Ferrucci is the award-winning Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) researcher who started and led the IBM Watson team from its inception in 2006 to its celebrated success in 2011 when Watson defeated the greatest Jeopardy players of all time. Considered a landmark in AI, Watson delivered amazing results that out-performed all expectations. From 2011 through 2012, Ferrucci pioneered Watson’s applications in health which helped lay the technical foundation for a new Healthcare Division at IBM. In 2013, Ferrucci joined Bridgewater Associates, where he leads the Systematized Intelligence Lab. He joined to explore the application of AI in building explicable data-driven systems for optimal management and people analytics.

Ferrucci’s more than 25 years in AI and his passion to see computers fluently think, learn, and communicate inspired him to found Elemental Cognition LLC in 2015. Elemental Cognition is focused on creating AI systems that autonomously learn from human language and interaction to become powerful and fluent thought partners facilitating complex decision-making in areas ranging from healthcare to economics. AI systems should not only predict possible solutions but should be able to explain why they make sense.

Ferrucci graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a Ph.D. in Computer Science. He has over 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, automated configuration, document assembly, and open-source software and standards for large-scale text and multi-modal analytics.

Ferrucci has keynoted in highly distinguished venues around the world including many of the top computing conferences. He has been interviewed in numerous settings from the New York Times to Bloomberg West to the Computer History Museum. Ferrucci was awarded the title of IBM Fellow and has won many awards for his work including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s Innovation Award and the AAAI Feigenbaum Prize.