Adam Lally is an expert software engineer and researcher with 25 years of experience in Automated Reasoning, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and Cloud Computing.

Before joining the Institute for Advanced Enterprise AI, Adam served as Manager of Inference Systems at Elemental Cognition (EC), where he led the design, development, and cloud deployment of the EC Reasoning Engine—a deterministic symbolic reasoner based on dynamic constraint solving. As part of EC’s Cogent language and platform, the reasoning engine enables accurate, traceable, and efficient problem-solving based on a declarative specification of business requirements.

Previously, Adam was a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM, where he was an original member of the research team that built the Watson question-answering system, which won the Jeopardy! Man vs. Machine Challenge. He is one of the inventors of the DeepQA architecture on which the Watson system was built and a key contributor to its implementation.

Adam holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.