Luis A Lastras           

I am a Distinguished Research Staff Member at the IBM Watson Group, where additionally I am a member of the iBM Academy of Technology, Manager of the Concept Analytics Group, and a Master Inventor. I obtained my Bachelor in Electrical Engineering form the Universidad Autonoma de San Luis Potosi, Mexico, and then I got my MSc and PhD degrees from Cornell University in 1998 and 2000, respectively, where I concentrated in the subject of information theory.

My most recent interests are in the area of conversational systems, natural language processing, information retrieval, semantic search, knowledge graphs, linked data, social networks, natural language processing and very large scale systems. My past interests are in coding and information theory, and memory systems and reliability. I enjoy existing in the place where theory meets practice, where we take very deep and fundamental mathematical ideas and have them impact the world.

My research has found its way to several IBM systems. I am particularly proud of my work in memory reliability, as all IBM POWER Systems and System Z Mainframes now utilize error correcting technology in their main memory that I helped design. The mainframe's RAIM design, in particular, uses an interesting new class of algebraic error correcting codes that was custom designed for the needs of IBM mainframes. My work in this area has been recognized with several IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and the prestigious IBM Corporate Technical Recognition Award.

On the theory & algorithms side, recently I have been working on an information theoretic model for memories that have write noise, which in the long term I hope will form the basis for how we understand how to encode information in a variety of new memory technologies that exhibit write uncertainty, such as Phase Change Memory, MRAM and Flash.