Lead Developer
IBM Watson Developer Cloud
Jan 2015 – Dec 2016
I was a developer and architect in the effort to transform Watson into a developer platform, responsible for defining the architecture and implementation of multiple technologies in the Watson Developer Cloud, and leading development teams who implemented them.
After supporting IBM teams delivering transformational Watson projects, I switched to enabling large numbers of non-IBM teams to use these abilities in their own apps.
One focus was on taking what I’d learned from supporting projects run by people with deep ML and NLP expertise, and embedding those best practices into the platform so it could be used at scale by developers without that background.
The other was building these capabilities into a scalable modern cloud platform.
Developer
IBM Watson Core
Apr 2012 – Dec 2014
I was a Java developer in the new IBM Watson division formed to being IBM Watson to market. I worked on the Core platform that underpinned the various commercial projects.
I worked on several areas of the system during this time, however my particular responsibility was for accuracy analysis: how we understood why the system returned the answers that it did, and how to improve performance.
I worked to support the IBM Solutions teams delivering the few large oncology and healthcare Watson projects, and the algorithms developers who enhanced the capabilities of the system. I helped these teams to better understand and accelerate the progress we made on these projects.
Research productisation
IBM Watson
Apr 2011 – Apr 2012
I was one of a small team of developers that worked on the initial commercialization of the question-answering system IBM Watson.
Our job was to transform a large multi-year Research project that was demonstrated on a quiz show into the basis of a solution suitable for solving real-world problems.
The focus was on improving the scalability, performance, security, manageability and robustness of a Research code-base, to form the basis for future commercial development.
More info…
I blogged about Watson a few times while on the team.
I also regularly gave talks and presentations on the technology behind Watson, some of which were at events open to the public.
IBM has a load of information about the project at ibmwatson.com.
