IBM's Dr. Watson Will See You...Someday

Four years ago, Neil Mehta was among the 15 million people who watched Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter--the world's greatest "Jeopardy!" "Jeopardy!" is a television game show in which the host challenges contestants with answers for which they must then supply the questions--a task that involves some seriously complicated cognition. Artificial-intelligence experts described Watson's triumph as even more extraordinary than IBM supercomputer Deep Blue's history-making 1997 defeat of chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. To an AI aficionado, Watson was a tour de force of language analysis and machine reasoning. To Mehta, a physician and professor at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic, Watson was a question unto itself: What might be possible were Watson's powers turned to medicine? "I love technology, and I was rooting for Watson," says Mehta. "I knew that the world was changing.