David Ferrucci

David Ferrucci is the founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist at Elemental Cognition. David was previously the Director of Applied AI at Bridgewater Associates from December 2012 to December 2021. Prior to that, they were the IBM Fellow and VP of DeepQA (Watson) Technologies at IBM T.J. Watson Research from January 1995 to December 2012. Ferrucci was responsible for building and leading a team of 30 AI Researchers and Software Engineers in the development and application of Watson - a natural language processing system for collecting, analyzing and reasoning over unstructured content. David also led the development of Watson from its inception in late 2006 to its land mark victory over the best players of all time in the question-answer game of Jeopardy in 2011 and its early applications in healthcare. Prior to the development of Watson, Ferrucci lead an AI team in open-domain question answering and was the Chief Architect for the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) at IBM, a framework for integrating and scaling text, speech and image analytics. UIMA was used to build Watson and is now managed as an Apache Open-Source Project.

David Ferrucci received their PhD in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and their BS in Biology and Computer Science from Manhattan College.

Some direct reports include Ryan Luckie - Infrastructure Lead, Shirin Saleem - VP, AI Platform Solutions, and Ben Plummer - VP of Product.