Rama Akkiraju is an IBM Fellow, IBM Master Inventor and IBM Academy
Member. Presently, Rama is the CTO of AI Operations, which aims to
optimize the IT Operations management processes with AI-infusion.
Prior to this role, Rama led the AI mission of enabling natural,
personalized and compassionate conversations between computers and
humans both as the director of research and development in IBM’s
Watson division and as the Chief Architect. She and her team developed
and delivered several differentiating AI Services such as Personality
Insights, Tone Analyzer, Emotion Analysis, and Sentiment Analysis
services to the IBM Watson platform. Before this, Rama led various
projects and Research teams at IBM Watson Research Center and IBM
Almaden Research Center in the areas of AI, analytics, business
process optimization and delivered innovative analytical assets to IBM’s
Global Business Services (GBS), and Global Technology Services
(GTS) organizations. Rama has been named by Forbes magazine as
one of the ‘Top 20 Women in AI Research’ in May 2017, has been
featured in ‘A-Team in AI’ by Fortune magazine in July 2018, In addition,
Rama has been named ‘Top 10 pioneering women in AI and Machine
Learning’ by Enterprise Management 360 in April 2019. Rama is also the
recipient of the University of California, Berkeley’s Athena award for
Technical and Executive Leadership for 2020.

Rama has expertise in agent-based decision support systems, business
process management, electronic market places, and semantic Web
services, for which she led a World-Wide-Web (W3C) standard. Rama
has co-authored 6 book chapters and over 100 technical papers. Rama
has 30+ issued patents and 25+ pending. She is the recipient of 4 best
paper awards in AI and Operations Research areas. Rama has received
three IBM Corporate Technical Awards, the highest technical awards
given to individuals each year at IBM for their innovative technical
contributions that led to significant business impact. Rama also received
multiple Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards both while at IBM
Research and at IBM Watson divisions in her career. Rama holds a
Master’s degree in Computer Science and an MBA from New York
University’s Stern School of Business, where she graduated at the top of
the class with the highest academic excellence for which she received a
gold medal. Rama served as the President for ISSIP, a Service Science
professional society for 2018 and continues to actively drive AI projects
through this professional society.