Watson: Meet the Watsons

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator

Dr. John H. Watson - The fictional sidekick of Sherlock Holmes. Created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Watson most often serves as the narrator of Holmes' adventures. He's smart, a medical doctor who served in the British Army, and a fairly typical Victorian gentleman (unlike Sherlock Holmes who was brilliant but eccentric).






Thomas Augustus Watson - After leaving school at the age of 14, Watson began work in an electrical shop in Boston, where he met Alexander Graham Bell. He worked with Bell on his telephone experiments, and on March 10, 1876, through a receiver connected by wire to a transmitting instrument located in another room, Watson heard Bell’s famous first telephone call, which Watson later recalled as “Mr. Watson—come here—I want you.” Over the next year Watson joined Bell in demonstrating the powers of the new invention in several spectacular and widely reported exhibitions. In 1877, when the Bell Telephone Company was formed, Watson received a share in the business and became its head of research and technical development.

After leaving Bell in 1881, Watson, made independently wealthy by his share of the royalties on the telephone, traveled through Europe, married, started a family, and made an unsuccessful attempt at farming along the Weymouth Fore River in East Braintree, Massachusetts, southeast of Boston. In 1885, having opened a machine shop in a building on his farm property, he started a new business, the Fore River Engine Company, in partnership with his assistant, Frank O. Wellington. The two partners at first constructed marine engines, and then in 1896 they received their first government contract, for two destroyers. During the following eight years, Watson moved the shipyard to nearby Quincy, Massachusetts, changed the growing company’s name to the Fore River Ship & Engine Company, and took on contracts to build lightships, cruisers, battleships, schooners, and other vessels.

Following his retirement from shipbuilding in 1904, Watson led a restless and peripatetic existence. He and his wife studied geology; he acted in a Shakespearean company; and in 1926 he published an autobiography, Exploring Life. On January 25, 1915, he rejoined Bell in making the first transcontinental telephone call, between New York City and San Francisco. Watson died at his winter home in Florida. (from biography.com)

IBM Watson - Watson is a question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first CEO, industrialist Thomas J. Watson.

The computer system was initially developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy! and, in 2011, the Watson computer system competed on Jeopardy! against legendary champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings winning the first place prize of $1 million.

In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson software system's first commercial application would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York City, in conjunction with health insurance company WellPoint. IBM Watson's former business chief, Manoj Saxena, says that 90% of nurses in the field who use Watson now follow its guidance. (info from wikipedia and IBM)