Watson coming to class, CCI to offer new computer science course

“Semantic Technologies in IBM Watson” is a new course for UNC Charlotte’s College of Computing and Informatics starting in spring 2014, and the University is one of only three in the country to offer it.

The class, which will cover text analytics with IBM Watson and its business applications, will be taught by Associate Professor Wlodek Zadrozny, who was a core member of the Watson team from 2008-12.

“Students will have an opportunity to build prototype projects using an important, emerging collection of technologies,” said Zadrozny. “In the process, they will also learn scalable techniques of text mining, data mining, information retrieval and machine learning.”

Other course topics will include: different ways of modeling text (as vectors, as structured chunks, and as parse trees), document classification, clustering, information extraction, question answering and elements of machine learning. Business scenarios and project assignments will illustrate and clarify course concepts.

This will be a hands-on course on a common, Eclipse-based platform and will cover all major components of IBM Watson. The course material, software and data, will be provided to students. Different components will be implemented for text mining and language processing, within the same architecture, with the idea of replicating and extending several Watson capabilities. The course will be a combination of lecturing and projects.

Zadrozny has been named a 2014 Data Science Faculty Fellow by the National Consortium for Data Science (NCDS) as a result of the curriculum being offered and his additional research. The NCDS is a collaboration of leaders in academia, industry and government formed to address the data challenges of the 21st century.