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.