Rama Akkiraju


Rama Kalyani T. Akkiraju is an Indian-born American computer scientist. She is vice president of AI/ML for IT at Nvidia and performs research in the field of artificial intelligence.
Akkiraju started her career at the T. J. Watson Research Center in New York and later moved to IBM Almaden Research Center. She served as the Distinguished Engineer and Director of Engineering at IBM's Watson Division from 2015 to 2019.
Akkiraju was named an IBM Fellow in 2019. She has been an IBM Master Inventor since 2014.

Education

Akkiraju received her MBA at New York University, Stern School of Business in 2004, where she earned a gold medal for highest academic excellence. She received her M.S. in Computer Science from Utah State University in 1995 and her B.Tech. in Electronics engineering from JNTU College of Engineering, in Andhra Pradesh, India in 1993.

Professional contributions

Akkiraju served as the President for ISSIP, a Service Science professional society for 2018, and actively drives AI projects through ISSIP. Akkiraju is the co-chair for the AI Council at CompTIA industry forum. Akkiraju has served as program committee chair, and program committee member for various academic conferences & journals including those organized by IEEE, ACM, ICSE, and ASPLOS.
While at IBM, Akkiraju led the "People Insights" on the IBM Watson team, developing technologies to infer personalities, emotions, tone, attitudes, and intentions from social media data.
Akkiraju has co-authored over 100 technical papers. Akkiraju has 45+ issued patents and 25+ pending. She is the recipient of 4 best paper awards in AI and Operations Research areas from AAAI and INFORMs.
Akkiraju has delivered many keynote addresses, podcasts and blog posts on artificial intelligence, bias, AI for IT operations etc.

Awards and honors

Selected publications