A little background: I am a senior CS major at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and this upcoming week my school will be holding a 3 day event to cover the Watson computer system taking on Jeopardy. The lead researcher, David Ferrucci, is a graduate of RPI and will be here one of those days to do a Q&A, but I don't really know much about the system and figured HN might have a few insightful questions that I could forward on.<p>Also, kind of a weird twist, but Ferrucci happens to be my roommate's first uncle (he's a management major and never mentioned it since him and I don't really talk CS all that often), so I might be meeting Dr. F personally afterward - making the question asking even more feasible.
Ask him what he thinks the various applications of the Watson project are (if he can disclose some of them). I heard they were going to use it for medical purposes (let Watson answer people's questions and help diagnose them), but I'm sure they have a lot more in mind. It'd also be interesting to have him compare this feat to Deep Blue.<p>Let us know the question you end up asking him and his answer, if you can! Thanks!
Could you ask him what is the single most important thing that makes Watson possible, whereas Watson would not be possible five years ago? Was there an advancement in querying unstructured data? Or was it simply disks got big enough to hold a lot of data?
You're his nephew's roommate? Ask him "May I send you my resumé?"<p>Seriously, I presume that his budget was large, but not inexhaustible. Ask him what he could have accomplished if he'd thrown more hardware/people at the problem.