PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

James Fan

James Fan is an AI researcher whose work spans question answering, game-playing systems, speech analysis and LLM-agent security. After earning a PhD at UT Austin, he coauthored IBM's DeepQA overview and Watson strategy research; his later work includes a self-play poker system and speech-sentiment research. The IBM Watson team received the 2013 AAAI Feigenbaum Prize, and Fan went on to work on AI-powered customer support and co-found Tomato.ai, whose voice filter softens offshore call-center agents' accents. As of October 2026, he researches how to make LLM agents safe to deploy.

Now at
Tomato.ai
Works
54
Citations
2,669
h-index
17
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2009

    The Loose-Speak Interpreter

    In 2009, he coauthors “Automatic interpretation of loosely encoded input” with Ken Barker and Bruce Porter. Its Loose-Speak Interpreter reaches 98% average precision and 90% average recall in empirical studies.

  2. 2011

    Watson and DeepQA

    In 2011, he is a member of IBM's Watson team and holds a PhD from The University of Texas at Austin. He coauthors the DeepQA overview, which describes Watson as a real-time Jeopardy! contestant built to compete at the human-champion level.

  3. 2013

    A prize for IBM Watson

    The IBM Watson team receives the 2013 AAAI Feigenbaum Prize for showing that a synthesis of AI techniques can reach human-level real-time factual question answering; Fan is named among its members. He coauthors a 2013 study that analyzes Watson's Jeopardy! strategy through simulation, learning and Monte Carlo methods.

  4. 2016

    Poker-CNN learns through self-play

    At Columbia University, he coauthors Poker-CNN in 2016, a poker system that learns through iterative self-play and improves to compete against human experts.

  5. 2017

    HelloVERA in AI Nexus Lab

    In 2017, HelloVERA joins NYU and ffVC's AI Nexus Lab cohort as an AI-powered customer-support startup. Fan and LiangLiang Cao point to the lab's presentation guidance.

  6. 2020

    Speech sentiment analysis

    In 2020, he coauthors a Google-affiliated study on pre-trained end-to-end ASR features for speech-sentiment analysis and a Switchboard speech-sentiment corpus. The corpus adds three human annotators' sentiment labels to each transcript segment and contains 49,500 labeled segments across 140 hours of audio.

  7. March 2024

    Co-founding Tomato.ai

    In March 2024, he is Tomato.ai's co-founder and CTO. Its voice filter softens offshore call-center agents' accents as they speak, and Ofer Ronen credits Fan with the seed idea of using a French accent to sell wine.

  8. As of October 2026

    LLM agent security research

    In July 2026, his LangGraph Agent Security series examines software-dependency and supply-chain risks. As of October 2026, he researches how to make LLM agents safe to deploy, including risks that arise when agents can use real tools; his earlier roles include leading Google Cloud's Speech Group and teaching at Columbia University.

Career

  1. From 2024Tomato.aiCo-founder, CTO
  2. 2019–2020GoogleGroup Lead
  3. 2019–2022Naval Postgraduate School
  4. 2012–2017Pennsylvania State University
  5. 2011–2014IBMTeam Member
  6. Columbia UniversityTeacher

Education

  1. University of Texas at AustinPhD

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project2010 · AI Magazine · 1,523 citationsWith Adam Lally, Aditya Kalyanpur, Chris Welty, David Ferrucci and David Gondek
  2. Efficient Clustering of Very Large Document Collections2001 · Massive computing · 240 citationsWith Inderjit S. Dhillon
  3. Fluorescence Excitation Emission Matrices of Human Tissue: A System for in vivo Measurement and Method of Data Analysis1999 · Applied Spectroscopy · 114 citations
  4. Project Halo: Towards a Digital Aristotle2004 · 84 citationsWith Michael Witbrock and Steffen Staab
  5. Speech Sentiment Analysis via Pre-Trained Features from End-to-End ASR Models2020 · IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing · 79 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes James Fan. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.
  2. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Google. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of James Fan yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Automatic interpretation of loosely encoded input - IBM Research research.ibm.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Three cheers for Watson - UT News news.utexas.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Building watson: An overview of the deepQA project for AI Magazine - IBM Research research.ibm.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. AAAI Feigenbaum Prize - AAAI aaai.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Analysis of Watson’s strategies for playing Jeopardy! for JAIR - IBM Research research.ibm.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Poker-CNN: A Pattern Learning Strategy for Making Draws and Bets in Poker Games Using Convolutional Networks - Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence ojs.aaai.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. ffVC and NYU are mixing researchers with investors in the name of machine intelligence - TechCrunch techcrunch.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. IEEE ICASSP 2020 || Barcelona, Spain || 4-8 May 2020 cmsworkshops.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. A Large Scale Speech Sentiment Corpus - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Ofer Ronen, Co-Founder and CEO of Tomato.ai – Interview Series – Unite.AI unite.ai. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. James Fan — AI Agents, LLMs, GenAI & Security Research jamesfan.net. Checked 21 October 2026.
  12. 17. Dependency and Supply Chain Security: The Threat Hiding in Your Requirements File — James Fan jamesfan.net. Checked 21 October 2026.