Features

IBM Names Five Fellows, Company's Highest Technical Honor

NAPLES, Fla. -- June 5, 2002 -- IBM today bestowed its most prestigious technical honor on five of its top scientists, researchers and developers, naming them IBM Fellows in recognition of their continued innovation and outstanding contributions to the information technology industry. Reflecting the changing nature of the IT business, this year's honorees include the first-ever Fellow from IBM Global Services, in addition to leaders from the company's traditional hardware and software operations.

With these new appointments, there are now 55 active IBM Fellows representing the more than 170,000 members of IBM's worldwide technical community.

Among the five new Fellows is

Dr. Rakesh R. Agrawal (IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, Calif.) is credited with creating the fast-growing, commercially important research field of data mining, which refers to the discovery of useful knowledge hidden in massive amounts of data. His definition of the operations that a data mining system must support and his invention of fast algorithms for pattern discovery provided the impetus and core for the award-winning and strategic IBM Intelligent Miner product. He was the technical leader of the combined Software Group/Research team that brought Intelligent Miner to market in record time in 1996 and helped build a services and consultancy business around it. Since then, Dr. Agrawal has continued to invent more uses for data mining, ranging from searching and integrating catalogs in e-commerce to helping cope with information overload by managing e-mail in Lotus Notes.