Details
Meeting time: 3:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Meeting location: 11 Madison Ave (at 24th Street), 18th Floor, Room 18006
About 40 students, mostly Masters, about 6 PhDs and a couple of undergrads, attended the talks and an informal panel.
The feeback was very positive and included:
- I am a research person with a PhD and enjoyed both talks. But I loved the work that Claudia's group is doing. Thanks for inviting us.
- Very interesting presentation on data mining.
- I loved both talks. Nearing towards the end of my PhD in machine learning. I imagine how difficult it is to mine data. Thank you for the talks.
- The idea of Watson is crazy but I find it is exciting and amazing.
- Watson is crazy cool. I wish I could have heard more on the algorithms.
- Great discussion and presentation, eclectic and informative.
- Although I signed up late for this activity, but I'm lucky to be here and having a great afternoon.
- The presentations were fantastic and opened our eyes on the most cutting-edge research in IBM. And the panel session really gave us a comprehensive big picture in so many aspects of IBM. Our students were quite excited and become more interested in IBM after the trip.
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Join IBM colleagues to hear about exciting new technology and initiatives, e.g., the Jeopardy challenge, hear from those working in various divisions of IBM about their work, and network with local IBMers over refreshments.
Please notify Angjoo Kim and Jillian Elizabeth Kozyra at NYU by Tuesday Nov 17 if you plan to attend - as names have to be supplied to security in advance. Places are limited.
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Agenda
3:00-3:30 Arrive and network and have refreshments
3:30-4:00 Building Watson: A Brief Overview of the DeepQA Project by Jennifer Chu-Carroll
4:00-4:30 Data Mining at IBM Research: Combining Customers, Competitions and Science by Claudia Perlich
4:30-5:00 Informal Careers panel
- Very Special Guest Janet Butler: Vice President Software Sales at IBM for New York and New Jersey
- Very Special Guest Warren Lucas: Sales Executive at IBM running the Information Management software sales business in New York and New Jersey
- Panelist Caroline Benveniste: Working with Hardware
- Panelist Marina Greenstein: Working in Sales
- Panelist Anshu Kak: Being a Distinguished Engineer
- Panelist Keith McAuliffe: Being a Distinguished Engineer
- Panelist Claudia Perlich: Working in Research - Internships in IBM Research
5:00-5:30 Networking and Refreshments
Talk Descriptions
Building Watson: A Brief Overview of the DeepQA Project
Jennifer Chu-Carroll will present an overview the DeepQA project, an effort that integrates NLP (Natural Language Processing), IR (Information Retrieval), KR&R (Knowledge Representation and Reasoning), and ML (Machine Learning) technologies to advance the state of the art in open-domain Question Answering. A key application of this technology is the development of "Watson", a computer system that can answer complex natural language questions and will compete with human contestants on the game of Jeopardy! This talk will be a high-level overview of IBM’s development efforts so far, the key research and engineering challenges, and IBM's evaluation methodology -- what it takes to win the game
Jennifer Chu-Carroll is a Research Staff Member and manager at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. She is currently working on the DeepQA project, where IBM develops and leverages technologies in Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning for advanced open-domain Question Answering. Prior to joining IBM in 2001, Jennifer spent 5 years as a Member of Technical Staff at Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories where she worked on spoken dialogue management.
Jennifer is currently serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Dialogue Systems. In the recent past, she was on the executive board of the North American Chapter of the ACL (2007-2008), and was program co-chair of the HLT/NAACL 2006 Conference and program committee area chair for EMNLP/HLT 2005. She also served on the editorial board of the Computational Linguistics Journal, and as secretary and scientific advisory board member of the ACL/ISCA special interest group on discourse and dialogue (SIGDIAL).
Data Mining at IBM Research: Combining Customers, Competitions and Science
IBM Research is housing one of the largest community of data mining experts. IBM's work spans a variety of activities:
1) customer-initiates applied projects to provide analytical solutions for day-to-day business problems,
2) participating, winning and organizing data mining competitions and
3) theoretical data mining and machine learning research to be published in conferences and journals.
Claudia Perlich will give an overview of a number of these activities and discuss some of the necessary skills and experiences.
Claudia Perlich has received her Master in Computer Science from Colorado University at Boulder, Diplom in Computer Science from Technische Universitaet in Darmstadt, and her Ph.D. in Information Systems from Stern School of Business, New York University. Her Ph.D. thesis concentrated on probability estimation in multi-relational domains that capture information of multiple entity types and relationships between them. Claudia joined the Data Analytics Research group as a Research Staff Member in October 2004. Her research interests are in machine learning for complex real-world domains including marketing, finance and medicine. She and her team have been very successful in data mining competitions. Her recent wins include KDD CUP 2007, 2008 and 2009.
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Panelist Bios
Caroline Benveniste is a Senior Technical Staff Member in the Systems Group Technology RAS and Architecture Department. She is currently leading a project in the area of High Availability and Resiliency. Caroline has an undergraduate degree in Physics and a PhD in Electrical Engineering. After working for two failed start-ups, she joined IBM in 1996 where she worked on many aspects of computer architecture, including interconnection networks and memory. She is an expert in main memory compression and previous to her current position worked on edge of network computing. She has also led projects in virtualization, simulation and performance analysis.
Marina Greenstein is an Executive IT Specialist with the IBM Data Servers and Application Development Team. She is an IBM Certified Solutions Expert and has experience in database application architecture and development. Joined IBM in 1995, in the past 14 years Marina has assisted customers in their migrations from Microsoft SQL Server®, Sybase, and Oracle databases to DB2. She has presented migration methodology at numerous DB2 technical conferences and at SHARE. She is also the author of multiple articles and tutorial about DB2 application development.
Anshu Kak is a Distinguished Engineer in IBM Software Group leading the Worldwide Software IT Architect Community. Anshu is recognized as a leader in the deployment of architecture and the design of complex end-to-end client solutions, leveraging her deep technical expertise in Enterprise Architecture, WebSphere, SOA and Master Data Management. Anshu is TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) Certified Enterprise Architect. Anshu is focused on strengthening the skills of the Software IT Architect community and has a particular passion for developing the architecture skills of key growth markets including Russia, India, South Africa and China. In addition Anshu is currently leading very important initiatives for the Software Technical Professionals: the Software Deployment initiative where she has authored a book also called "Guidance to Successful Software Deployment". Anshu is a tenacious advocate of technical vitality both inside and outside of IBM. She has twice received the Women In Color Technology "All Star Award" from a national level publication magazine. She is a member of Open Group, ACM and Women in Technology consortium. She is an IBM Ambassador to New York University New York.
Keith McAuliffe is a Distinguished Engineer in IBM Global Financial Services Sector. Mr. McAuliffe supports the Morgan Stanley Integrated Account. As a Distinguished Engineer, Mr. McAuliffe has developed a breadth of experience and a proven track record of delivering successful engagements. Mr. McAuliffe has provided leadership in all aspects of application development including project management, design, and implementation. His expertise includes enterprise resource planning implementations, enterprise architecture assessments, middleware solutions, e-business application development, and client/server programming
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Logistics for Nov 20
11 Madison is on 24th Street between Madison and Park Avenues. You can enter on either of the avenues. Please check in at the IBM security desk in the middle of the lobby (not the Credit Suisse desk on the side). You will need to show a photo ID, such as a driver’s license. The meeting is on the 18th floor. Enter on the side of the floor where the receptionist sits, and you will be directed to room 18006
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