David Ferruci was named IBM Fellow for his pioneering work in machine question answering that resulting in the Watson supercomputer beating a human at Jeopardy.
IBM bestows the honor of Fellow on its most prolific innovators in a practice started by Thomas J. Watson himself in 1962 as a way to encourage creativity. Of the 231 individuals who have been named Fellows since the program’s inception, 71 are active IBM employees. Past honorees include pioneers in such technologies as reduced instruction set computing (RISC), thin-film recording heads, DRAM, relational databases, the trackpoint, virtual memory, the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), Fortran and the AT bus on the original IBM personal computer. Fellows are typically given greater responsibilities in their area of expertise and are granted virtual carte blanche for choosing specific projects..
Further Reading: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-kK8a
