Lisa Amini

Dr. 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.

Lisa was previously Director of Knowledge & Reasoning Research in the Cognitive Computing group at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center in New York. She 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, Lisa 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 Lisa was also 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.

Lisa has served on program committees, hosted panels, and presented keynotes and publications in numerous IEEE, ACM and other conferences and workshops. She has worked at IBM the areas of AI and Cognitive Computing, Smarter Cities, Stream Processing, Distributed and high performance systems, Content Distribution, Multimedia, and Networking for over 25 years. She earned her PhD degree in Computer Science from Columbia University.