Lora Aroyo won a 2012 IBM Faculty Award, which was handed out the 10th of December 2012 by Gerard Smit, CTO IBM Benelux. The Faculty Awards are presented annually by IBM for extraordinary activities in the field of IT research and innovation. Lora Aroyo won the IBM Faculty Award for her innovative work on crowdsourcing the process of (medical) text annotation to further enable AI systems, such as Watson, to deal with diversity in human expressions and interpretations. As part of this event, Chris Welty, IBM Research, NY also talked about “The importance of Metrics for Watson & Healthcare”.

“Making Watson smarter, especially in the context of healthcare, is a very exciting opportunity to add our expertise in harnessing the crowd to IBM’s expertise in analytics and NLP” (Lora Aroyo). 

“Interestingly, a lot of the errors made by AI Systems like Watson are very easy for humans to detect. The crowdsourcing work done by Dr. Aroyo helps to overcome these errors, by bringing human knowledge into the machine. This awards stresses both the quality and significance of the research done by Dr. Aroyo at the VU University Amsterdam.” (Robert-Jan Sips, IBM University Relations, NL.

The IBM Faculty Awards are part of IBM’s global University Programs. These awards are intended to stimulate the crossover of academic knowledge to society. The awards are highly competitive. In 2012 IBM granted 200 awards globally, of which 3 in the Netherlands.