immunizations and educational performance, or correlate data regarding the high incidence of lead poisoning and poor performance in standardized testing.
“Watson enables you to get at a compendium of information through a natural speech interface, rather than through search engines, which are kind of a blunt-edge took,” Wood said. Watson, she continued, could also have enormous value in a clinical care setting. “Having this natural speech interface enables you to say, out loud, in a doctor’s office, ‘What do you think?’ she said, posing a specific question about treatment.
Some of the issues unresolved in the potential roll out of Watson in the health care sector revolve around IBM’s decision about how to treat Watson’s intellectual property, Wood said. “Will it be open source, or a proprietary product?” explained Wood, was one of the questions posed at the session. “The jury is still out on that.”
