WATSONIBM

Cold Case Solutions

CJ YangClinton McKay

Deepak Bhagchandani

It has been 16 months since the Missing Lauren case was started. However, it was recently closed a couple of months ago, when they could not find another lead.

Finding Lauren

He has been on this case for a while and even though the case is closed is really frustrated.

This is Lieutenant Potts.

He receives a call from the chief saying that a new and powerful computer program has been made available by the government to solve cold cases.

He thinks about it for a while and becomes hopeful for Lauren and her family.

Giving Watson all of the Evidencefrom a Cold Case

Connecting Old Cases

We wanted to leverage Watson to analyze the finite corpus of a closed cold case to help detectives find new leads and reopen these cases

How can we leverage the corpus of old - solved and unsolved cases to connect with new case data to use Watson for finding new insights and leads

Opportunity Space

Watson is expensive to run, so it should be consulted to answer critical questions

Finite set of Documents

Yes/No Training

Watson works best with a finite set of documents--adding new documents means you will need to teach Watson how to interpret the new documents

Watson learns corpora by asking yes/no questions about its hypotheses

Assumptions

Watson is Expensive

Concept

Whenever Lieutenant Potts opens the IBM Watson Cold Case Solutions program, he is greeted with the login screen.

After he enters his credentials, he can choose to open an existing case file or create a new one. He’s already collected the evidence in Lauren’s case, so he’s ready to create a new case file.

A new case number is automatically generated and Lieutenant Potts enters some details about the case. He directs the program to a folder containing all of the evidence in Lauren’s case and uploads the contents of the folder.

After he has saved the documents, Watson starts processing the evidence in the background. A few moments later, Watson begins asking him to clear up some ambiguities in the files.

Watson continues asking questions until all of the ambiguities between the documents have been resolved. As Lieutenant Potts answers more questions, Watson’s comprehension of the documents increases. The program shows Watson’s learning progress at the bottom of the screen.

After Watson’s comprehension reaches 100%, Lieutenant Potts finds that he can ask a question of Watson. He knows the stakes are high and he wants to check that Watson knows what it’s talking about. To test Watson, he asks a question he already knows the answer to.

Watson found the correct answer to his question based on the evidence in the file. Now it’s time for the department-wide training session on how to write useful questions for the IBM Watson Cold Case Solutions program.

After Lieutenant Potts and Watson have worked together to solve the case, he prints the Evidence Report. There are step-by-step explanations of how Watson came to its conclusions. Now that Potts knows which pieces of evidence Watson used, he can re-trace the program’s steps. Armed with this information, he can defend Watson’s findings as evidence in court.

Future StrategiesLeveraging high speed analysis for opened casesUsing the high speed analysis to analyze new data from previously closes cases. As new data and documents become available they are uploaded into the Watson system for quick analysis.

Thank youTarun GangwaniBrandon LeMarty Siegel

AppendixSystem MapResearchOur Process

ResearchVideos and articles about Watson on JeopardyIBM’s Watson website

How Watson answers questions

Cold case investigation practices

Watson in different use cases (healthcare, law, education, etc.)

Process and Sketches