Pankaj Dhoolia

As a Senior Technical Staff Member (at IBM Research), I envision, design, and productize technology in the area of conversational & Generative AI, working directly with IBM watsonx teams on bringing new research technology & solutions to our products & services. I have had the opportunity to lead the development of watsonx Assistant’s dialog engine, built on our earlier research on declarative & constraint driven dialog, and also to work on solutions for some of our biggest clients including SAP, NatWest, Nestle, & Philip Morris International.

My current focus is on integrating our conversational (watsonx Assistant), automation (watsonx Orchestrate), and AI (watsonx) platforms for generative AI empowered conversational interactions including automation skills. Towards that, I have worked on infusing foundation models into watsonx Assistant for document-grounded & retrieval-augmented generation, and slot-filling. I am also exploring an agentic AI middleware platform that combines emerging LLM usage patterns including function / tool calls with low level control required to address complex field problems encountered in enterprise solutions with generative AI.

Prior to this (as a lead researcher in the Programming Technologies department), I :

• Worked on building technologies to analyze and transform legacy applications (on J2EE platform) to a cloud based programming model, by comprehending, extracting and generating API wrappers for them.
• Worked on enhancing productivity of SAP practitioners, developing: an interrogative debugger to localize faults in SAP’s data-centric ABAP programs; and a delta-refactoring technique to reconcile and merge custom clones of SAP standard programs with newly released updates.

I began my IBM Research career as a lead Research Engineer in Model Driven Engineering, leading the development of Model Driven Business Transformation Toolkit. The toolkit consisted of a set of model transformation plugins in Eclipse, spanning across IBM’s Business Process Modeler, Rational Software Modeler, and WebSphere Integration Developer. I also led the application of this toolkit in several first of a kind engagements including Gap, Time Warner Cable, and IBM’s own Service Delivery Management business.

Prior to joining IBM Research in 2005:

• As a lead software developer at Perot Systems, I developed a Genetic Data Bank (for a startup venture, First Genetic Trust). This banked genotypic and phenotypic data for persons participating in genomic studies and drug trials, empowering pharmaceuticals to combine genomics with their drug trials to understand the efficacy and impact of drugs on cohorts with specific gene markers.
• As a software developer at Infosys, and later at Peritus Software Services (another start up venture) I developed a system to parse, analyze, and automatically correct mainframe software for Y2K, and Euro currency impact.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

• Council for Innovation Leadership Award | 2023-11-16
• Council for Innovation Leadership Award | 2022-11-16
• OTAA for Research Advancements to Conversational Technology | 2022-05-25
• CTR Honor & Special Division Accomplishment for IBM COVID-19 Technology Taskforce | 2022-05-25
• OTAA & Research Accomplishment (A) for Contributions to Watson Assistant Dialog Runtime | 2021-06-16
• OTAA & Research Accomplishment (A) for COVID-Assist and connect platform | 2021-06-08
• Invention Development Team Award | 2020-11-19
• OTAA & Outstanding Research Accomplishment (O) for Advancements to Conversational Tech. | 2020-03-06
• Invention Development Team Award | 2019-11-07
• Invention Development Team Award | 2018-11-05
• Master Inventor Award | 2017-12-19
• Invention Development Team Award | 2017-12-06
• Invention Development Team Award | 2016-12-13
• Client value OTAA for leading first of a kind cognitive solution at Philip Morris International | 2016-07-17
• OTAA & Research Accomplishment (A) for contributions to Cognitive Technology | 2016-04-13
• Eminence and Excellence Award for outstanding work with Nestle & Cognitive AMS | 2015-11-13
• Client value OTAA for leading first of a kind cognitive solution at Nestle | 2015-10-11
• Research Division Award (level - O - Accomplishment) for Catapult - Accelerators for SAP AMS | 2013-12
• IRL Distinguished Paper Award 2013 for FSE 2013 paper on Distributed Program Tracing | 2013
• OTAA conferred by Regional Technical Leadership Exchange for University Relations in IBM Cloud
• OTAA & Research Accomplishment (A) Award for Catapult-Accelerators for SAP AMS | 2012-05-01
• Eminence and Excellence Award for outstanding performance and contributions in 2010 | 2011-02
• Client Value OTAA for contributions to IBM Packaged Applications Research | 2010-11
• Research Division Award (level - A - Accomplishment) for work on Core Banking Transformation | 2010-10
• Research Division Award (Science accomplishment) - Siena: Lightweight BPM with Business Entities | 2010-10
• Research Division Technical Group Award for MDBT CEO Milestone Accomplishment | 2006-04

In addition to above I have also received:

• 1000+ IBM Restricted Stock Units as Long Term Incentive Award
• 40+ IBM patent file awards
• 20+ IBM Manager choice & appreciation awards