Dr. David A. Ferrucci

David A. Ferrucci, Ph.D. is IBM Fellow, VP — DeepQA (“Watson”) Technologies, at IBM’s T.J. Watson’s Research Center. His team of 30 researchers focuses on developing technologies for discovering knowledge in natural language and leveraging those technologies in a variety of intelligent search, data analytics, and knowledge management solutions.
 
In 2007, Dave began exploring the feasibility of designing a computer system that can rival human champions at the game of Jeopardy!. Dubbed DeepQA, the project focused on advancing natural language question answering using massively parallel evidence-based computing. After winning support, he has set and driven the technical agenda for Jeopardy! The IBM Challenge.
 
The Watson computer system designed by his team represents the integration and advancement of many search, natural language processing, and semantic technologies.
 
Following the Jeopardy! challenge, Dave and his team plan to apply DeepQA technologies to areas like medicine, government, and law to drive advances in computer supported intelligence and decision-making.
 
His papers include UIMA: An Architectural Approach to Unstructured Information Processing in the Corporate Research Environment, Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project, Logic and Artificial Intelligence: Divorced, Still Married, Separated… ?, Explaining Conclusions from Diverse Knowledge Sources, What’s in an Instance?, Creativity, the turing test, and the (better) lovelace test, Towards an Interoperability Standard for Text and Multi-Modal Analytics, and Instances and Classes in Software Engineering. He holds patent Method and system for characterizing unknown annotator and its type system with respect to reference annotation types and associated reference taxonomy nodes.
 
Dave graduated from Manhattan College with a BS in Biology and from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1994 with a Ph.D. in Computer Science specializing in knowledge representation and reasoning.
 
Watch Building Watson — A Brief Overview of the DeepQA Project, IBM Research Artificial Intelligence David Ferrucci, Inside the Mind of Watson the Supercomputer, and A Computer Called Watson: IBM’s David Ferrucci with Richard Waters. Read 10 Questions for Watson’s Human and Ferrucci, RPI grad, named IBM Fellow. Read his LinkedIn profile.