CSSE-453: Project Proposal
Objectives
The term project will consist of developing an application in which Watson plays a key role.
We will need to train Watson with about 1200-1500 question-answer pairs. This is a time consuming task
and because of that, we will select just one domain for the entire class. Groups of students may
decide to develop different applications based on the domain, but we will train Watson on just one domain.
The project proposal phase consists of a four week process in which you will develop an idea for an application,
research it, obtain feedback from your classmates, attempt to recruit your classmates to join your proposal
and, if necessary, a class vote on the domain to be used for training Watson.
The proposal phase is designed to learn about ways in which people creatively think about product ideas, how to
obtain fail-fast feedback/validation of an idea, how to research a market opportunity and how to make a good argument as
well as to engage in the back and forth of negotioating a commonly accepted project proposal.
Overview
For each of the following assignments, please submit your work to the appropriate drop-box on Moodle.
Parameters of a good IBM Watson Domain
Please consider the following broad parameters when thinking about a suitable domain for
a Watson project. We will spend a good amount of classtime to discuss these parameters
and study
- Pick a domain that is about question answering.
- Confine the problem space to about 1200-1600 questions and 300-400 answers. Notice that
each answer will have about 5 questions associated with it.
- Keep the questions very much confined to those answers,
i.e. Watson will be able to handle a lot of different ways of asking
the same question but it will not be able to handle questions that do
not have the answer in your document or for which Watson was not
trained, i.e. for which we did not associate question answer
pairs. Think of Watson as enabling you to ask a question in a 1001 ways.
- As part of your proposal, please present representative
questions that one may ask. In this context, try to not focus too much
on "What is: ..." questions as we can use Google to answer
them. Think broadly about all sorts of questions one might ask, such
as "How do I ...", "I want ..., how do I do that?"
- The more answers you want your system to process, the more
training it needs.
- Do not worry about the availability of a corpus too much. Please
notice that the corpus to be ingested should be very narrowly limited
on having the answers. The more irrelevant data it has, the more
training we have to do and the lower the confidence values.
See about proposing an app that is:
- small
- cute and
- related to question answering.
Be aware that the original Facebook was largely developed in a
weekend. It did not have a lot of functionality then, but people
absolutely loved it.
Assignment Specs
The purpose of the reviews of recent IBM Watson projects is to study the current state of the art of Watson
infused Q/A applications. Please submit a write-up highlighting key features of the app assigned for your review
Please also capture any unusual or interesting features. When watching the video, try to answer the following question:
"What about this app or domain makes it a good question-answering app?" [to be assigned from
Watson University Competition
and other sources]
Based on the apps we have seen, a web survey, but primarily on your own thinking, develop an idea or two for
a good question-answering application. Submit a brief write-up to the appropriate drop-box on Moodle. We
will discuss each idea in class for the purpose of improvement and for group formation.
Based on feedback through the class discussion of your app idea, further thinking and research of existing, similar
apps, as well as negotiations and input from your growing group, revise your idea or produce a new one. Submit a
write-up of your revised app idea to the appropriate drop-box on Moodle. We will discuss your revised idea in class for
the purpose of continued improvement and group formation.
This exercise is designed to get to know the
innovation canvas. Please work on this assignment in pairs. Using the March 1999 Wired Interview with Jeff Bezos entitled
The Inner Bezos, fill in the innovation canvas.
For the project proposal, submit a write-up in form of a filled in innovation canvas for your proposed project
and prepare a PPT presentation.
Proposal Presentation
- Please provide slides with information about each of the five
quadrants.
- Let's plan to spend about 5 minutes for the presentation, as such, it
has to be very concise. If you need more time, that is fine, just
don't plan on using 20 minutes.
- Please be aware that based on the proposal presentations and
discussions of them, we will eventually select one of them as a class
project. As such, continue to ask good questions.