Dr. Eric W. Brown

Director, USA: IBM Watson Group

Eric Brown is the Director of Watson Algorithms in the IBM Watson Group.  Dr. Brown earned his B.S. at the University of Vermont and M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, all in Computer Science.  Eric joined IBM Research in 1995 and has conducted research in information retrieval, document categorization, text analysis, question answering, bio-informatics, and applications of automatic speech recognition.  Since 2007 Eric has been a technical lead on the DeepQA project at IBM and in the application of automatic, open domain question answering to build the Watson Question Answering system. 

The goal of the Watson project has been to achieve human-level question answering performance.  This goal was realized in February of 2011 when Watson beat human opponents Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a televised Jeopardy! exhibition match.  Eric's role on the project has spanned architecture development, special question processing, and hardware planning, and he is currently focused on applying Watson to clinical decision support in healthcare.  Eric has published numerous conference and journal papers, and holds several patents in the areas of text analysis and question answering.