Heiko Ludwig

Heiko Ludwig is a Principal Research Staff Member and Senior Manager with IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. Leading the AI Platforms research group, Heiko is currently working on topics related to distributed systems and AI. This includes federated machine learning and inference along, privacy and security, data acquisition and the relationship between data and model performance. The results of this work contribute to various IBM lines of business.

Throughout his career he was mostly dealing with issues of scaling systems, resilience and crossing organizational boundaries. These technically challenging topics evolve over time with the platforms we use and the applications we like to run on, from B2B applications on the early Internet to issues of mobile systems using the Cloud, to today's (federated) machine learning frameworks and applications. How to build systems and services that scale? How to monitor, manage performance effectively. How to reach over organizational boundaries, e.g., connecting processes of different providers, in a robust and secure way? Other topics include computer supported collaborative work, workflow management, rule-based systems and machine learning.

Heiko is an ACM Distinguished Engineer and published more than 100 refereed articles, conference papers, and book chapters as well as technical reports. He is an associated editor of two journals, editor-in-chief emeritus of the International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems. and served on numerous program committees of conferences and workshops in the field. He co-organized workshops and served as PC Co-Chair and General Co-Chair on a number of conferences. He serves regularly on PhD and Tenure Committees of leading universities and gives lectures in master and PhD classes on numerous occasions. He also gave a number of keynote speeches at conferences and workshops in the field. Heiko served as a project reviewer of EU IST program and national research funding programs. He represented IBM in the OGF GRAAP working group, publishing the WS-Agreement standard.

Prior to the Alamaden Research Center, Heiko held different positions at IBM in the TJ Watson Research Center, the Zurich Research Laboratory, and IBM’s South American Delivery Centers in Argentina and Brazil. He holds a Master's (Diplom) degree and a PhD in information systems (Wirtschaftsinformatik) from Otto-Friedrich University Bamberg, Germany.