Ms. Josephine M. Cheng

An IBM Fellow (2000) and Vice President of IBM Research, Almaden in San Jose, California, she has been at the forefront of relational database technology for over 25 years. Born in Vietnam and raised in Hong Kong, she was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles with a B.S. degree in Mathematics and Computer Science in 1975; an M.S. degree in Computer Science in 1977. She is a resident of San Jose, California, but is currently based in Beijing, China. She oversees the work of 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, she was Vice President of IBM China Development Laboratories for four years. She also 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 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. She received the Asian American Engineer of the Year award 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. Also in 2006, she was named one of the Top 10 Software Leaders in China and received the prestigious Professional Achievement Award from UCLA in 2007. She is also on the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Advisory Board of the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), as well as a member of San Jose State University?s Engineering Industry Advisory Council. She also serves on the advisory board of the UCB Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), board member of the Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium (BASIC), University of Miami Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Industrial Advisory Board member, Silicon Valley CTO Forum Advisory Board member and member of the Anita Borg Institute For Women and Technology Board. Most recently, she received the 2010 UCLA Alumnus of the Year award. She has been awarded 28 patents for her inventions.