Andy Crossen successfully defended his dissertation, “Building Intelligent Information Systems: Experiences with the ISA Platform,” yesterday. Andy’s been doing what people are calling “mash-ups” since 1999, way before the term even existed. His infrastructure, the ISA Platfrom, which we use in Watson, allows developers to easily incorporate multiple web services into a single user experience. The cool thing is that it doesn’t require the services themselves support Web standards like SOAP and XML. Developers can write little “wrappers” in XML that provide a programmable interface to any existing web service, even legacy applications and web sites. The scripting language he built makes this easy – you don’t have to know how to code in C++ in order to add a new service to Watson. His framework is even capable of automatically reasoning about how to take input and to arrive at the desired output by using the right services together.
During his time as student, he made a bunch of demo apps on top of this. One of them makes a web site about any book that you scan in with a barcode scanner. Based on the type of book it will search for different things. If you scan a fiction book, it will find out about the author. For a textbook it will see if there are materials online from the publisher. Smart stuff.
We’re all really excited that Andy has decided to join the Intellext team so he can continue to help us improve Watson!
Good job, Andy! Now there's a paradox at Intellext.
Posted by: Jonathan Cruz | April 17, 2006 at 03:28 PM