[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

IBM has elevated seven employees to IBM Fellow — its most prestigious technical honor — to acknowledge their important contributions and industry-leading innovations in developing some of the world’s most important technologies. IBM Fellows are given additional responsibilities in their areas of specialization. Only 238 individuals have earned this designation in IBM’s history, and, including the newly named Fellows, 77 are active employees. This year’s group of Fellows has 131 years of combined IBM experience and has collectively been issued 273 patents.

The seven employees who have earned the coveted distinction of IBM Fellow this year are:

• Luba Cherbakov (IBM Enterprise Transformation – Bethesda, Md.) The areas where she has made significant contributions include Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture, Rivers-for-Tomorrow, Situational Applications Environment, The Genographic Project and IBM Virtual Spaces.

• Paul Coteus (IBM Research – Yorktown Heights, N.Y.) A founding member and chief engineer of the Blue Gene project, Paul was responsible for the system’s power, packaging and cooling, including the reliability of design.

• Dr. Ronald Fagin (IBM Research – San Jose, Calif.) Dr. Ronald Fagin is a founder of relational database theory, the creator of the field of finite model theory, the author of seminal work in information integration and aggregation, and a thought leader in the field of reasoning about knowledge. He has advanced both the theory and practice of modern computing systems, especially data management systems. His key inventions include extendible hashing, widely used in database query processing; differential data backup, a key feature of Tivoli software, and critical tools for database design.

• Vincent Hsu (IBM Systems and Technology Group – Tucson, Ariz.) He is the founding architect for Easy Tier storage virtualization.

• Jeffrey Jonas (IBM Software Group – Las Vegas, Nev.) Jeffrey Jonas was founder and chief scientist of Systems Research and Development, a company that IBM acquired in 2005. He is currently leading an effort to deliver real-time “sensemaking” analytics to the market.

• Ruchir Puri (IBM Research – Yorktown Heights, NY) Dr. Ruchir Puri has led the fundamental transformation of microprocessor design in IBM’s high-performance enterprise systems.

• Balaram Sinharoy (Systems and Technology Group – Poughkeepsie, N.Y. ) Among the technologies he has pioneered are Simultaneous Multi-Threading and multi-core server design. Dr. Sinharoy is currently chief architect of IBM’s next generation POWER technology, responsible for micro-architecture and differentiation features.