KEYNOTE TALK SERIES
Juan Li
(Professor, North Dakota State University)
Bio: Dr Juan (Jen) Li is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Dakota State University (NDSU). She joined NDSU in August 2008 after graduating with her PhD in Computer Science from University of British Columbia, Canada. Dr. Li’s research has focused upon the areas of Healthcare Informatics, Distributed Systems including Internet of Things (IoT), Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing, Cloud computing, and Semantic Web technologies.
Title for Talk : Empowering Healthcare with Digital Twins: From Design to Real-World Impact
Abstract: This keynote presentation will showcase groundbreaking research in leveraging digital twin technology to transform healthcare. It will delve into the design and implementation of digital twins for complex conditions, notably diabetes and Alzheimer’s. The presentation will elucidate the fundamental principles of digital twins, their construction, and their wide-ranging applications. Dr. Li will highlight how digital twins enable personalized treatment, predict disease progression, and optimize interventions, ultimately improving patient outcomes.
Ken Birman
(Professor, Cornell University, USA)
Bio : Ken Birman joined Cornell after receiving his PhD degree from U.C. Berkeley in Computer Science. He currently holds the N. Rama Rao Chair in Computer Science. A researcher in distributed systems, Professor Birman focuses on high assurance applications. His past work was used in settings that include the New York Stock Exchange, French Air Traffic Control System and US Navy AEGIS. More recent systems transitioned to companies like IBM, Microsoft, Cisco and Amazon. Professor Birman has been the Editor in Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems and has chaired or participated in program committees for numerous conferences. He has also run a number of studies on behalf of the Air Force, NSF, DARPA and DOE, aimed at understanding how best to exploit cloud computing in sensitive settings.
Title for Talk- Vortex: Vector Database Architecture for Accelerating RAG-LLM Queries
Sanjeev Kumar Marimekala
(IBM Certified Senior Enterprise Technology Architect)
Bio: Sanjeev Kumar Marimekala is an Experienced (25+ Years) IBM Certified Senior Enterprise Technology Architect (Thought Leader) and STSM with a demonstrated history of working in the Information Technology and Services Industry focused on designing and implementing solutions which deliver business value to over 400,000 employees in 100+ countries. As a core member of IBM Transformation Team, Sanjeev has led the transformation of Global Infrastructure team into a Worldwide Agile Infrastructure organization responsible for creating and delivering a productive environment for IBM’ers. Sanjeev has also led various Global Server Infrastructure optimization projects that has streamlined, simplified, and reduced the cost of IT operations across IBM Global Data Centers. Currently he works in IBM CIO/F&O Organization and leads the Common Configuration and Automation Standards Project.
Title for Talk: Prompt Engineering
Abstract: Prompt engineering is the practice of designing inputs for AI tools that will produce optimal outputs. In this session, you will know about what prompt engineering is and why is it important and why do we use prompt engineering. Sanjeev will discuss about some of the benefits of prompt engineering. Further, Sanjeev will focus on elements of prompt engineering, prompt engineering techniques, limitations of prompt engineering and what skills are needed for prompt engineering. He will also discuss on application and use cases of prompt engineering with a brief demo.
Dr Leland Chang
(Principal Research Scientist and the Senior Manager of AI Hardware at IBM Research)
Bio: Leland Chang is a Principal Research Scientist and the Senior Manager of AI Hardware at IBM Research, where he leads a team developing AI hardware accelerators for next-generation server and mainframe products. He has worked across technology, circuits, architecture, and software with key technical contributions to FinFET technologies, SRAM scaling, integrated voltage regulators, and AI accelerators. He received the B. S., M. S., and Ph.D. degrees in EECS from UC Berkeley and has authored 100 technical articles and 135 patents.
