In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with David Ferrucci, founder of Elemental Cognition and senior technologist at Bridgewater Associates. Ferrucci served as principal investigator of IBM’s DeepQA project and led the Watson team that became champion of the Jeopardy! quiz show. Elemental Cognition (EC) is a research group focused on building an AI system that will be equipped with state-of-the-art natural language understanding technologies. Ferrucci envisions that EC will ship with foundational knowledge in many subject areas, but will be able to very quickly acquire knowledge in other (specialized) domains with the help of “human mentors.”

Having built and deployed several prominent AI systems through the years, I also wanted to get Ferrucci’s perspective on the evolution of AI technologies, and how enterprises can take advantage of all the exciting recent developments.