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IBM 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 founder and 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 champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, winning the first place prize of 1 million USD. In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson'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 WellPoint (now Elevance Health).. Watson was created as a question answering (QA) computing system that IBM built to apply advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and machine learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering. IBM stated that Watson uses "more than 100 different techniques to analyze natural language, identify sources, find and generate hypotheses, find and score evidence, and merge and rank hypotheses." In recent years, Watson's capabilities have been extended and the way in which Watson works has been changed to take advantage of new deployment models (Watson on IBM Cloud), evolved machine learning capabilities, and optimized hardware available to developers and researchers. It is no longer purely a question answering (QA) computing system designed from Q&A pairs but can now 'see', 'hear', 'read', 'talk', 'taste', 'interpret', 'learn' and 'recommend'. Watson uses IBM's DeepQA software and the Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) framework implementation. The system was written in various languages, including Java, C++, and Prolog, and runs on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 operating system using the Apache Hadoop framework to provide distributed computing.

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