[megaman22]

> The word from our engineers was that Watson was designed to sell commercials, not be a useful tool in a problem space

This is the number one thing to remember about Watson. I've worked with teams within IBM that spent years and thousands upon thousands of man-hours trying to get it to be useful in a fairly well-defined, constrained use-case. Eventually they bailed and went to what was essentially a simple decision tree. It hits it out of the park on the sexy buzz-words, but I'm ready to curse the whole field for giving customers wildly inflated expectations.

[Spooky23]

I worked on a project that did a little Watson work as well. Same result as you described.

The shame is decision tree based expert systems can be pretty powerful, but the tools these guys were using were not that great.

[davak]

I am a nerdy physician desperate to work with somebody on decision tree based expert systems. Are there a bunch of existing projects that I’m just missing?

[gtmb]

Well, I just started an open source project to gather the data for such systems. It is starting as a database/graph of symptoms and conditions. But the vision is bigger than that.

https://github.com/gafmgafm/med

There are similar products but they are not open source, such as: http://apimedic.com/ and http://www.diseasesdatabase.com/

[mindcrime]

I've been doing a lot of work lately with automated Abductive Inference, and medical diagnosis has been cited as one of the key uses of same. Perhaps there could be some opportunity to collaborate (everything I do is open source as well, btw). If you guys would like to talk, feel free to hit me up at [e-mail]