Michael Witbrock received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and currently a manager and distinguished research staff member at IBM T J Watson Research center, leading work at the intersection of learning and reasoning. Previously he Founded and acted as CEO at Curious Cat Company, building assistants that actually understand you and what you do, and was Vice President for Research at Cycorp, and CEO at Cycorp Europe, where he lead research in automated knowledge acquisition from text and dialogue, automated reasoning, and intelligent human-computer interaction. Previously to that he was Principal Scientist at Terra Lycos, working on integrating statistical and knowledge based approaches to understanding web user behavior, a research scientist at Just Systems Pittsburgh Research Center, working on statistical text summarization, and a systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon on the Informedia spoken and video document information retrieval project. His dissertation work at CMU was in the area of machine learning for speaker modelling. Dr Witbrock frequently acts a an expert consultant to the European Commission in the area of human-computer collaboration for eGovernment, and is technical director of the FP7 LarKC project. He is the author of numerous publications in areas ranging across neural networks, parallel computer architecture, multimedia information retrieval, web browser design, genetic design, computational linguistics and speech recognition and is a inventor on six US patents.