Jerome Pesenti

I have been involved with artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and search for the past 20 years. I currently lead the AI team at Meta -- pursuing fundamental and applied research in AI and making Meta products safer and more valuable to people through the use of AI.

Previously I was heading BenevolentTech, the tech arm of BenevolentAI, which develops novel AI technologies that will change the way drugs are discovered. Before that I managed a global team of researchers and software engineers within IBM Watson. My team was doing research and developing state-of-the-art software in question and answering, dialog, speech, natural language processing, and automated machine translation. Our biggest research focus was on leveraging deep learning for all these tasks. We were also responsible for the Watson Developer Cloud, which exposes these technologies as easy-to-consume cloud services.

I joined IBM through the acquisition of Vivisimo, the search and text analytics company I co-founded in 2000. Vivisimo grew organically to 130 employees and had many large corporate and government customers such as P&G, Airbus, J&J, DIA, SSA, or the US Air Force. Vivisimo's technology was based on the machine learning research I conducted with my co-founders in the CS department of CMU from 1998 to 2000.

I was also active in the big data community through a local non-profit that I created, Pittsburgh DataWorks, whose mission is to promote and provide access to big data education, projects, talent, and technologies and to help establish Pittsburgh as a leader in big data.