Rama Akkiraju

Rama Akkiraju is a Distinguished Engineer, and Master Inventor at IBM. Rama is presently leading the mission of enabling natural, personalized and compassionate conversations between computers and humans via user modeling at IBM's Watson division. Specific projects in user modeling domain that she is leading include: researching and developing technologies to infer people's personalities, emotions, tone, attitudes and intentions etc. from social media data using linguistic and machine learning techniques. In her career, Rama has worked on agent-based decision support systems, electronic market places, and business process integration technologies including semantic Web services, for which she drove 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+ others pending. She is the recipient of 3 best paper awards in the areas of AI and Operations Research. Rama also received multiple awards and honors at IBM in her professional career. Rama holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and has received a gold medal from New York University for her MBA.