Rama Akkiraju

Summary

Rama Akkiraju is an Indian-born American computer scientist. She is vice president of AI for IT at Nvidia and performs research in the field of artificial intelligence.

Rama Akkiraju
NationalityAmerican
Alma materNew York University Stern School of Business (MBA)
Utah State University
Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Anantapur
EmployerNvidia
Known for
Awards
  • Athena Award for Executive and Technical Leadership (2020)[1]
  • ISSIP Excellence in Service Innovation Award for People Insights (2019)[2]
  • ISSIP Excellence in Service Innovation Award for AI Operations (2020)[2]
  • Decision Sciences Journal Best Article Award (2009)
  • WAEC99 Best Paper Award (1999)

Akkiraju started her career at the T. J. Watson Research Center in New York and later moved to IBM Almaden Research Center. She served as the Distinguished Engineer and Director of Engineering at IBM's Watson Division from 2015 to 2019.

Akkiraju was named an IBM Fellow[3] in 2019. She has been an IBM Master Inventor since 2014.

Education edit

Akkiraju received her MBA at New York University, Stern School of Business in 2004, where she earned a gold metal for highest academic excellence.[4] She received her M.S. in Computer Science from Utah State University in 1995 and her B.Tech. in Electronics engineering from JNTU College of Engineering, in Andhra Pradesh, India in 1993.[5][citation needed]

Professional contributions edit

Akkiraju served as the President for ISSIP,[6] a Service Science professional society for 2018, and actively drives AI projects through ISSIP. Akkiraju is the co-chair for the AI Council at CompTIA[7] industry forum. Akkiraju has served as program committee chair, and program committee member for various academic conferences & journals including those organized by IEEE, and ACM.

While at IBM, Akkiraju led the "People Insights" on the IBM Watson team, developing technologies to infer personalities, emotions, tone, attitudes, and intentions from social media data.[8]

Akkiraju has co-authored over 100 technical papers. Akkiraju has 45+ issued patents and 25+ pending. She is the recipient of 4 best paper awards in AI and Operations Research areas from AAAI and INFORMs.

Akkiraju has delivered many keynote addresses, podcasts[9][10][11][12][7] and blog posts[13][14][15] on artificial intelligence, bias, AI for IT operations etc.

Awards and honors edit

  • May 2017: Top 20 Women in AI Research, Forbes[4]
  • July 2018: A-Team in AI, Fortune [4]
  • December 2019: Top 10 pioneering women in AI and Machine Learning, Enterprise Management 360[4][16]
  • 2020: Athena Award for Executive Leadership, University of California[17]
  • 2019, 2020: Excellence in Service Innovation Award, International Society of Service Innovation Professionals[18]
  • 2021: Nominee, women in AI Award, VentureBeat[19]

Selected publications edit

  • Akkiraju, Rama, Joel Farrell, John A. Miller, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Amit P. Sheth, and Kunal Verma. "Web service semantics-wsdl-s." (2005).
  • Doshi, Prashant, Richard Goodwin, Rama Akkiraju, and Kunal Verma. "Dynamic workflow composition: Using markov decision processes." International Journal of Web Services Research (IJWSR) 2, no. 1 (2005): 1–17.
  • Akkiraju, Rama, Richard Goodwin, Prashant Doshi, and Sascha Roeder. "A Method for Semantically Enhancing the Service Discovery Capabilities of UDDI." In IIWeb, pp. 87–92. 2003.
  • Elmeleegy, Hazem, Anca Ivan, Rama Akkiraju, and Richard Goodwin. "Mashup advisor: A recommendation tool for mashup development." In 2008 IEEE International Conference on Web Services, pp. 337–344. IEEE, 2008.

References edit

  1. ^ "Meet the 2020 Women in Tech Initiative Athena Awards Winners !". 16 January 2020.
  2. ^ a b "ISSIP Excellence in Service Innovation Award Recipients – ISSIP".
  3. ^ "2019 IBM Fellow Rama Akkiraju". 2019 IBM Fellow Rama Akkiraju. 2019-04-11. Retrieved 2022-03-29.
  4. ^ a b c d "Rama Akkiraju". Women in Data Science (WiDS). Retrieved 2023-08-13.
  5. ^ "Back Matter". Interfaces. 29 (5). 1999. ISSN 0092-2102.
  6. ^ "Leadership team – ISSIP". issip.org. Retrieved 2022-03-31.
  7. ^ a b AI Experts Discuss the Truth Behind "The Social Dilemma" | CompTIA AI Advisory Council, retrieved 2022-03-31
  8. ^ Yao, Mariya. "Meet These Incredible Women Advancing A.I. Research". Forbes. Retrieved 2023-08-13.
  9. ^ Ruth, Joao-Pierre S. (2021-04-21). "IBM Talks AIOps Potential at Digital Developer Conference". InformationWeek. Retrieved 2022-03-31.
  10. ^ "SuperDataScience". www.superdatascience.com. Retrieved 2022-03-31.
  11. ^ Episode 1 - AIOps with Rama Akkiraju, 2020-10-13, retrieved 2022-03-31
  12. ^ Ep6: Automating enterprise IT with Artificial Intelligence, 2021-09-24, retrieved 2022-03-31
  13. ^ "Using Language Models to Optimize IT Operations Management in Watson AIOps". www.ibm.com. Retrieved 2022-03-30.
  14. ^ "Applying natural language understanding to IT operations data to build machine learning models for IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps". IBM Developer. Retrieved 2022-03-30.
  15. ^ "Artificial intelligence". IBM Developer. Retrieved 2022-03-30.
  16. ^ "Hilary Mason - One of Best Machine Learning Scientist | EM360". em360tech.com. Retrieved 2023-08-13.
  17. ^ "EDGE in Tech Initiative Athena Awards - University of California". EDGE in Tech Initiative at UC. Retrieved 2023-08-13.
  18. ^ "ISSIP Excellence In Service Innovation Award Past Recipients". ISSIP. Retrieved 2023-08-13.
  19. ^ "Transform 2021 Women in AI | VentureBeat Events". 2021-04-09. Retrieved 2023-08-13.

External links edit

  • Rama Akkiraju at NVIDIA Research
  • NPR article on IBM's work by Akkiraju
  • IBM Tone Analyzer website
  • IBM: Humanizing Digital Conversations, by Akkiraju on App Developer Magazine