Finding Balance through Innovation

Mike Barborak
IBM

Mike Barborak manages the Natural Language Engineering and Frameworks department of the Watson project. This group is tasked with improving the DeepQA system through principled and thoughtful software engineering. Some of our projects include a Matching Framework to represent alignment between texts, a Term Matching Framework to support ecosystems of term matchers, and the TeachWatson service which supports synchronous and asynchronous opportunities for improving Watson through human interaction.

Mike has a background in software engineering and application development. For 10 years he was the Technical Director and Partner of the digital agency BASIK doing work for such brands as Bath & Body Works, Epoch Films, New York Magazine, Theory, and Victoria's Secret. In response to the needs of that company, he developed the open-source Flash technology Frontal - a programming language used by BASIK to create all of their sites and used at IBM to create the "ticker" showing Watson's answer panel during Jeopardy! matches.

Mike received his BSEE (1989) and MSEE (1992) from the University of Texas at Austin.

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