Title of Talk: Architecture and Design Approaches to ML Hardware Acceleration: Performance Compute Environment
Abstract: With the recent explosion in generative AI and large language models, hardware acceleration has become particularly important in high-performance compute environments. In such applications, AI accelerators should address a broad range of AI models and enable workflows spanning model pre-training, fine-tuning, and inference. System-level design and software co-optimization must be considered to balance compute and communication costs, especially with inference workloads driving aggressive latency targets and model size growth driving the use of distributed systems. This talk will discuss these considerations in the context of high-performance system deployments and explore approaches to AI accelerator circuit design as well as research roadmaps to improve both compute efficiency and communication bandwidth.
Dr Jeff Rogers
(Global Research Leader for Digital Health and a Distinguished Scientist at IBM)
Bio: Dr. Jeff Rogers is the Global Research Leader for Digital Health and a Distinguished Scientist at IBM, where he founded the company’s healthcare initiatives at the intersection of artificial intelligence, the internet-of-things, and microelectronics. He also leads the healthcare focus of the international AI Alliance and the digital health theme in the Cleveland Clinic/IBM Discovery Accelerator. Before IBM, Dr. Rogers was a Director of Engineering at Google, where he founded a cardiac care group and served as a DARPA Program Manager, creating the Blast Gauge/TBI monitoring effort in Afghanistan and founding the agency’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO). He has served as a faculty member at the California Institute of Technology and as a scientist at HRL Laboratories. Dr. Rogers earned his Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology and an M.S. from Emory University. He has received several prestigious awards, including the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service, the 2021 Landmark Award, IBM’s General Managers Award for technology creation and transition, and the Joint Meritorious Unit Award from the US Department of Defense.
Tiltle of Talk: Unlocking the Promise of Digital Health: Leveraging Innovations in Sensing, AI, IoT, and Quantum Technologies
Abstract: Digital Health promises to democratize quality healthcare and extend its reach beyond major medical centers. Yet, despite its potential, moving past narrow use cases to achieve broad impact has proven elusive. The COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing chronic disease burden, and a global mental health crisis underscore the urgent need for meaningful progress. This talk will explore how recent advances in sensing, computing, and connectivity present an opportunity. It will focus on emerging technologies such as
foundation models in artificial intelligence, internet-of-things, and quantum computing and how they can be leveraged to overcome barriers and achieve widespread, transformative, personalized healthcare. Findings from specific use cases in mental health, traumatic brain injury, dementia, and chronic pain will be discussed.
Dr. Christopher Lirakis
(Research staff member in the IBM Quantum team )
Bio: Dr. Christopher Lirakis is a research staff member in the IBM Quantum team. He is currently helping develop
solutions for large scale modular quantum systems. An example of the initial work is shown in IBM Quantum System Two, where he acted as system lead. Over the course of his career at IBM he helped guide a global hardware ecosystem focused on economic
development around quantum hardware. Additionally, he led the initial international deployments of Quantum System One during COVID. He has been a part of the IBM team since 2012.
Dr. Lirakis received his PhD in High Energy physics in1989. During his thesis work and as a post-doc he worked on the development and deployment of large scale particle detectors. After leaving the high energy physics field, Dr. Lirakis became interested in the newer field of quantum information. His initial work started on the metropolitan scale quantum key distribution with BBN Technologies. He moved on the help BBN enter the quantum computation development. While there he formed a partnership with IBM. He later made the transition from BBN to IBM and has helped the IBM team grow.
Title of Talk:
Abstract: Quantum Information started formally in 1982 when a conversation between Charlie Bennet and Richard Feynman took place. It was posited that a bit of information could be stored in a quantum mechanical system. This idea intrigued Feynman and he subsequently stated that you would need a quantum computer to model a quantum system. Since then, experimental demonstrations progressed to where we have large scale quantum systems which promise to solve problems that are intractable by conventional processors. Quantum computers will not displace but rather be a part of a larger heterogeneous computing platform that includes conventional classical computation. We at IBM call this “quantum centric super computing” The talk given will give an overview of quantum information as it pertains to quantum sensing, quantum communications and quantum computation. We will offer a deep dive on how the IBM superconducting systems work and the potential that we hope will be tapped.
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