Lisa Amini

Dr. Lisa Amini leads IBM's Data & AI Platforms Research efforts globally, along with IBM's AI Horizons Network. She is also an IBM Distinguished Engineer (DE). The mission of the Data & AI Platforms Research theme is to infuse generative and agentic AI throughout IBM's Data Platform, to make it more intelligent, self-service, and autonomous, and to optimize its performance on AI workloads.

She was previously Lab Director and Site Lead Executive of IBM Research Cambridge (home of the MIT-IBM AI Lab, and Director of Knowledge & Reasoning Research in the Cognitive Computing group at IBM Research - Yorktown in New York. She was also the founding Director of IBM Research Ireland, and the first woman Lab Director for an IBM Research Global (i.e., non-US) Lab (2010-2013). In this role she developed the strategy and led researchers in advancing science and technology for intelligent urban and environmental systems (Smarter Cities), with a focus on creating analytics, optimizations, and systems for sustainable energy, constrained resources (e.g., urban water management), transportation, and the linked open data systems that assimilate and share data and models for these domains.

Previously, Dr. Amini was Senior Manager of the Exploratory Stream Processing Research Group at the IBM Research - Yorktown. She was the founding Chief Architect for IBM's InfoSphere Streams product. The Streams product is the result of a Research technology, System S, for which Lisa was also the architectural lead from inception. Streams is a software platform for continuous, high-throughput, and low-latency mining of intelligence from massive amounts of sensor and other machine-generated data. She also led her team in formative Smarter Planet/Cities pilots, analyzing real-time data for cyber security, manufacturing, telecom, market data analysis, radio astronomy, environmental (water) monitoring, and transportation.

She has served on program committees, hosted panels, and presented keynotes and publications in numerous IEEE, ACM, and other conferences and workshops. She has worked at IBM in the areas of Data & AI, Cognitive Computing, Smarter Cities, Stream Processing, Distributed and High Performance systems, Content Distribution, Multimedia, and Networking for over 25 years. She earned her PhD degree in Computer Science from Columbia University.