Dr. Guruduth S. Banavar

Guruduth S. Banavar, Ph.D. is Vice President, Cognitive Computing at IBM.
 
Guru currently leads a worldwide team at IBM Research, responsible for creating the next generation of cognitive systems in the Watson family.
 
Previously, Guru and his team worked across IBM’s businesses to co-innovate with clients, by applying advanced technologies to solve tough business problems across the spectrum of industry verticals, such as Healthcare & Life Sciences, Commerce & Financial Services, and Energy & Natural Resources. As CTO of IBM’s Global Public Sector business, Guru focused on the Smarter Cities initiative, and led strategic engagements around the globe to improve public safety, transportation, and other city services that make cities more livable and sustainable. An example of his work is the City Operations Center in Rio de Janeiro, which coordinates day-to-day as well as emergency operations in support of planning and service management across thirty agencies within that city. Guru also served on NY Governor Cuomo’s commission for improving New York State’s resilience to natural disasters after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.
 
Earlier, Guru was the Director of IBM Research in India, which he helped establish as a pre-eminent center for Services Research and Mobile Computing. There, he and his team received a National Innovation Award by the President of India in 2009 for the Spoken Web project. His early work was on distributed systems and programming models at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center in New York, which he joined in 1995 after his Ph.D. in Computer Science.
 
Guru’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and other international media. He is an elected member of the IBM Academy of Technology, and has served on the boards of IBM’s Industry Academy and those of client and academic institutions.
 
His papers include An Efficient Multicast Protocol for Content-Based Publish-Subscribe Systems, Challenges: An Application Model for Pervasive Computing, Software Infrastructure and Design Challenges for Ubiquitous Computing Applications, Exploiting IP Multicast in Content-Based Publish-Subscribe Systems, A Case for Message Oriented Middleware, The Design and Applications of a Context Service, and Gryphon: An Information Flow Based Approach to Message Brokering. Read the full list of his publications!
 
His patents include System and method for maintaining communication channels through coverage gaps, Method and system for context-based automated product identification and verification, System and method for constructing computer application flows with specializations for targets, Sharing resources among hierarchical containers of resources, and System and method for providing collaborative replicated objects for synchronous distributed groupware application. Read the full list of his patents.
 
Watch Analytics: How Big Data Can Solve our Most Complex Problems and Guruduth Banavar | Using Information to Plan and Predict. Read his LinkedIn profile.