The “Watson” question-answering system used on “Jeopardy!” would not “play out the same in the world of intelligence analysis today because none of these new technologies — including Watson — deal well with deliberately deceptive data,” according to Kristan Wheaton, J.D., associate professor of intelligence studies at Mercyhurst College.

Lindy Smart, one of the student analysts on a study on the future of predictive analytics used by  intelligence analysts, explained why. “While there are technologies that can extract data from unstructured sources like e-mails and blogs, they are unable to identify the validity of those sources,” she said.

“For example, let’s say you want to do a search about mining practices in African countries. The software could extract data from every single type of source identifying mining practices in Africa. However, it would not identify what data came from state-run news sources that would most likely have skewed the data. Humans are still needed to identify and weed out which sources are deceptive and how reliable the data is.”

Adapted from materials provided by Mercyhurst College