Rama Akkiraju

Rama Akkiraju is a Director, Distinguished Engineer, and Master Inventor at IBM’s Watson Division where she leads the AI mission of enabling natural, personalized and compassionate conversations between computers and humans.
In her career, Rama has worked on agent-based decision support systems, 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 50 technical papers. Rama has over dozen issued patents and 20+ pending. She is the recipient of 3 best paper awards in AI and Operations Research. Rama received multiple awards and honors at IBM in her professional career including multiple Corporate Awards, highest technical awards in the company.

Rama has been named by Forbes as one of the ‘Top 20 Women in AI Research’ in May 2017. Rama and her team’s work has been featured in various media outlets including, National Public Radio (NPR), LA Times, VentureBeat, and CNBC.
Rama holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and has received a gold medal from New York University for her MBA for highest academic excellence. Rama currently serves as the President for ISSIP, a Service Science professional society for 2018.