Database Technologies Group

My interests revolve around performance and efficiency of AI workloads, from a parallel algorithms and architecture perspective. While a lot of my work these days happens behind the scenes of Watson, some achivements have made it into the public realm. For example, I led the technical team for a CTO initiative to deliver a 40x efficiency improvemen... t for Watson's question answering capability . I also led the efforts to leverage hardware acceleration for Watson offerings , which we first presented at at Supercomputing 2015 . In 2014 I joined the IBM Watson team as their performance architect, leading a team of engineers focused on optimizing efficiency of Watson offerings across the hardware/software stack. I started my IBM career in 2010 when I joined the Database Technologies Group at IBM Almaden Research . During that time I had the opportunity to "play" with several emerging parallel architectures and evaluate their use for data-intensive applications. The outcomes were a thorough understanding of parallel architectures and their application to large scale software systems. Since 2011 I am also an Adjunct Professor in the Computer and Information Science department at the University of Pennsylvania where I teach lectures on GPU and systems programming. Before my time at IBM I was a member of Oracle 's Special Projects Team and prior to getting my PhD I worked at SAP, Lufthansa, and Software AG. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California Santa Cruz . My advisor was Prof. Scott Brandt and my thesis is on "Predictable High-Performance Data Management - Leveraging System Resource Characteristics to Improve Performance and Predictability". I did my undergraduate work in Business Informatics (Wirtschaftsinformatik) at Technische Universitt Darmstadt in Germany. I received my Master's degree in Network Engineering from Eurecom , a research institute funded by Telecom Paris in France and EPFL in Switzerland. Michael Gschwind, Tim Kaldewey, David K. ...Read More