For trivia and simply Jeopardy style questions yes Wikipedia is King. I am
sure this version of Watson would not rely on Wikipedia. There are much
better sources out there for medical content. Anyway who would base an
expert system for medicine on Wikipedia would be a fool. I am sure the
people at IBM are not.
James Heilman
On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 11:59 PM, James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Recently IBM announced that their Watson natural
language processing
system will be used for "utilization management" decisions in lung
cancer treatment by health insurance company WellPoint at Memorial
Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center.
I would like to urge everyone to review
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilization_management -- it seems very
likely that Watson will be making treatment decisions similar to those
which have colloqually been rerred to as "death panel" decisions in
the US over the past four years.
The IBM Watson team has frequently stated that they rely on Wikipedia
in essentially all of their interpretation and question answering
processing, more than any other source.
What are the legal liability issues involved with an artificial
intelligence system based on Wikipedia making life-or-death medical
decisions?
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com