Lisa Amini (IBM) Joins CRA-Industry Steering Committee

CRA-Industry (CRA-I) is delighted to announce that Lisa Amini (IBM Research) has joined the CRA-I Steering Committee. The CRA-I Steering Committee is led by Co-Chairs Vivek Sarkar (Georgia Tech) and Ben Zorn (Microsoft) and includes five additional members: Amini, Mary Hall (University of Utah), Fatma Özcan (Google), Chris Ramming (VMware), and Divesh Srivastava (AT&T). 

Lisa Amini is the Director of IBM Research Cambridge, which is home to the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and of IBM’s AI Horizons Network. She also leads IBM’s AI Automation and Scaling Research efforts globally and is an IBM Distinguished Engineer. She was previously Director of Knowledge & Reasoning Research in the Cognitive Computing group at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center in New York. Amini was also the founding Director of IBM Research Ireland, and the first woman Lab Director for an IBM Research Global (i.e., non-US) Lab (2010-2013). In this role, she developed the strategy and led researchers in advancing science and technology for intelligent urban and environmental systems (Smarter Cities), with a focus on creating analytics, optimizations, and systems for sustainable energy, constrained resources (e.g., urban water management), transportation, and the linked open data systems that assimilate and share data and models for these domains.

Previously, Amini was Senior Manager of the Exploratory Stream Processing Research Group at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center. She was the founding Chief Architect for IBM’s InfoSphere Streams product. The Streams product is the result of a Research technology, System S, for which Amini was also the architectural lead from inception. Streams is a software platform for continuous, high throughput, and low latency mining of intelligence from massive amounts of sensor and other machine generated data. She also led her team in formative Smarter Planet/Cities pilots analyzing real-time data for cyber security, manufacturing, telecom, market data analysis, radio astronomy, environmental (water) monitoring, and transportation.

Amini was a panelist in the CRA-I roundtable on Computing Research in Industry on November 9th, 2022. You can view the recording from the event here. If you have any comments or questions about the roundtable, please let us know here. If you would like to sign up for future CRA-I events, please let us know here. 

Welcome, Lisa!