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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

Jason Chaw received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include question-answering, knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language processing, and machine learning. He was a key contributor to the Project Halo and Machine Reading programs. Jason's dissertation studied methods at addressing the problem faced by users in using unfamiliar knowledge bases to answer questions. During this time, he built the ASKME research prototype, which is an integral component to support question-answering in Project Halo. External evaluations have shown the work to make significant progress towards helping users use unfamiliar knowledge bases to answer questions.

After graduating, Jason joined IBM Research to work on extending the capabilities of the Watson question-answering system. He contributed to a computational resource of common sense knowledge to help Watson answer questions. In particular, Jason investigated methods that learn to extract knowledge from text, a key requirement for the Watson system. Recently, the Watson system was showcased on national television by competing as a contestant on the Jeopardy! game-show.

Jason encourage you to connect with him via LinkedIn, http://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonchaw