Finding Balance through Innovation

As part of his research he led the team that developed Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA). UIMA is a software framework and open standard widely used by industry and academia for collaboratively integrating, deploying and scaling advanced text and multimodal (e.g., speech, video) analytics. As Chief Software Architect for UIMA, Dr. Ferrucci led its design and chaired the UIMA standards committee at OASIS. The UIMA software framework is deployed in IBM products and has been contributed to Apache open-source to facilitate broader adoption and development.

In 2007, Dr. Ferrucci took on the Jeopardy! Challenge – tasked to create a computer system that can rival human champions at the game of Jeopardy!. As the PI for the exploratory research project dubbed DeepQA, he focused on advancing automatic, open-domain question answering using massively parallel evidence based hypothesis generation and evaluation. By building on UIMA, on key university collaborations and by taking bold research, engineering and management steps, he led his team to integrate and advance many search, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and semantic technologies to deliver results that have out-performed all expectations and have
demonstrated world-class performance at a task previously thought insurmountable with the current state-of-the-art. Watson, the computer system built by Ferrucci’s team is now competing with top Jeopardy! champions. Under his leadership they have already begun to demonstrate how DeepQA can make dramatic advances for intelligent decision support in areas including medicine, finance, publishing, government and law.

Dr. Ferrucci has been the PI on several government-funded research programs on automatic question answering, intelligent systems and saleable text analytics. His team at IBM consists of 28 researchers and software engineers specializing in the areas of NLP, Software Architecture, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR&R).

Dr. Ferrucci graduated from Manhattan College with a BS in biology and from Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute in 1994 with a PhD in computer science specializing in knowledge
representation and reasoning. He is published in the areas of artificial intellegence, KR&R, NLP and automatic question-answering.