Roberto Sicconi, Program Director at IBM T.J. Watson Research, has received his M.S degree from the Politecnico University of Milan, Italy and his Doctorate degree from the same University in 1985 in the area of image processing and new Computer Aided Design techniques. He joined IBM Italy in 1985 to work on development of multimedia platforms, both hardware and software, working on hardware acceleration for hi-resolution PC and RISC/6000 workstations, DSP-based front-ends for IBM speech recognitions systems on PCs, PS/2 and laptops. In 1990 he became manager of the Multimedia Development Lab at Vimercate, Italy, leading development of speech recognition products (Martin/Voicetype), high-throughput bank check image scanners, a high-resolution negative film scanner, TV-Teletext VBI receivers, high-speed modems, a satellite Internet data broadcasting system, IBM cryptographic systems for data security, a portable videoconferencing system for laptops. In 1998 he moved to the US to work as executive assistant to the GM of IBM Microelectronics, leading two cooperation projects with IBM Research (a speech chip and a Bluetooth chip). Dr. Ing Sicconi joined the Human Language Technology group at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center since 2000, where he managed development of exploratory prototypes of conversational and multimodal user interfaces in smartphones and other consumer devices (STB, videogames), with a special focus on cars, both in standalone and in network-connected configurations. Research projects involved advanced conversational dialog systems, leveraging natural speech input, dynamic dialog management, workload management, context- and environment-aware communication with the user to provide ease-to-use and safe access to services, both local and across the network. Most recently he joined the DeepQA team to apply deep semantic analysis of very large unstructured information sources, hypotheses generation, multiple search and results scoring techniques to the Jeopardy! game and business Question Answering applications. Research projects are currently targeting differential diagnosis assist in Healthcare, technical support for agents in Contact Centers, Customer technical support in Financial Services, Online Videogaming.