Rama Akkiraju is a Distinguished Engineer, Master Inventor and IBM Academy Member, and a Director, at IBM’s Watson Division where she leads the AI operations teams and also heads the AI mission of enabling natural, personalized and compassionate conversations between computers and humans. Rama has been named by Forbes as one of the ‘Top 20 Women in AI Research’ in May 2017 and has been featured in ‘A-Team in AI’ by Fortune magazine in July 2018. Rama has co-authored 4 book chapters, and over 50 technical papers. Rama has over dozen issued patents and 20+ pending. She is the recipient of 3 best paper awards in AI and Operations Research.

In her career, Rama has worked on agent-based decision support systems, electronic market places, and semantic Web services, for which she led a World-Wide-Web (W3C) standard.
Rama holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and has received a gold medal from New York University for her MBA for highest academic excellence.