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The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.

One-on-One With Watson Creator David Ferrucci

April 24th, 2012 / in big science, research horizons, videos / by Erwin Gianchandani

Helen Hastings, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Alexandria, Va. [image courtesy NSF].David Ferrucci, IBM Research [image courtesy NSF].David Ferrucci, the IBM Research Staff Member who led the development of Watson — the question-answering system that bested human competitors on Jeopardy! in February 2011 — recently visited the National Science Foundation (NSF) to describe the fundamental advances underpinning the supercomputer. While there, Ferrucci took a few minutes to sit down for an interview by Helen Hastings, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST) in Alexandria, Va., who earlier this year was named one of the recipients of the National Center for Women & Information Technology’s (NCWIT) 2012 Award for Aspirations in Computing.

Hastings asked Ferrucci how he assembled his team, the challenges the team faced, what the Watson success means for search, natural language processing, and semantic analysis, and the next steps for Watson in the context of application areas such as healthcare.

Check out the interview — just over 10 minutes long — after the jump…

…and read more of our coverage of Ferrucci’s talks and interviews here, here, and here.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)

Disclaimer: Posts on this blog report on happenings, opportunities, and issues that arise in the broad computing research community, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the CCC or the National Science Foundation.


Related posts:

  1. “A Q&A with David Ferrucci”
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  3. Watson’s Lead Developer: “Deep analysis, speed, and results”
  4. Watson Outpaces Jeopardy Wizards in Sneak Preview
  5. Congressman Rush Holt beats Watson at Jeopardy!
One-on-One With Watson Creator David Ferrucci

1 comment

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  1. Earle Jones says:
    April 24, 2012 at 12:35 pm

    How do we get more “Helens” to go into science and technology?  She mentioned that she is the only girl in her Parallel Computing class.  What do we do to encourage young people, both boys and girls, to get more involved with science?  I wish I knew!