The vision of self-aware, self-healing and self-managing Information Technology (IT) systems has remained elusive till recently. Recent advancements in Cloud computing, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general, i. are all making it possible to realize this vision now. AI can optimize IT operations management processes by increasing application availability, predicting and detecting problems early, reducing the time it takes to resolve problems, proactively avoiding problems, and optimizing the resources and cost of running business applications on hybrid Clouds. In this talk, I will discuss the opportunity for AI to optimize IT Operations Management. I will describe how semi-structured application and infrastructure logs can be analyzed to predict anomalies early, how entities can be extracted and linked from logs, alerts and events to reduce alert noise for IT operations admins, how NLP can be put to use on unstructured content in prior incident tickets to extract next-best-action recommendations to resolve problems, and how deployment change request descriptions can be analyzed in combination with past incident root cause information to predict risks of deployment changes to prevent issues from happening in the first place.

Rama Akkiraju is an IBM Fellow, Master Inventor, and IBM Academy Member at IBM’s Automation Division where she is the CTO of AI Operations. AI Operations is about optimizing information technology (IT) operations management using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Prior to this role, Rama led the AI mission of enabling natural, personalized, and compassionate conversations between computers and humans where 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 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, and 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.

In her career, Rama has worked on 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 4 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. 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. Rama holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science and has received a gold medal from New York University for her MBA for the highest academic excellence.