As I was reading articles about Watson winning Jeopardy, I was thinking about one of my wife’s favorite TV shows; “House” . The main character, Dr. Gregory House, played brilliantly by Hugh Laurie, is an emotionally unstable genius who leads a team of physicians in a diagnostic unit at a fictional teaching hospital in Princeton, New Jersey.

In most episodes of House, the diagnostician tortures this viewer, the patient, and the patient’s family, with a game much like Jeopardy when each of the experts draw on their memory over days and weeks to match symptoms with disease and therapy. As if this isn’t painful enough for someone who has been focused on applying semantic technologies to improving healthcare efficiencies, the team invariably nearly kills the patient multiple times during the diagnostic Q & A before House has an epiphany when his pain-killer addicted mind finally connects the dots between Jungian philosophy, tropical parasites, chemical toxicity, and/or genetic disorders to miraculously save the patient (usually). Read More