Shubhi Asthana

Shubhi Asthana is a Sr Research Software Engineer who build AI & ML Solutions. She is SME in AI and ML models for Financial Services, along with leading the PII effort in Unstructured Data & NLP. Her research and development work spans the areas of Data Analytics, NLP and Cloud Services.

Shubhi has demonstrated multi-year technical leadership with outstanding and sustained research impact recognized by IBM (3 O-level, 3 A-level, 5 OTAA, 1 CTR within last 5 years). She led global research and development teams in successfully architecting, executing and delivering 4 global projects under Research. She is passionate about infusing new AI Analytical initiatives, building foundational model frameworks bring innovative AI solutions like PII detection to the clients.

Shubhi has successfully led projects in services computing and data analytics with business impact. In 2020-2022, she led a financial services based risk analytics solution for a customer. Shubhi rapidly architected and delivered an innovative solution that accurately predicts when customer would exhaust their PO funds using a combination of machine learning and software engineering. The project was presented at top tier conferences such as KDD, IEEE Services etc. Shubhi also received the IBM Research’s OTAA Award 2021, 2023 for leading these projects.

She has also worked on building data analytical tools that are used by IBM Services. She led the research and development team to invent the service tools that leverage novel analytics and OR methods. The tools have been implemented and deployed in production, and have resulted in significant win rate increases, and a realized revenue increase of almost $350M. The details of this accomplishment have been published in INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics journal paper “Analytics and Operations Research Increases Win Rates for IBM’s Information Technology Service Deals”.

In addition, to her technical excellence in services computing, she has tirelessly worked to support Women in Services. She is the Vice President at Society of Women Engineers - Santa Clara Valley section (2022-2024). She also serves as the Industry liaison for Women in OR/MD under INFORMS (2021-24). She co-organized the IEEE Women in Services Computing symposia (2021-23). She has mentored 30+ students and early-career researchers through IBM, Alumni networks, Grace Hopper, Society of Women Engineers. She presented invited talks at 50+ conferences and co-organized the NeurIPS ML4HC workshop.

Shubhi has been recognized with the IBM Corporate Award 2020 for the business impact to IBM. For her exemplary technical achievements, she was awarded four times (2018, 2019, 2022) the IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards (OTAA, the highest technical accomplishment award at IBM). Her projects received the INFORMS Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Advanced Analytics, Operations Research, & Management Science for 2019, as well as first place for the 2018 ISSIP Excellence in Service Innovation Award. Her other external accomplishments include - ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper award 2022, 2023 Top 100 Technologists to Watch, 2023 North Carolina State University Outstanding Early Career Award, 2022 IEEE Annual Industry Rising Star Award, Franz Edelman Award Finalist for Achievement in Advanced Analytics, Operations Research, & Management Science 2019, 1st at "Outstanding Innovation in Service Systems Engineering Award” 2020, SWE Patent award 2021 - 2023, Silicon Valley Business Journal’s 40 u 40 2021. Shubhi has 20+ patents filed and 40+ top-tier conference publications on AI, data and analytics (NeurIPS, INFORMS, KDD, ICAIF).

Shubhi has been at IBM Research since 2015. Previously, she worked for a year at AirWatch by VMware. She holds a Masters degree in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University, USA.