Dr. Daniel M. Dias is a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1976. Later, he obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Rice University, Houston, Texas, in 1978 and 1981, respectively.

For more than three decades, Dr. Dias has led pioneering research in scalable commercial computing systems, and he has been director of research labs and teams on three continents. He was previously director of the IBM India Research Lab (IRL), with sites in Delhi and Bangalore. During his tenure, IRL received National Awards for ‘empowerment of persons with disabilities, leveraging some of the earliest Hindi speech recognition technology built by the lab. IRL also played world-wide research leadership role in Service Science and mobile computing, and received several best paper and other awards.

Most recently, Dr. Dias was the inaugural lab director of IBM Research — Brazil (BRL), with responsibility for leading and creating IBM’’s first research lab in the southern hemisphere, with sites in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. One of the lab’s projects is a smarter city initiative, where BRL played a key role in the Rio de Janeiro Center of Operations, particularly in providing fine grained weather and flood modelling for the city.

Dr. Dias is currently director of Cloud Innovation Technologies, responsible for world-wide research related to IBM’s cloud service offerings, including public, private and hybrid clouds, and solutions. He previously led the internet infrastructure and computing utilities department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he and his team built one of the first scalable and highly valuable Web servers, with key patents and highly cited papers, forming the basis for IBM offerings and products in this area.

Dr. Dias is co-inventor on more than 45 issued US patents, and co-author of more than 90 publications. He has received several awards for his contributions to research, including IBM Invention Achievement, Outstanding Innovation and Outstanding Technical Achievement awards, and best paper awards. He is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, and a Fellow of the IEEE.