IBM turns computer brain to NASA research
Computer Brain to NASA
Research
By Sarah Lewin, Space.com Staff Writer | December 16,
2016 12:38pm ET
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IBM's Watson computer system, hosted in the cloud, is taking
on NASA's big research data.
Credit: IBM
IBM's question-answering whiz, the Watson computer system,
famously beat former winners on Jeopardy in 2011 — and now
it's digging into aerospace research and data to help NASA
answer questions on the frontier of spaceflight science and
make crucial decisions in the moment during air travel.
More than 60 years after the first IBM computing machines
showed up in the halls of NASA's Langley Research Center ,
new work at Langley will use IBM tech to help researchers sort
through the huge volumes of data that is generated by
aerospace research.
"There's so much data out there that consists of unstructured
text that usually only humans can make sense of, but the
challenge is that there's too much of it for any human being to
read," Chris Codella, an IBM Distinguised Engineer who is
working on Watson, told Space.com. "The idea here is to have
a Watson system that can be a research development advisor
to people who work in the aerospace fields." [Forget Jeopardy:
5 Abilities That Make IBM's Watson Amazing ]
Watson operates with what IBM calls cognitive computing —
essentially, it draws connections after examining huge volumes
of data that is fed to it, and it is able to return highly relevant
answers within the fields that data encompasses. The system
has been used to analyze connections within medical and
scientific research documents, make potential diagnoses,
invent recipes and analyze people's personality traits through
social media posts. (Plus, of course, play Jeopardy! — after
the system drew from Wikipedia to help build its knowledge
base.)
IBM chief technical officer Rob High spoke at NASA's Langley
Research Center in Virginia about using the company's Watson
computer system to streamline aerospace research.
Credit: NASA/David C. Bowman
Watson is able to respond to questions that it is asked in
natural language — or as a human would ask another human,
as opposed to through search terms — and unlike a search
engine, where more information can muddle the results,
Watson returns better answers when the user gives it more
detail, Codella said. At Langley, the system will return what it
ranks as the most relevant passages in its database when a
user asks it a question. While human researchers couldn't
hope to internalize all the aerospace research out there,
Watson doesn't have that limitation.
"That was the initial emphasis here: Have a system that could
read it all, make sense of it all," Codella said. "The number of
documents Watson could read is in principle unlimited."
Langley played host to a large IBM mainframe in the early
1960s, which was used to calculate complex flight trajectories
as NASA made its first forays into human spaceflight. The
upcoming new film "Hidden Figures" features the women of
Langley learning to program the great machine; mathematician
Katherine Johnson famously checked its numbers before John
Glenn launched into space, as well. (IBM has a page about the
movie and history online.)
At the time, the computer let researchers take on the many
complex, ever-changing calculations that were needed to
develop rockets and plot their paths. Now, when electronic
computers have number wrangling well covered, Watson lets
them wrangle the library of research, too.
Watson researchers are also working with NASA to develop a
program that provides important information to pilots "on the
fly" — during flight, when they need to make quick decisions
and don't have time to gather all the information they might
need.
"The very first demonstration system we built was meant to
surface relevant information to a pilot in flight," Codella said.
NASA "tried to recreate an incident that happened in one of
the airlines a few years ago and see if Watson could, when
given the background information, surface information that
would have made a difference, had the pilot known it at the
time."
The real flight the scenario was based on landed successfully,
Codella added, but the pilot took some actions that could
have made the situation worse. During a simulated test,
Watson was able to provide information about the aircraft,
equipment malfunction and weather conditions that would
have led the pilot to a better understanding of the situation.
"It's going after that tidbit of information that might be so
highly relevant, that they might not have been aware of in their
own experience, that might make the difference in their
decision process," Codella said. He added that the next stage
of that project will begin in 2017.
IBM's early computers were housed in large rooms on
Langley's campus , but Watson operates on servers that
communicate with its users remotely, through the cloud.
However, there's one situation where that would be particularly
inconvenient: in space or on another planet, where time lag
and limited bandwidth slow that stream of communication to
a trickle.
Codella described another scenario they've discussed with
NASA, where a Watson system would be able to diagnose
astronauts' illnesses in flight and offer suggestions for
treatment. Perhaps the system could even help operate the
ship itself, he added. (IBM has also discussed the possibility
of Watson directing a rover on Mars.) With the continued
miniaturization of computer components, called Moore's Law,
the computational power it requires could someday be
miniaturized enough for it to find a home in space, Codella
said.
Even as the history of humans performing crucial calculations
at Langley is depicted on the big screen, in "Hidden Figures,"
IBM is helping NASA to write a script for the future role of
technology at the agency — where Watson helps read and
understand huge libraries of data, reconciling contradictory
information and weighing all the options before it picks out the
crucial details for a given problem.
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