IBM has named seven employees as IBM Fellowsits most prestigious technical honorto acknowledge their contributions and innovations in developing some of the world’s most key technologies.
“Technology innovation is at the core of everything we do to help our clients make the world work better,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM president and chief executive officer, in a statement. “IBM’s 2012 Fellows represent the very best of this culture of innovation, and I’m honored to recognize their outstanding accomplishments.”
Among the newly named IBM Fellows is chief scientist of analytics and distinguished engineer Jeff Jonas. IBM said this is a testament to this individual the company refers to as a self-taught software savant and swashbuckling entrepreneur who has been making enormous contributions to the IT industry in the area of advanced analytics.
Jonas is currently applying his technology expertise and passion by leading an effort at IBM to deliver real-time “sense-making” analytics to the marketdesigned to analyze transactions in real time, affording clients more time to make decisions and react to changing situations faster. The project is part of IBM’s leadership in advancing new analytics capabilities in the area of big data and the company’s Smarter Planet initiatives. From surviving bankruptcy and a broken neck, to starting his successful Systems Research and Development (SRD) company that IBM acquired in 2005 and completing 25 full-distance Ironman events, this new IBM Fellow has packed enough living into his first 48 years to fill three or four lifetimes.
Jonas is internationally recognized as a leader in his field and advises both private and public sector organizations. He is currently leading an effort to deliver real-time “sense-making” analytics to the market. This technology is designed to analyze transactions in real time, affording clients more time to make decisions and react to changing situations more rapidly. This new breed of “context-aware computing” holds big promise for organizations across a variety of industries as well as government.
Meanwhile, Luba Cherbakov of IBM Enterprise Transformation in Bethesda, Md., is a driving force behind the creation and use of emerging technologies that have enabled the business transformation of both IBM and its clients. The areas where she has made significant contributions include Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture, Rivers-for-Tomorrow, Situational Applications Environment, The Genographic Project and IBM Virtual Spaces. Cherbakov has played a leading role in IBMs entry into new market segments, and her groundbreaking research has helped IBM and its clients improve their internal operations while supporting growth in the marketplace. As mentor, teacher and sponsor, Luba is a highly regarded technical leader whose expertise is sought by customers and technical practitioners alike.
Paul Coteus, of IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., has made key contributions to memory, power, packaging and cooling for high-speed computing systems. Pauls accomplishments involve his work with Blue Gene. In 2004, BlueGene/L represented a breakthrough in supercomputer sustained performance, power efficiency and reliability. The 104-rack system with 212K processor cores is still running at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), thus enabling prodigious computing tasks that surpassed previous systems. A founding member and chief engineer of the Blue Gene project, Paul was responsible for the system’s power, packaging and cooling, including the reliability of design.
Ronald Fagin of IBM Research in San Jose, Calif., is a founder of relational database theory, the creator of the field of finite model theory, the author of seminal work in information integration and aggregation, and a thought leader in the field of reasoning about knowledge. He has advanced the theory and practice of modern computing systems, especially data management systems. His key inventions include extendible hashing, widely used in database query processing; differential data backup, a key feature of Tivoli software; and critical tools for database design.
Vincent Hsu of IBM Systems and Technology Group in Tucson, Ariz., has a long history of innovation in storage system architectures, creating workload optimized solutions through intelligent data placements and championing IBM’s increasing success in growth markets. He is the founding architect for Easy Tier, the next generation of storage virtualization that accounts for IBM’s leadership in storage efficiency and workload optimization. Vincent is defining the next generation of storage platforms, designed to deliver data on demand. Intelligent storage and workload optimized solutions will be critical to IBM’s growth in newly designed data centers.
Ruchir Puri of IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., has led the fundamental transformation of microprocessor design in IBMs high-performance enterprise systems. Throughout his career, he has shown a passion for pushing the boundaries of design automation to reduce dependence on labor-intensive manual design. The resulting increase in design efficiency has strengthened IBMs competitive position in the marketplace. Puri led this new design approach and directed combined global teams from IBM Research and Systems and Technology Group to execute the transformation.
And Balaram Sinharoy of IBM Systems and Technology Group in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., is known as one of the world’s top processor architects. Among the technologies he has pioneered are Simultaneous Multi-Threading and power-efficient, high-performance, multi-core server design. Sinharoy is currently chief architect of IBMs next-generation POWER technology, responsible for micro-architecture and differentiation features. Before that, he was chief architect of IBM’s POWER7 processor and was responsible for defining the POWER7 micro-architecture that delivers IBM significant leadership in the marketplace.
Over the history of the company, IBM Fellow is the company’s pre-eminent technical distinction, granted in recognition of outstanding and sustained technical achievements and leadership in engineering, programming, services, science and technology. To enhance their potential for more innovations, IBM Fellows are given additional responsibilities in their areas of specialization. Only 238 individuals have earned this designation in IBM’s history, and, including today’s newly named Fellows, 77 are active employees. This year’s group of Fellows has 131 years of combined IBM experience and has collectively been issued 273 patents.
Examples of technology originated by IBM Fellows include:
¢ reduced instruction set computing (RISC)the architectural basis for most high-performance workstations and servers;
¢ thin-film headsfor high-density disk storage devices;
¢ relational databasesone of the foundational technologies of knowledge management;
¢ virtual memorywhich allows many users to share a single computer;
¢ The Scanning Tunneling Microscopethe first instrument able to image atoms;
¢ Fortranone of the world’s most widely used computer languages;
¢ RAMACthe world’s first disk drive; and
¢ Watsonthe high-performance computing system that defeated two all-time winning contestants on the TV quiz show “Jeopardy.”