David Ferrucci

{{short description|IBM employee}}

File:David Ferrucci speaks at TEDx Binghamton University.jpg

David Ferrucci is an American computer scientist who served as the principal investigator of a team of IBM and academic researchers and engineers between 2007 and 2011Ferrucci, D, et al. (2010), "Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project", AI Magazine (AI Magazine) 31 (3), retrieved 2011-02-19 to the development of the Watson computer system, which won the television quiz show Jeopardy!.

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.{{Cite web |url=http://lifesciences.ieee.org/publications/newsletter/contributors/110-david-ferrucci |title=David Ferrucci - IEEE Life Sciences |access-date=2014-01-16 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140116204716/http://lifesciences.ieee.org/publications/newsletter/contributors/110-david-ferrucci |archive-date=2014-01-16 |url-status=dead }}

He joined IBM's Watson project in 1995 and left in 2012 to join Bridgewater Associates.{{Cite web | url=http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/david-ferrucci-life-after-watson/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 |title = David Ferrucci: Life After Watson|date = 2013-05-06}} He is also the founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist of Elemental Cognition, a venture exploring a new field of study called "natural learning", which Ferrucci describes as "artificial intelligence that understands the world the way people do."{{Cite web | url=https://ec.ai |title = Elemental Cognition}}

In December 2024, he became Managing Director of the Institute for Advanced Enterprise AI, "a new non-profit research organization dedicated to helping business leaders tackle complex challenges with reliable, explainable AI."{{Cite web | url=https://www.iaeai.ai/post/center-for-global-enterprise-launches-the-institute-for-advanced-enterprise-ai-to-empower-business-l |title = Institute for Advanced Enterprise AI}}{{Cite web | url=https://fortune.com/2024/12/09/neurosymbolic-ai-deep-learning-symbolic-reasoning-reliability/ |title = Fortune}}

Ferrucci is interviewed in the 2018 documentary on artificial intelligence Do You Trust This Computer?

In this documentary, he accurately predicts the emergence of systems in 3 to 4 years that can autonomously learn how to learn things.