Hello, all! I'm Dr. J. William Murdock. I am a computer scientist at Red Hat, where I have worked on InstructLab and RHEL AI. I am currently a member of the Agentic/MCP team for Red Hat AI. At Red Hat, I have worked on a variety of open source projects including InstructLab, Llama Stack, AI Alliance Llama Stack Examples and Docling SDG. See my GitHub profile for more details on my open source activities.

Before transferring to Red Hat, I worked at Red Hat's parent company, IBM. At IBM, I worked on IBM Watson cloud computing AI services. I also worked on the orginal 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.

Before 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 National Research Council Postdoctoral Research Associateship. 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.