DARPA Offers Free Watson-Like Artificial Intelligence

DeepDive Offers DIY Artificial Intelligence

If you wonder what the government has done for you lately, take a look at DeepDive. DeepDive is a free version of IBM's Watson developed in the same Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), but now available free and open-source.  Although it's never been pitted against IBM's Watson, DeepDive has gone up against a more fleshy foe: the human being. Result: DeepDive beat or at least equaled humans in the time it took to complete an arduous cataloging task. These were no ordinary humans, but expert human catalogers tackling the same task as DeepDive -- to read technical journal articles and catalogue them by understanding their content.

"We tested DeepDive against humans performing the same tasks, and DeepDive came out ahead or at least equaled the efforts of the humans," professor Shanan Peters, who supervised the testing, told EE Times.  DeepDive is free and open-source, which was the idea of its primary programmer, Christopher Re.  

"We started out as part of a machine-reading project funded by DARPA in which Watson also participated," Re, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, told EE Times. "Watson is a question-answering engine (although now it seems to be much bigger). [In contrast] DeepDive's goal is to extract lots of structured data" from unstructured data sources...