Jason Chaw

Welcome!

A while back, I used to be a graduate student in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. I was a key member of the Knowledge Systems Research Group headed by Bruce Porter.

Education: Ph.D., Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin (2009)
Advisor: Bruce Porter
Dissertation title: Addressing the Brittleness of Knowledge-Based Question-Answering


Biography

Jason Chaw received his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include question-answering, knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language processing, and machine learning. Jason was a key contributor to the Halo and Machine Reading projects. His 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 graduation, 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.


My famous back of the envelope plot to the all-too-important question, "When do you know you can graduate with a Ph.D.?".


Publications


Healthy weight



Contact

Department of Computer Sciences
Bill & Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex
The University of Texas at Austin
Email: jchaw (at) cs.utexas.edu