IBM’s 2015 Fellows Hail From Analytics, Cloud, Systems Camps

by Darryl K. Taft

Donna Dillenberger works in IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where she is the global leader of Enterprise Systems. Dillenberger has been at IBM for 27 years and has had a distinguished career of contributions to System z products—the mainstays of industries ranging from banking to transportation. Her achievements include innovative work in enabling servers within data centers to share memory resources while using 100 percent of their processing power. In 2014, Dillenberger began working on transforming mainframes to become more cognitive—enabling interaction with users in a more natural way and developing components that can detect patterns in business data that provide insights that help organizations run better.

Chitra Dorai, an 18-year company veteran, works in IBM Global Business Services in Yorktown Heights, where she is global leader for research and innovation in financial services. Dorai is a leader in financial industry analytics. Her achievements include innovations in machine learning, multimedia content analysis, unstructured data mining and computer vision. After years in research, she moved into a role in IBM’s consulting business to work closely with clients on some of their greatest challenges. Her recent work is focused on transforming mortgage services in the banking industry. The goal is to reduce the potential for mortgage-driven market crises while enabling people to fulfill their dreams of home ownership.

Michael Factor works at IBM Research in Haifa, Israel, and is CTO of Cloud Storage Services. Factor led IBM’s contributions to the storage elements of OpenStack cloud computing standards. He’s also leading one of the more promising storage innovations in the big data era—the concept of “storlets,” a mechanism for moving data processing to the data rather than moving massive amounts of data around within computing systems.

James Steve Fields works for IBM Systems in Austin, Texas, where he is director of Power Systems design. Fields, who is responsible for strategy and technical execution, was essential to the success of IBM’s Power microprocessors in the Unix and Linux server markets and is currently directing the evolution of Power Systems for emerging demands, including cloud computing and analytics. His ability to solve problems that span multiple hardware and software disciplines has contributed to the improved performance and quality of IBM Power Systems. He’s also a key contributor to IBM’s OpenPower initiative, which has opened the chip and system architectures for partners to build products on.

Mickey Iqbal works at IBM Global Technology Services in Coppell, Texas, where he is a technical solution design operations architect. Iqbal is an expert in designing highly efficient computing systems in data centers. By using automated management programs to efficiently share computing, storage and networking resources among a large number of servers, data center operators can fully utilize their assets, use space efficiently and better control their energy costs. Iqbal works closely with clients to design systems that are custom-fit to their requirements.

Bala Rajaraman works in the IBM Cloud unit in Research Triangle Park, N.C., where he is CTO for Cloud Platform Services. Rajaraman is a key technical leader in IBM’s strategy and product development for cloud computing and IT service management. He was instrumental in conceiving and producing Bluemix, IBM’s development platform for cloud computing. Bluemix enables IT departments, entrepreneurs and students to quickly create and manage everything from run-the-business applications to mobile apps by tapping a library of ready-made software components. He pressed to make Bluemix easy to use so it would be widely adopted.

Bernhard Schiefer works in IBM Analytics in Toronto, where he is manager of the DB2 UDB Performance and Advanced Technology team. Schiefer is a recognized industry expert in benchmarking and database performance, and has been instrumental to IBM’s big data technologies. His innovations and technical leadership have been critical to the evolution of database software in the area of autonomics and pushing the boundaries of big data performance.

James C. Sexton works for IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, where he is department manager for Data Centric Systems. Sexton is IBM’s leading technical computing performance expert. He developed a comprehensive, performance characterization methodology that is essential to IBM’s high-performance computing offerings and influences their system architectures through all phases of design, sales enablement and ongoing performance tuning. As a key member of the Blue Gene program, Sexton was the first to understand how important collaborative application development was to clients. Blue Gene computers, which combine high performance with energy efficiency, are the workhorses of a number of national research laboratories and university labs.

Jing Shyr works in IBM Analytics, where she is chief statistician. Shyr, who joined IBM in 2009 with the acquisition of SPSS, is a leader in the field of predictive analytics. Her methodology for end-to-end automation of statistical analysis became the core of IBM SPSS Analytic Catalyst, a tool that enables non-specialist users to derive forward-looking insights from data. Building on that project, she drove technology advances that today are central to IBM’s big data analytics business. As big data and analytics tools become increasingly essential for modern businesses, Jing will focus on developing and deploying predictive technologies across IBM’s analytics portfolio.

John R. Smith works on visual analytics at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, where he is senior manager of Intelligent Information Systems. Smith is a pioneer in fundamental research for image and video content search, retrieval and analytics. He was one of the earliest developers of an appearance-based approach to analytics by applying machine learning to visual features such as color, texture and shape. This seminal work has been highly influential, garnering more than 15,000 citations in academic papers. Smith also has been instrumental to the development of key products based on these technologies, and he is currently working to bring deep learning-based image recognition capabilities to IBM Watson.