Biologically Inspired Question Answering

 Via Jim Spohrer.    See the previous CSIG talk on this work.

In Kurzweil AI: IBM’s Watson shown to enhance human-computer co-creativity, support biologically inspired design ... Watson Engagement Advisor AI system was trained to "learn" about biologically inspired design from biology articles, then answer questions.

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers, working with student teams, trained a cloud-based version of IBM’s Watson called the Watson Engagement Advisor to provide answers to questions about biologically inspired design (biomimetics), a design paradigm that uses biological systems as analogues for inventing technological systems.

Ashok Goel, a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing who conducts research on computational creativity. In an experiment, he used this version of Watson as an “intelligent research assistant” to support teaching about biologically inspired design and computational creativity in the Georgia Tech CS4803/8803 class on Computational Creativity in Spring 2015. Goel found that Watson’s ability to retrieve natural language information could allow a novice to quickly “train up” about complex topics and better determine whether their idea or hypothesis is worth pursuing.  ... "