Project Debater started as an IBM grand challenge idea in 2011, and eventually competed on stage with a world-renowned debater in 2019. The team has since been further developing the underlying technology, applying it to various business use cases, and is providing access to the underlying tech for non-commercial use. In this talk Dr. Aya Soffer from IBM Research, provides a behind the scenes perspective on developing such a project from an idea to a machine that can debate humans, highlight some of the technical innovations including the recent publication in Nature, and discuss various business applications of the technology and how it fits in the overall Language Strategy for IBM Research.
Dr. Aya Soffer is Vice President of AI Technologies for the IBM Research AI organization and the Director of the IBM Research – Haifa lab. Her Research focus is natural language understanding and conversational systems and their application in customer care and other enterprise applications. In this role Dr. Soffer is responsible for setting the strategy and working with IBM scientists around the world to shape their ideas into new AI technology, and with IBM’s product groups and customers to drive Research innovation into the market. In her 20 years at IBM, Dr. Soffer has led several strategic initiatives that grew into successful IBM products and solutions in the Big Data and AI space including the original Watson system and more recently Project Debater. She has authored over 50 peer-reviewed papers and served as an invited speaker in numerous conferences.
