No product, idea or achievement is possible without our most critical asset—the collective thought capital of hundreds of thousands of IBMers. The expertise, technical skill, willingness to take risk and overall dedication of IBM employees has led to countless transformative innovations through the years. Meet the team members who contributed to this Icon of Progress.
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Dr. David Ferrucci
David Ferrucci graduated from Manhattan College with a bachelor of science degree in biology, and received his PhD in computer science, specializing in knowledge representation and reasoning, from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1994. His background is in artificial intelligence, specifically knowledge representation and reasoning. Ferrucci leads the Semantic Analysis and Integration department at the T.J. Watson Research Center, and is the principal investigator for the DeepQA project. Previously, Ferrucci was chief architect of UIMA, now an OASIS standard, and Apache open-source project for integrating text and multi-modal analytics. UIMA is used to implement and scale DeepQA. Today, he leads the project currently focused on building Watson, the computer system capable of understanding language that competed on the Jeopardy! quiz show. His team is also working on the DARPA Machine Reading Program, extending DeepQA to perform deeper understanding of natural language content. Dr. Ferrucci won the 2010 CME Group Fred Arditti Innovation Award because, as Leo Melamed, CME Group Chairman Emeritus and Competitive Markets Advisory Council (CMAC) Vice Chairman states: “David Ferrucci’s dedication and advancements in the design and architecture of intelligent systems exemplifies the work that this award recognizes.”
Algorithms Team
The IBMers responsible for Watson's DeepQA architecture include Branimir Boguraev, Eric Brown, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, Bonaventura Coppola, James Fan, David Gondek, Aditya Kalyanpur, Adam Lally, Anthony Levas, Michael McCord, Bill Murdock, Siddharth Patwardhan, John Prager, Chang Wang, Chris Welty and Wlodek Zadrozny.
Strategy Team
The group that worked on Watson's game play and betting strategy during a Jeopardy! match
includes James Fan, David Gondek, Jon Lenchner, John Prager and Gerry Tesauro.
Systems Team
The team that designed the complex system of POWER7 cores that power Watson includes Eric Brown, Jaroslaw Cwiklik, Pablo Duboue, Eddie Epstein, Tong Fin, Bhavani Iyer, Adam Lally, Burn Lewis and Marshall Schor.
Speech Team
The IBM researchers who developed Watson's voice and speech recognition capabilities includes Andy Aaron, Raul Fernandez, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Andrew Rosenberg, Roberto Sicconi and Maria Smith.
Annotations Team
The linguistics team that developed the taxonomy for Watson’s search databases includes Matt Mulholland and Karen Ingraffea.
China Research Lab Team
The group primarily tasked with how Watson links data from different sources includes Lei Zhang, Yuan Ni, Yue Pan and Zhao Ming Qiu.
Tokyo Research Lab Team
The group that helped to develop the system Watson uses to attach meaning to the words in a question includes Hiroshi Kanayama and Kohichi Takeda.
Haifa Research Lab team
The team responsible for optimizing the search process of Watson's DeepQA architecture includes David Carmel and Dafna Sheinwald.
Project Management Team
The team that managed the relationship between the Watson research team and the Jeopardy! production staff includes Jim De Piante and David Shepler.
Applications Team
The team working to develop systems that apply DeepQA technology to real-world problems includes Sugato Bagchi, Mike Barborak, Anthony Levas, Erik Mueller and Wlodek Zadrozny.