Rama Akkiraju

IBM  Fellow, 
Director of AI Operations
IBM

Rama Akkiraju is an IBM Fellow, Master Inventor and IBM Academy Member, and a Director, at IBM’s Watson Division where she leads the AI operations team with a mission to scale AI for Enterprises. Prior to this, Rama led the AI mission of enabling natural, personalized and compassionate conversations between computers and humans. 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 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 100 technical papers. Rama has 18 issued patents and 25+ pending. She is the recipient of 3 best paper awards in AI and Operations Research. ​

​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 served as the President for ISSIP, a Service Science professional society for 2018 and continues to actively drive AI projects through this professional society.