Dr. David Ferrucci Named 2012 Iona College Graduate Commencement Speaker and Honorary Degree Recipient

New Rochelle, NY (March 16, 2012) - David Ferrucci, PhD, an IBM fellow and the principal investigator for the Watson/Jeopardy! Project, has been named as the 2012 Iona College Graduate Commencement speaker and the recipient of an honorary doctoral degree. He will deliver his remarks at Iona College on May 19.

Widely known for his 2007 challenge to create a computer system that can rival human champions at the game of Jeopardy!, the analytics of Dr. Ferrucci’s Watson technology may be adopted by the world’s biggest financial services network, Citigroup.

Ferrucciis an alumnus of Iona Grammar and Iona Preparatory Schools, he graduated from Manhattan College in Bronx, NY with a BS in biology and received his PhD in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institutein Troy, NYspecializing in knowledge representation and reasoning.

"Dr. Ferrucci is most notably recognized for his involvement with the television game show, Jeopardy!. However, he actually delved into the intricate construction of Watson and the DeepQA project with the Iona College Community this past November at the Thomas G. Bullen CFC Memorial Lecture Series in Science and Technology," said Dr. Joseph E. Nyre, president of Iona College.

“It was inspiring for Iona students to hear, in a November science lecture at the College, how Dr. David Ferrucci, and his IBM team using the basic tenets of problem solving: defining the problem, devising a plan, executing the plan and checking the results built the Watson computer system that defeated the Jeopardy! Champions,” added Victor Stanionis, Ph.D., professor of physics. “As a member of Iona’s science faculty, I was also delighted to hear that his first introduction to computers was at a summer class at Iona College and it was that class that inspired him to go into computer science.”

Since 1995, Dr. Ferrucci has been at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center inYorktown Heights, NY. He leads the Semantic Analysis and Integration department and his work focuses on technologies for automatically discovering knowledge in natural language that can be used to enable better decision making.

He has been the principal investigator on several government-funded research programs on automatic question answering, intelligentsystems and saleable text analytics and for the research project dubbed DeepQA where he focused on advancing automatic, open-domain question answering using massively parallel evidence based hypothesis generation and evaluation.

Founded in 1940, Iona College is a four-year private, coeducational institution of learning in the tradition of the Edmund Rice Christian Brothers and American Catholic higher education. It is a diverse community of learners and scholars dedicated to academic excellence and the values of justice, peace and service. Iona offers undergraduate degrees in liberal arts, science, and business administration, as well as Master of Arts, Master of Science and Master of Business Administration degrees and numerous advanced certificate programs.

For questions or more information please contact:
Dawn Insanalli
Public Relations Office
Iona College, 715 North Avenue, New Rochelle, N.Y. 10801
Office: (914) 637-2726
Fax: (914) 637-2711
dinsanalli@iona.edu