David Ferrucci, the man who built IBM's Jeopardy-playing machine, Watson, is explaining a children's story to his new creation. In the tale, Fernando and Zoey buy some plants. Fernando places his plant on a windowsill while Zoey tucks hers away in a darkened room. After a few days, Fernando's plant is green and healthy but the leaves of Zoey's have browned. She moves her plant to the windowsill, and it flourishes.

Dr. David Ferrucci is one of the few people who have created a benchmark in the history of AI because when IBM Watson won Jeopardy we reached a milestone many thought impossible. I was very privileged to have Ferrucci on my podcast in early 2012 when we spent an hour on Watson's intricacies and importance. Well, it's been almost 8 years since our original conversation and it was time to catch up with David to talk about the things that have happened in the world of AI, the things that didn't happen but were supposed to, and our present and future in relation to Artificial Intelligence. All in all, I was super excited to have Ferrucci back on my podcast and hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. During this 90 min interview with David Ferffucci, we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: his perspective on IBM Watson; AI, hype and human cognition; benchmarks on the singularity timeline; his move away from IBM to the biggest hedge fund in the world; Elemental Cognition and its goals, mission and architecture; Noam Chomsky and Marvin Minsky's skepticism of Watson; deductive, inductive and abductive learning; leading and managing from the architecture down; Black Box vs Open Box AI; CLARA – Collaborative Learning and Reading Agent and the best and worst applications thereof; the importance of meaning and whether AI can be the source of it; whether AI is the greatest danger humanity is facing today; why technology is a magnifying mirror; why the world is transformed by asking questions.

David Ferrucci led the team that built Watson, the IBM question-answering system that beat the top humans in the world at the game of Jeopardy. He is also the Founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist of Elemental Cognition, a company working engineer AI systems that understand the world the way people do. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast.

At the Kellogg School's first Computational Social Science Summit, David Ferrucci, the lead scientist behind IBM's Watson computer, sat down with Kellogg School professor Brian Uzzi to discuss how machine learning and artificial intelligence will become central to the future of business. In the first of these videos, Ferrucci gives an overview of the five ways machine learning will be transformative. In the following videos, he goes into detail on each point. Get the latest from Kellogg Insight delivered to your inbox. Devices are getting smarter and smarter, from hearing aids that filter noise, to driverless cars that adapt to specific road conditions.

David Ferrucci will deliver a keynote at the O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference in NYC, June 26-29, 2017. His colleague Jennifer Chu-Caroll will also give a talk, "Beyond the state of the art in reading comprehension," at the same conference. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with David Ferrucci, founder of Elemental Cognition and senior technologist at Bridgewater Associates.

When the IBM supercomputer Watson competes on the US quiz show Jeopardy! We face many challenges that computing could help with: climate change, economics, social modelling. Why did IBM choose to test its computer on the quiz show Jeopardy!? The ability to understand natural language, to analyse what it means and to respond quickly and appropriately is one of the grand challenges in computing. You call the computer Watson.