Rama Akkiraju is a senior technical staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in New York (physically residing in Almaden, California). Since joining IBM Research in 1995, she has worked on agent-based decision support systems, electronic market places, business transformation analytics, business  process integration technologies including semantic Web services. She is one of the drivers of W3C standard on SAWSDL (Semantic Annotations for Web Services Description Language) and is the editor of the SAWSDL User guide. She is interested in applying Artificial Intelligence techniques to solving business process integration problems. Rama currently works on developing and applying model-driven architecture, and semantic techniques to aid services consultants in developing Information Technology (IT) solutions efficiently. Rama has co-authored 4 book chapters, and over 35 technical journal, conference and workshop papers. Rama is the recipient of an INFORMS award and a best paper award for her work on agent-based decision support system for paper mill scheduling in 1998 and 1999 respectively. Rama holds a masters degree in computer science and an MBA from New York University, Stern School of Business. Rama graduated at the top of the MBA class in 2004 and received a gold medal of honor from the university.