David Ferrucci

Dr. David Ferrucci is the award-winning AI researcher who built and led the IBM Watson team from its inception in 2006 to its landmark success in 2011 when Watson defeated the greatest Jeopardy! players of all time.

In 2013, Dr. Ferrucci joined Bridgewater Associates. His nearly 30 years in AI and his passion to see computers fluently think, learn, and communicate inspired him to found Elemental Cognition LLC in 2015.

Ferrucci serves as Founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist of Elemental Cognition. The company is focused on creating novel AI systems that dramatically accelerate automated language understanding and intelligent dialog.

Ferrucci graduated from Manhattan College, with a B.S. degree in biology and from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in 1994 with a Ph.D. degree in computer science specializing in knowledge representation and reasoning.He has over 50 patents and published papers in the areas of AI, Automated Reasoning, NLP, Intelligent Systems Architectures, Automatic Story Generation, and Automatic Question-Answering.

Ferrucci was also interviewed in the 2018 documentary on artificial intelligence, "Do You Trust This Computer?"

Dr. Ferrucci was awarded the title of IBM Fellow (fewer than 100 of 450,000 hold this technical distinction) and has won many awards for his work creating UIMA and Watson, including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s Innovation Award and the AAAI Feigenbaum Prize.