As part of the Watson/Deep QA project, I am responsible for scaling out Watson's computation over thousands of compute cores in order to achieve the speed needed to be competitive in a live Jeopardy! game.

For the past seven years I have been manager of the IBM team doing ongoing development of Apache UIMA. Originally an internal IBM Research project, Apache UIMA is an open source, highly scalable, multimodal framework used to create applications doing deep analysis of natural human language text and speech. We have truly enjoyed having Watson to demonstrate so many of UIMA's strengths, as well as using Watson as the most intensive UIMA test suite ever devised.

I previously contributed as a Research Staff Member and manager to IBM's development of large vocabulary speech recognition technology. Before coming to IBM, I worked for Technicon Instruments on development of the first automated white blood cell differential system based on flow-through cytochemical analysis.