People

Rama Akkiraju is a vice president of AI for IT at NVIDIA. Prior to this, Rama held various leadership roles at IBM in her two decades-plus career. Most recently, Rama was an IBM Fellow, Master Inventor, and an IBM Academy Member at IBM, where she was the CTO of IBM Watson AI Operations product, a product to optimize IT operations management with AI. Before that, Rama led the AI mission of enabling natural, personalized, and compassionate conversations between computers and humans where she and her team developed several differentiating AI services such as Personality Insights, Tone Analyzer, Emotion Analysis, and Sentiment Analysis services to the IBM Watson platform. Rama also led the effort to scale IBM Watson’s AI services including automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, and chatbot services to dozens of languages. Before this, Rama led various projects and research teams at IBM Watson Research Center and IBM Almaden Research Center in the areas of agent-based decision support systems, business process management, electronic marketplaces, and semantic Web services, for which she led a World Wide Web (W3C) standard. Rama has co-authored over 100 technical papers. Rama has 50+ issued patents and 25+ pending. She's the recipient of four best paper awards in AI and operations research. Rama served as the president of ISSIP, a service science professional society for 2018, and continues to be on the organization’s Strategy committee. Rama holds a master’s degree in computer science and has received a gold medal from New York University for her M.B.A. for the highest academic excellence. Rama was 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 was 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 2022, Rama was named "USA Industry Innovator of the Year" by the Women in AI Organization and "AI Industry Leader of the Year" by the Women Leaders in Data & AI (WLDA) organization.