Watson's Lead Developer: "Deep analysis, speed, and results" » CCC Blog

David Ferrucci's official title is "IBM Fellow and Leader of the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center." But to the world, he's the genius behind Watson, the question-answering supercomputer system that bested two humans in a nationally televised broadcast of the popular game show Jeopardy! On Monday, Ferrucci delivered a fantastic keynote at the ACM's 2011 Federated Computing Research Conference in San Jose, CA. Ferrucci walked the audience -- nearly 2,000 computer scientists from around the country -- through the creation of Watson, from its initial conception in 2004 to its nationally televised victory this past February. "The story goes," he began, "that an IBM vice president was dining at a restaurant" when, suddenly, everyone around him got up and rushed toward a TV.