In 2014, The University of Texas at El Paso will celebrate the 100th anniversary of our founding in 1914 as the Texas State School of Mines and Metallurgy. Like most such major milestones, UTEP's Centennial offers not only an occasion to celebrate our distinguished history, but also a window through which we can begin contemplating our bright future as we become the first national research university with a 21st century student demographic. The Centennial Lecture Series will help us focus our lens on UTEP's second century by inviting speakers to the UTEP campus to share their perspectives on a broad range of contemporary issues that are likely to impact our society, culture and lives in the years ahead. We invite you to join us in exploring these important and timely topics and expanding our thinking about how they may help shape UTEP's next 100 years.


President Diana Natalicio
and
The Department of Computer Science
cordially invite you to attend a
UTEP Centennial Lecture
"Beyond Jeopardy! Putting Watson to Work"
Richard Talbot
Director
Product Line Management of the IBM Power Systems
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
5 p.m.
Undergraduate Learning Center, Room 116
UTEP Campus
Reception to follow presentation


     IBM Watson is an artificial intelligence system capable of answering questions posed in natural language —with precision, confidence and speed. Named after IBM's founder and first president, Thomas J. Watson, the supercomputer is one of the most advanced systems on Earth and was developed by an IBM Research team of 25 scientists. In an historic event, in February 2011, Watson competed on Jeopardy! against the TV quiz show's two most renowned champions, delivered a stellar performance and captured the world's imagination. The IBM Jeopardy! Challenge represented a major milestone in the development of artificial intelligence systems, and was highlighted in IBM's centennial celebration this year as a showcase for its commitment to research and tradition of Grand Challenges. While the Grand Challenge for this IBM Research team was winning the three game Jeopardy! tournament, IBM's bigger vision for Watson targets the development of broadly applicable, commercial technologies capable of digesting a variety of structured and unstructured information and responding with precise answers to questions posed in natural language. IBM has now challenged itself to successfully migrate Watson's sophisticated analytics capabilities to solving real world challenges in Healthcare, Finance, Banking and other industries. Richard Talbot, Director, IBM Power Systems will be presenting highlights of this exciting IBM Research program and delving into present and future business implications of the DeepQA and Natural Language Processing technologies behind Watson. After the presentation, a panel of business and research leaders from the El Paso community will discuss future implications of these exciting new technologies.

     Richard Talbot currently serves as Director, Product Line Management of the IBM Power Systems business. In this role, he leads development of portfolio definition, business planning and successful world-wide introduction of IBM's next generation Power platforms. His team contributes to the achievement of all Power Systems' business and quality objectives and helped grow this IBM business unit to #1 market share leadership.
     Most recently, Richard has been working on the IBM leadership team responsible for transitioning Watson from the game show circuit to solving real world problems in healthcare, financial services, government citizen services and many other industries. He is personally involved in the development of several Watson pilot applications and works frequently with clients to understand how these new analytics and natural language processing technologies can help address their most complex business challenges and accelerate their delivery of new services and offerings. His interests also include developing broad scale IBM partnerships within the healthcare industry and university alliances for the deployment of these new technologies to accelerate the development of new treatment options and cures for complex disease processes.
     Richard is an IBM Executive and PMI Certified Project Manager, holds five U.S. Patents and has received several awards in management excellence, business and technical achievement. Prior to this role, he held a number of management and software development roles since starting with IBM in Boca Raton, Florida.
     Richard received his Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas in Austin and BA from Rice University. He currently resides with his family in Austin, Texas and remains active in several charitable and community service organizations.