Kamal Bhattacharya

KamalBhattacharyaDr. Kamal Bhattacharya is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the inaugural director of the IBM Research – Africa lab, head-quartered in Nairobi, Kenya. The IBM Research – Africa lab has been established in August 2012. Researchers at the lab address key challenges of the African continent through commercially viable innovation that impact people’s lives. The lab is focused on technologies around smarter cities, next generation public services, human capability development and financial inclusion.

Since joining IBM in 1999 Kamal has been working on innovations in the services industry, the largest segment of the IT industry. He has held various technical and management leadership position with a focus on business transformation and IBM’s global outsourcing business. With the appointment as Director of IBM Research – Africa, he will now have worked for IBM in Europe, the US, Asia and Africa. In his previous role Kamal was the Senior Manager at IBM Research- India, Bangalore working on Cloud Computing, especially application migration to the Cloud, IT services delivery in the context of IT outsourcing and social computing in the enterprise.

Prior to joining IBM Research – India, Kamal lead a team at IBM Watson Research, NY, US, exploring new ideas in the area of IT Optimization with a focus on data center consolidation and application migration. He started his career at IBM Research working on model-driven business transformation. Dr. Bhattacharya has received three IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award and several IBM Research Division awards for his work. Furthermore, he has received multiple best paper awards at international conferences for his contributions in the area of business process management, IT service management and social computing. Kamal is an elected member of the IBM Academy of Technology. Kamal started his career at IBM as an IT architect at IBM Global Services in Germany. He graduated with a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Goettingen University, Germany, in 1999.