In late 2006, Eric Brown (UMass Amherst CS Ph.D. ’96) joined a dozen other researchers at IBM's Watson Research Center and, under the lead of principal investigator David Ferrucci, took on the Jeopardy! Grand Challenge, where the goal is to build a QA system, named Watson, that can play the popular television quiz show Jeopardy! and beat a human champion. In a CS newsletter article, Dr. Brown describes the project. To showcase their results, Watson competed against Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The matches aired on February 14, 15, and 16, 2011.