Keynote Speaker

Dr.Pingali
IBM Distinguished Engineer and Vice President of the Global Technology Services Labs (GTS Labs) at IBM

Dr. Gopal Pingali is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Vice President of the Global Technology Services Labs (GTS Labs) at IBM. In this worldwide leadership role he is responsible for driving cognitive hybrid cloud solutions for clients and the development of automation, analytics, and cognitive delivery to realize IT as a Service. His team of distinguished engineers, architects, developers, and designers spans the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific. The GTS Labs has been transforming several thousand enterprises around the globe with hybrid cloud and intelligent automation capabilities. Gopal is currently playing this role from Bangalore, India while continuing to have a base in New York.
Gopal established the IBM Cloud Center of Excellence in 2009 and grew this into a world leading organization to architect and implement hybrid cloud solutions for clients. In his current role, Gopal continues to lead the Cloud CoE while taking on expanded responsibility for leading software development work across Global Technology Services.
Prior to this role, he was in the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York for a decade where he played various roles including Chief Architect of a Big Bet on Mobile Web, leader of Experience Management and its application to Services, and leader of Smart Interactive Spaces. He also led a joint Research Collaboratory between IBM Research and the Indian School of Business at Hyderabad, India. Gopal obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1993 in Image Modeling and Restoration for Scanning Probe Microscopy. He worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey till 2001 where he pioneered real time video based tracking systems that have now become a standard in sports broadcasts as well as in a variety of customer activity analysis and surveillance systems.
Gopal is an IBM Master Inventor and Member of the IBM Academy Leadership Team. Gopal has published over 65 papers in peer reviewed international conferences and journals, has 50 patents filed or issued, and has been an invited keynote speaker or panelist at forty venues including IEEE Cloud Computing Conferences and workshops, IEEE and ACM Multimedia conferences, IETE National Conferences in India, US Government workshops, and at top Universities such as MIT, Georgia Tech, University of California, Brown University, Indian Institute of Science, and National University of Singapore. Gopal has been chair of various international conferences including being the founding Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing in Emerging Markets and running this annual conference since 2012.
Gopal won the IEEE Mark Weiser Best Paper Award in Pervasive Computing in 2003, the bi-annual Best Industrial Research Paper Award at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition in 2000, the IEEE Best System Paper Award at the International Workshop on Multimodal Sentient Computing in 2007. He won outstanding technical achievement awards at IBM over the years and the Mark Ernst Memorial Award for Outstanding Mentoring at IBM in 2013.