Guruduth Banavar
During the football World Cup earlier this year, Brazil put in place an emergency response solution in Rio de Janeiro to save lives. The solution was implemented by IBM as part of its Smart Cities division. And the man at IBM tasked with making more cities smarter is Guruduth Banavar, the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Global Public Sector. Banavar has a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Utah. He started his career as a researcher at IBM’s T J Watson Research Centre in New York and worked on technologies like pervasive computing and programming models. Later he worked as the Director of IBM Research in India and is credited with making it a prominent research lab in fields like mobile computing. As the CTO of IBM India/ South Asia, he created a Bangalore branch of IBM Research. In 2009, he got the National Innovation Award from the President of India. He has 25 patents to his name and has published more than 40 research papers.