Building the 'Watson' team - NYTimes article dt. Jan 7, 2012

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Building the Team That Built Watson

By DAVID A. FERRUCCI
Published: January 7, 2012

...It was not easy finding people to join the Watson team in the mid-1990s. Most scientists I approached favored their own individual projects and career tracks. And who could blame them? This was an effort that, at best, would mingle the contributions of many. At its worst it would fail miserably, undermining the credibility of all involved.

Scientists, by their nature, can be solitary creatures conditioned to work and publish independently to build their reputations. While collaboration drives just about all scientific research, the idea of “publishing or perishing” under one’s own name is alive and well....

...From the first, it was clear that we would have to change the culture of how scientists work. Watson was destined to be a hybrid system. It required experts in diverse disciplines: computational linguistics, natural language processing, machine learning, information retrieval and game theory, to name a few.

Likewise, the scientists would have to reject an ego-driven perspective and embrace the distributed intelligence that the project demanded. Some were still looking for that silver bullet that they might find all by themselves. But that represented the antithesis of how we would ultimately succeed. We learned to depend on a philosophy that embraced multiple tracks, each contributing relatively small increments to the success of the project...

...Leadership had to be steadfast and persistent but grounded in optimism....

IN the end, the hero was the team, not any individual member or algorithm. Eventually, everyone came to appreciate that. Well into the throes of the project, one researcher commented, “Compared to the way we work now, it’s like we were standing still before.”

Watson went on to win “Jeopardy” a year ago, but its work is far from over. Now we and other research and development teams at I.B.M. are busy developing ways to put Watson to work in several different areas, most notably health care.

As for the members of the original Watson team, they’d tell you that never in a million years could they have imagined what we accomplished. Just like Watson itself, we all learned that the sum is much greater than the parts.