Tim Kaldewey

Performance Architect, IBM Watson Group

About Me

My interests revolve around performance and efficiency of AI workloads, from a parallel algorithms and architecture perspective. While a lot of my work these days happens behind the scenes of Watson, some achivements have made it into the public realm. For example, I led the technical team for a CTO initiative to deliver a 40x efficiency improvement for Watson's question answering capability. I also led the efforts to leverage hardware acceleration for Watson offerings, which we first presented at at Supercomputing 2015 .

In 2014 I joined the IBM Watson team as their performance architect, leading a team of engineers focused on optimizing efficiency of Watson offerings across the hardware/software stack. I started my IBM career in 2010 when I joined the Database Technologies Group at IBM Almaden Research. During that time I had the opportunity to "play" with several emerging parallel architectures and evaluate their use for data-intensive applications. The outcomes were a thorough understanding of parallel architectures and their application to large scale software systems. Since 2011 I am also an Adjunct Professor in the Computer and Information Science department at the University of Pennsylvania where I teach lectures on GPU and systems programming. Before my time at IBM I was a member of Oracle's Special Projects Team and prior to getting my PhD I worked at SAP, Lufthansa, and Software AG.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California Santa Cruz. My advisor was Prof. Scott Brandt and my thesis is on "Predictable High-Performance Data Management - Leveraging System Resource Characteristics to Improve Performance and Predictability". I did my undergraduate work in Business Informatics (Wirtschaftsinformatik) at Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany. I received my Master's degree in Network Engineering from Eurecom, a research institute funded by Telecom Paris in France and EPFL in Switzerland.

Selected Publications

All Publications