IBM named 11 new IBM Fellows, the company's most prestigious technical honor. The new Fellows are being honored for pioneering work in areas including cognitive computing, analytics, cloud, security, mobile and healthcare. As Fellows, these individuals will have the opportunity to dedicate significant time to free-form exploration and innovation in their areas of expertise.
“These extraordinary men and women join a select community made up of some of the world’s most creative thinkers,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and CEO. “Our new IBM Fellows play a critical role in defining the next era of technology, business and society, with vital contributions to IBM’s position as the world’s leading cognitive solutions and cloud platform company.”
To be awarded IBM’s pre-eminent technical honor, an employee must meet four important criteria:
• Sustained innovation in some of the world's most important technologies
• Significant recognition as a leader among IBM's technical communities
• Broad industry acknowledgement of the individual’s accomplishments
•A strong history of new technologies and business models being deployed at scale
The program was founded in 1962 by Thomas J. Watson, Jr. to promote creativity among the company's most exceptional technical professionals. IBM has named 278 Fellows since the program’s inception. Collectively, IBM Fellows have 9,329 patents.
2016 IBM Fellows
Shankar Kalyana – Cloud Business Solutions
IBM Global Business Services
Shankar Kalyana has worked for IBM in the US and India, helping clients across banking, government, automotive and other industries transform their organizations using cloud computing. Shankar Kalyana is currently serving as Vice President, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technology Officer of IBM Cloud Business Solutions.
Josyula Rao – Security and Analytics
IBM Research
Josyula (JR) Rao is the Director of IBM Security Research. JR is widely known for his pioneering technical contributions to the development of empirical and analytical methods for security. This is best exemplified by an industry-wide vision that JR has created for applying big data security intelligence for protecting enterprise, mobile and cloud environments.
Ajay Royyuru – Computation Biology and Genomics
IBM Research
Ajay Royyuru leads Healthcare and Life Sciences Research at IBM and is an expert in computational biology and genomics. Ajay’s latest work has been dedicated to human genetic research to help combat diseases. Using Watson for Genomics, Ajay built a system to translate genomic variations in cancer to treatment options.
Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood – Cognitive Computing and Medical Imaging
IBM Research
Tanveer (only the second Indian woman to be named IBM Fellow) is currently the Chief Scientist leading the Medical Sieve Radiology Grand Challenge project, a global IBM Research project aiming to develop automated, cognitive radiology and cardiology technology to aid clinician decision-making. This flagship project has made tremendous scientific advancements to establish IBM as a thought leader in cognitive computing and medical imaging.
Mac Devine – Cloud Computing and Internet of Things
IBM Cloud
As Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Networking and Innovation Services within IBM’s Cloud division, Mac Devine has helped shape the company’s cloud computing and Internet of Things strategies, including IBM’s acquisitions of SoftLayer, Cloudant,Fiberlink, Ustream and The Weather Company. Mac is a master innovator who constantly pushes IBM into new technology areas and finds innovative ways to leverage open source and its ecosystem.
Blaine Dolph – Apple+IBM Partnership
IBM Global Business Services
Blaine Dolph is Chief Technology Officer of the Apple+IBM Global Partnership. He is also an IBM Master Inventor with more than 40 patents filed. Blaine has been instrumental in launching the technical strategy for several IBM organizations, including IBM Interactive, IBM Global Mobile Center of Competence and most recently the Apple+IBM Global Partnership.
Stacy Joines – Performance Engineering
IBM Watson
Stacy Joines is the Chief Technology Officer of Watson Client Implementations. In this position, Stacy builds on her contributions to the field of performance to deliver robust cognitive solutions. She has a long history of delivering and sustaining IBM's high-volume clients in the WebSphere Application Server and Smarter Commerce spaces.
Adam Kocoloski – Cloud Data Services
IBM Analytics
Adam Kocoloski joined IBM in 2014 through the acquisition of Cloudant, where he built a highly scalable database-as-a-service by extending Apache CouchDB. At IBM, Adam applied the lessons learned at Cloudant to form a Cloud Data Services group.
William Kostenko – z Systems
IBM Systems
William (Bill) Kostenko is the Chief Engineer for IBM z Systems hardware. Bill's innovation, leadership, and strategic vision were fundamental to the (5 GHz) z13 launch in 2015. His design also anticipated and provided key technology to accelerate the delivery of IBM’s POWER8 high-end and mid-range systems. Bill is a leading innovator of data center optimization, system energy efficiency, the transformation of Systems hardware, and the delivery of large hardware cost reductions.
Salim Roukos – Natural Language Processing
IBM Research
Salim Roukos’ work has significantly accelerated machine translation research and development over the past decade. The multilingual technologies developed by Salim have been key drivers for expanding IBM cognitive services and multilingual question-answering client engagements by making Watson systems understand non-English languages.
Malgorzata Steinder – Container Cloud Research
IBM Research
Malgorzata (Gosia) Steinder’s work is in the area of workload and resource management for hybrid cloud and data centers. Over the course of her career, Gosia has pioneered important concepts and technologies such as dynamic application clusters, workload-centric resource management, power-aware and license-aware workload placement, and container clouds.