Eric Brown

Biography

Eric Brown '92MS, '96PhD is vice president of machine learning at Capital One Bank. Prior to his current role, Eric served as director of Watson algorithms at IBM. Eric joined IBM Research in 1995 and conducted research in information retrieval, document categorization, text analysis, question answering, bio-informatics, and applications of automatic speech recognition. Starting in 2007, Eric was a technical lead on the DeepQA project at IBM, working on the application of automatic, open domain question answering to build the Watson Question Answering system. The goal of Watson, to achieve human-level question answering performance, was realized in February of 2011 when Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a televised Jeopardy! exhibition match. Eric's role on the project spanned architecture development, special question processing, and hardware planning. 

Eric earned his BS at the University of Vermont, and MS and PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, all in computer science. He has published numerous conference and journal papers and holds several patents in the areas of text analysis and question answering.