Christian Stab has been selected for the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award 2016 for his research in argumentation analysis related to the IBM Debating Technologies project.

This is already the second IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award that has been awarded to UKP researchers. In 2010, Torsten Zesch received the award for his work on semantic similarity. In additon, the UKP Lab has received three IBM UIMA innovation awards in the past.

The Program: The IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Awards Program is an intensely competitive worldwide program which honors exceptional Ph.D. students who have an interest in solving problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in many academic disciplines and areas of study. Among the four areas IBM Research is paying special attention for 2016-2017 is Cognitive Computing Research.

Cognitive Computing Research: The availability of large amounts of structured and unstructured data from business and public records, mobile devices, sensors and social media has brought the traditional artificial intelligence discipline to the era of Cognitive Computing. Individuals, professionals and businesses need help from cognitive machines to make sense of the many things that concern them on a near- real time basis. The active areas of research include natural language processing, assisted and automated machine learning, creation of knowledge representations and scalable querying techniques, multimedia analytics, contextual computing, recommendation and reasoning systems, a close collaboration between humans and machines on human terms, a rich platform and tools that support the creation and support of the cognitive applications, etc. IBM Research is closely tied to the IBM Watson Group for taking the research technology to market.