Jeff Kephart

I lead a research effort on multimodal AI systems at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. I am also a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and a Fellow of the IEEE. My goal is to fundamentally change the way people visualize and analyze data and make decisions. Rather than interacting with an application by pointing at menus, or using a traditional text-based chatbot, users use a synergistic combination of verbal and non-verbal modalities (i.e. speaking and pointing) to interact with an AI assistant. We have deployed tools based on this technology (which we call M2A2, or Multimodal AI Assistant) to multiple clients, who find that our tool can improve their productivity and efficiency by factors of 10 or more.

Earlier in my career at IBM Research, my team and I applied analogies from biology and economics to massively distributed computing systems, particularly in the domains of autonomic computing, electronic commerce, and anti-virus and anti-spam technology. My team's research efforts on digital immune systems and economic software agents were publicized in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Wired, Harvard Business Review, IEEE Spectrum, and Scientific American.

In 2003, I co-wrote with Dave Chess an article in IEEE Computer entitled the 'Vision of Autonomic Computing' that became the most widely cited article in the field of autonomic computing, which has been cited over 9000 times according to Google Scholar. In 2004, I co-founded the International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC) with Manish Parashar of Rutgers University and Salim Hariri of the University of Arizona. I was awarded the rank of IEEE Fellow in 2013 for my contributions to this field.

I received a BS from Princeton University in Electrical Engineering, also completing the Engineering Physics program. I received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in electrical engineering, along with a Ph.D. minor in physics. My doctoral research was an experimental and theoretical study of channeling radiation, a novel form of quasi-monochromatic X-ray and gamma-ray radiation emitted by relativistic electrons and positrons passing through aligned crystals. Afterwards, I spent two years at the Xerox PARC research center studying the nonlinear dynamical behavior of massively distributed systems of the future.

I am an avid recorder player (playing all instruments in the family from sopranino down to contrabass). Sometimes I perform solo or with my quartet (La Spiritata) at local churches and restaurants. I also enjoy juggling and riding the unicycle when I can find a spare moment.

Here's a link to my papers on Google Scholar.