Josephine M. Cheng, Vice President of IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, oversees more than 400 scientists and engineers doing exploratory and applied research in various hardware, software and service areas, including nanotechnology, materials science, storage systems, data management, web technologies, workplace practices and user interfaces.

Prior to her current role, Cheng was Vice President for IBM China Development Laboratories from 2004-June 2008. She led the China Software Development Laboratory (CSDL) located in three major cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei, with a combined total of more than 3,000 employees.

She has been at the forefront of relational database technology for over 20 years. She was also principally responsible for developing IBM's database technology for the web, allowing people to access huge amounts of data via the internet that was previously accessible only through proprietary systems. Her teams have produced such database technologies and products as: DB2 World-Wide Web and its follow-on, Net.Data, providing web access to corporate databases; XML Extender for DB2, permitting popular XML-formatted data to be integrated into DB2; and DB2 Everyplace, a tiny, totally self-managing database system that extends the power of DB2 to convenient pervasive computing devices such as handheld computers and cellular phones.

Cheng received Asian American Engineer of the Year in 2003. She was inducted into the United States National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2006 for sustained leadership and contributions to relational database technology and its pervasive applications to a wide range of digital operational systems. She received 2006 Top 10 Software Leaders in China, and Professional Achievement Award from UCLA in 2007. Currently, she is a guest professor at Tsinghua University and Shanghai University; advisory board committee to the School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University and chaired the advisory board committee of the Department of Computing of Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is also on the advisory board of the Computer Science Engineering of the University of California Berkeley and Engineering Council of the San Jose State University . Cheng also serves on the advisory board of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium (BASIC).

She has been awarded 28 patents for her inventions.

Cheng was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles (B.S., 1975, Mathematics and Computer Science; M.S., 1977, Computer Science). She is a resident of San Jose, California.

Session Soponsored By