The book is a fun read that explains the AI aspects very intuitively while also detailing the human drama of developing Watson. The author entertains with insider surprises throughout the book, such as IBM’s temporary fear that it would look foolish on national television if a hacker in a garage could build something comparable to Watson.

Though Watson’s “secret sauce” will remain an IBM secret, the book does a lot to explain the basics of how Watson operates and the potential applications of such technology. As the book demonstrates, a lot of trial-and-error was required to go from academic research to developing Watson. I also enjoyed seeing formal AI concepts explained very intuitively, such as seeing ontologies likened to “cheat sheets.”

At $9.99 for the Kindle edition, I think it’s a bargain. Not only is the book a thrill to read, it is more informative than expensive academic books (which notoriously overfocus on details while missing the bigger picture). For those wanting more technical details about Watson, the bibliography includes an article by IBM’s David Ferrucci and other team members: “Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project.” This article, which you can read on the web, is easier to understand once you read the book.

Abstract
Different approaches for distributed programming in modern hardware architectures allows the developers to build the efficient solutions of complicated technical and information problems. The technologies such as Web Services allow the applications to create a cross-platform for data exchange. The multi-agent systems, where a communication between the agents is essential for proper work of such applications can be developed using the technology of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The presented article presents how to apply the modern programming technologies, design patterns and software architectures to building standards of multi-agent systems.

A related video (that does not use WCF):

http://blog.qetza.net/en/2010/03/08/vs-2010-personnalisation-des-vnements-de-lintellitrace/

code_swarm – Eclipse (short ver.) from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

http://code.google.com/p/codeswarm/

http://code.google.com/p/gource/

What is the single most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills?

Freelancing:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/78396/finding-freelance-contract-coding-projects

From one of the messages there:

We currently don’t support JSON, only XML.
We are considering adding JSON support, but that’s currently only at
low prio.

So please use XML instead for now.

Code Search Team