Eric Brown

Eric Brown is a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. Eric is currently working on the DeepQA project, where we are advancing the state-of-the-art in automatic, open domain question answering technology. The DeepQA team is applying this technology to build Watson, a computer system that can play Jeopardy! The goal is to push question answering technology to levels of performance previously unseen and demonstrate the technology by playing Jeopardy! at the level of a human champion.


Eric has been working in the broader area of information retrieval since 1992 and has explored a variety of issues, including scalability, parallel and distributed information retrieval, automatic text categorization, question answering, text analysis in the bio-medical domain, and applications of speech recognition in knowledge management.


Eric received his B.S. (1989) in Computer Science from the University of Vermont, and M.S. (1992) and Ph.D. (1996) in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. While at UMass, Eric was a research assistant at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval and was advised by Bruce Croft. Eric has been at IBM since 1995.