Ruchir Puri
CTO and Chief Architect, IBM Watson, IBM

Ruchir Puri is the chief scientist of IBM Research and an IBM Fellow. Previously, he led IBM Watson as its CTO and chief architect and has held various technical, research, and engineering leadership roles across IBM’s AI and Research businesses and served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University and a visiting scientist at Stanford University. Ruchir is a fellow of the IEEE, has been recognized as an ACM Distinguished Speaker and an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, and was awarded 2014 Asian American Engineer of the Year. Ruchir was also honored with the John Von-Neumann Chair at the Institute of Discrete Mathematics at Bonn University, Germany. Ruchir is an inventor who holds over 50 United States patents; he has authored over 100 scientific publications on software, hardware automation methods, and optimization algorithms.