Athena Award, Executive Leadership, Rama K. Akkiraju

Athena Award Winner Rama K Akkiraju, IBM Fellow @rama_akkiraju
Rama Akkiraju is an IBM Fellow, Master Inventor and IBM Academy Member, and a Director, in IBM’s Watson Division where she leads the AI operations team with a mission to scale AI for Enterprises. Rama also heads the AI mission of enabling natural, personalized and compassionate conversations between computers and humans. Rama has been named by Forbes as one of the ‘Top 20 Women in AI Research’in May 2017, has been featured in ‘A-Team in AI’by Fortune magazine in July 2018 and named ‘Top 10 pioneering women in AI and Machine Learning’ by Enterprise Management 360. In her career, Rama has worked on agent-based decision support systems, electronic market places, and semantic Web services, for which she led a World-Wide-Web (W3C) standard. Rama has co-authored 4 book chapters and over 100 technical papers. Rama has 18 issued patents and 25+ pending. She is the recipient of 3 best paper awards in AI and Operations Research. Rama holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and has received a gold medal from New York University for her MBA for highest academic excellence. Rama served as the President for ISSIP, a Service Science professional society for 2018 and continues to actively drive AI projects through this professional society. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramaakkiraju/

The WITI@UC Athena Awards recognize those who embody, encourage, and promote the inclusion of women in technology. Awardees are leaders who inspire others to pursue and persist in technical careers by way of their outstanding contributions, and service and mentorship to foster inclusion in science and technical fields. The Athena Award for Executive Leadership recognizes individuals (all genders) who demonstrate exceptional leadership by supporting the professional development and promotion of women in technology within their companies, organizations, or the field at large.

The Women in Tech Symposium: Reimagining Cybersecurity for All was held March 6, 2020 at UC Berkeley. The Symposium is sponsored by Lam Research and Microsoft and other leaders in cybersecurity. #cybersecurity4all #womenintech @WITIatUC @citrisnews @Cal_Engineer

The Women in Tech Symposium is an annual professional and academic conference of the Women in Technology Initiative at the University of California (WITI@UC), a program jointly launched in 2017 by CITRIS and the Banatao Institute and the UC Berkeley College of Engineering to advocate for women in the tech industry and academia to be proportionately represented and equitably compensated throughout the professional ranks. The event promotes women’s leadership and expands opportunities in the field through heightened awareness and networking. The daylong event of keynotes and panels includes the WITI@UC Athena Awards presentation, recognizing those who have championed the advancement of women in technology.