Hello, all! I'm Dr. J. William Murdock. I am a computer scientist in the Watson Research Center at IBM. I work on IBM Watson cloud computing AI services including the Watson Discovery service. I also worked on original the IBM Watson research project throughout all of that project. It addressed the Grand Challenge task of competing with human champions in the quiz show, Jeopardy!. I was the guest editor of This is Watson, a special issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development. That special issue provides extensive details regarding our work on Watson. The technology underlying Watson is named DeepQA. DeepQA provides a complex combination of capabilities that include elements of natural-language processing, information retrieval, knowledge-based reasoning, and machine learning.

Before coming to IBM, I worked in the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. My position there was a Postdoctoral Research Associateship funded by the National Research Council. The director of the group that I was in at the Naval Research Laboratory is Dr. David W. Aha. During that time, I collaborated with the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland where I worked with Dr. Dana S. Nau.

I was a graduate student from fall of 1994 through summer of 2001 in AI (part of an interdisciplinary Cognitive Science program) at the College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology; I received my master's degree in 1996 and my Ph.D. in 2001. My advisor was Dr. Ashok Goel and I was a member of his Design Intelligence group. My Ph.D. work focused on a project called REM which uses functional models for self-redesign in the context of complex, dynamic environments such as manufacturing and web browsing. I obtained my bachelor's degree (in Computer Science, Linguistics and Semiotics, and Computational and Applied Mathematics) in the spring of 1994 from Rice University. I also assisted with the creation of a page for custom greeting cards and invitations and worked on the e-publishing for a book about journalism in Yemen.

This is my personal home page. You may also wish to see my official IBM home page. However, do not expect a lot of additional content there.