David Ferrucci

Former IBM Watson Team Leader David Ferrucci on AI and Elemental Cognition

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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.

My favorite quotes that I will take away from this conversation with David Ferrucci is:

Let our imagination drive the expectation for what AI is and what it does for us!

As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. To show your support you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation or become a patron on Patreon.

Who is David Ferrucci?

Dr. David Ferrucci is the CEO, Founder and Chief Scientist of Elemental Cognition. Established in 2015, Elemental Cognition is an AI company focused on deep natural language understanding and explores methods of learning that result in explicable models of intelligence. Elemental Cognition’s mission is to change how machines learn, understand, and interact with humans. Elemental Cognition envisions a world where AI technology can serve as thought partners through building a shared understanding and is capable of revealing the ‘why’ behind it’s answer.

Dr. Ferrucci is the award-winning Artificial Intelligence Researcher who built and led the IBM Watson team from its inception through its landmark Jeopardy success in 2011. Dr. Ferrucci was awarded the title of IBM Fellow in 2011 and his work in AI earned numerous awards including the CME Innovation award and the AAAI Feigenbaum Prize. From 2011 through 2012, Dr. Ferrucci pioneered Watson’s applications which helped lay the technical foundation for the IBM Watson Division. After nearly 20 years at IBM research, Dr. Ferrucci joined Bridgewater Associates in 2013 to explore applications of AI in markets and management based on a synergy with Bridgewater’s deep commitment to explicable machine intelligence.

Dr. Ferrucci graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a Ph.D. in Computer Science. He has 50+ patents and published papers in the areas of AI, Automated Reasoning, NLP, Intelligent Systems Architectures, Automatic Text Generation, and Automatic Question-Answering. He led numerous projects prior to Watson including AI systems for manufacturing, configuration, document generation, and standards for large-scale text and multi-modal analytics. Dr. Ferrucci has keynoted in highly distinguished venues around the world including many of the top computing conferences. He has been interviewed by many media outlets on AI including: The New York Times, PBS, Financial Times, Bloomberg and the BBC. Dr. Ferrucci serves as an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

 

David Ferrucci on Creating IBM’s Watson: Pursue the Big Challenges

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This Monday I interviewed Dr. David Ferrucci on Singularity 1 on 1.

David is the IBM team leader behind Watson – the computer that succeeded in dethroning humanity’s greatest ever Jeopardy champion – Ken Jennings.

I met both Dr. Ferrucci and Ken Jennings during last year’s Singularity Summit where both of them spoke about Watson and the opportunities and challenges associated with it. It was then and there that I hatched my plan to get David (and Ken) on Singularity 1 on 1.

I have to say that I learned a lot from and enjoyed talking to David very much. My favorite quote that I will take away from him is this:

“Pursue the big challenges and do the big things that inspire people and make them scratch their heads.”

During our conversation with Dr. Ferrucci we also discuss topics such as his original interest in biology and medicine and the story of how he got (accidentally) involved in computer science and programming; why Watson is not mere speech recognition software (or statistical database) but natural language processing and (a lot) more; the inside story behind the idea of creating Watson; the motivation and challenges behind the project; overcoming resistance and the danger and fear of failure; the definition of AI; the importance of Watson in the general scheme of things; Watson’s future and David Ferrucci’s plans; the technological singularity; whole-brain simulation and/or emulation; the importance of pursuing the big challenges.

As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. To show your support you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation, or become a patron on Patreon.

 

Who is David Ferrucci?

Dr. David Ferrucci is an IBM Fellow and the Principal Investigator (PI) for the Watson/Jeopardy! project. He has been at IBM’s T.J. Watson’s Research Center since 1995 where he heads up the Semantic Analysis and Integration department. Dr. Ferrucci focuses on technologies for automatically discovering valuable knowledge in natural language content and using it to enable better decision making.

As part of his research he led the team that developed UIMA. UIMA is a software framework and open standard widely used by industry and academia for collaboratively integrating, deploying and scaling advanced text and multi-modal (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, 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 and his team beat the highest ranked Jeopardy! champions of all time on national television on February 14th 2011. He is now leading his team to demonstrate how DeepQA can make dramatic advances for intelligent decision support in areas including medicine and health care.

Dr. Ferrucci has been the Principal Investigator (PI) on several government-funded research programs on automatic question answering, intelligent systems and saleable text analytics. His team at IBM consists of 32 researchers and software engineers specializing in the areas of Natural Language Processing (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 AI, KR&R, NLP and automatic question-answering.

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