Mark Wegman

I've recently co-authored a book, The Heart of Innovation. In it we describe innovators as people who want to change the way people and organizations behave. Inventors want to create devices or software that can change the physical world. Inventors study many STEM topics to get good at invention. Innovators need to study people and the situations they find themselves in. We describe some of the lessons they need to learn so that they can plot a course to success.

I'm working with the SynAGI team to build a neuronal system that can simulate many of the key functions of the animal and human brain and the evolutionary learning that leads to some of our innate knowledge. An animal brain can be thought of as a recurrent transformer based system, simulating a cortex. This system can learn what to remember for the long term and can perform tasks that current LLMs cannot, including planning, System 2 reasoning, and deductive and inductive reasoning.

I'm known for my work on compilers having been a co-creator of Static Single Assignment form, which is used by all modern optimizing compilers. I'm also known for my work on Universal Hash Functions, which demonstrate that the advantages of hashing can be used no matter what the input. My work on data compression resulted in what, for a time, was the strongest compression algorithm, and has been incorporated in a number of standards.

I'm grateful to have been elected an IBM, ACM and IEEE Fellow, a Distinguished Alumni from UC Berkeley, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. I'm blessed to live in a lovely home in Westchester with my wife of 40 years and many wonderful friends and family. I enjoy hiking, biking and climbing.

I am deeply concerned about the damage we are doing to our planet and the polarization and inequality of our society. I hope that what we do in IBM Research will increase the productivity of our society and help relieve some of the pressures creating these problems.