Paul Castro

Paul Castro, Ph.D. is a Senior Research Manager at the IBM Watson Research Center. He currently works on Hybrid Cloud for Generative AI. He co-leads the research theme on Platform Foundations for AI and has interest in the application of serverless computing to model serving, agentic programming models and runtimes, cloud platforms, and developer tooling for cloud-native development.

He has been active in research on mobile and pervasive computing, cloud infrastructure, wireless location systems, location databases, stream processing, and enterprise web applications and has been awarded several patents in these areas. He has worked on cloud services for supporting mobile applications running on various smart phone platforms. He has earned several IBM Research Accomplishment Awards in the areas of mobile computing and cloud native software systems. He worked extensively on enterprise solutions for the Apple+IBM partnership. He was an early contributor to Apache OpenWhisk.

Dr. Castro is the past Chair of the Mobile Computing Professional Interest Community at IBM Research, and has been active in the mobile computing research community. Paul has published in selective mobile computing related conferences such as Mobicom, Mobisys, Ubicomp, HotMobile, ICDCS, and MDM and served on 3 PhD committees. He has served on IEEE PerCom as the Vice Program Co-Chair in 2021, the Industrial Track Co-Char in 2010 and 2023, workshops co-chair 2017, and the technical program committee on 2008, 2015-2025, MobiDE 2009-2010, Mobiqutious 2010, CCEM 2020, and the Industry Track for MDM 2010, 2015. He was also the Publicity Chair and Finance Chair for HotMobile 2006 and 2007, respectively. He was a general co-chair for UIC 2018. He also holds 22 patents. He received the IBM Research People Manager Exemplar Award in 2021, 2023 and 2024, honoring managers who display exceptional and inspirational leadership.

Paul is a former officer in the United States Air Force where he worked at the Air Force Research Lab at Edwards Air Force Base.  After leaving the military, Paul received his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation investigated probabilistic sensor models, wireless location systems, and distributed data management. He was also a member of the Cooperative Robotics Laboratory looking at biologically-inspired robot programming.