Dario Gil: AI specialist and Director of IBM Research
Leading the technology roadmap and the technical community of IBM, Dr Dario Gil is responsible for directing innovation strategies in areas including hybrid clouds, AI, semiconductors, quantum computing, and exploratory science.
Under his leadership, IBM became the first company in the world to build programmable quantum computers and make them universally available through the cloud. He is also responsible for IBM Research, one of the world’s largest and most influential corporate research labs, with over 3,000 researchers.
He is the 12th Director of IBM Research in its 76-year history. Gil is also responsible for IBM's intellectual property strategy and business.
Gil has held a number of positions at IBM in the 19 years he has been with the company including Vice President of AI and Quantum, Director of Symbiotic Cognitive Systems and Director of Industry Research Laboratories.
Commenting on IBM’s development of quantum technology, Gil said in an interview: “In May 2016, we were the first company in the world that built a small quantum computer – a five-qubit machine at the time – and we made it universally available through the cloud. Since then, we have built over 30 quantum computers and at this very moment we have over 20 quantum computers deployed on the IBM cloud, and on any given day 3.5 billion quantum circuits are run on our actual quantum hardware. We run more quantum computers than the rest of the world combined.”
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Dario Gil’s work with IBM and other technology initiatives
Gil is an advocate of collaborative research models and co-chairs the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, which advances fundamental AI research to the broad benefit of industry and society.
He also co-chairs the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium, which provides access to the world’s most powerful high-performance computing resources in support of COVID-19 research.
Additionally, Gil is a member of the National Science Board (NSB), the governing body of the National Science Foundation (NSF), serves on the President’s Research Council of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and the MIT School of Engineering Dean's Advisory Council.
The Director of IBM Research is also on the board of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), New York Academy of Sciences, New York Hall of Science, and Research!America.
Gil: preparing for the next global crisis
As Director of IBM Research, Gil has posted a number of blogs sharing his insight into different technologies and industries including healthcare, science, quantum computing and AI.
In his blog, ‘COVID-19 a year later: What have we learned?’, Gil shares how he believes the best way to start planning for further global crises should they arise, he suggests: “We need to create the Science Readiness Reserves (SRR), a partnership on a truly global and multi-disciplinary scale, with industry, academia, and government scientists working side by side. Researchers from different fields would assess the risks of a specific disaster in advance and develop an action plan to deal with it when it strikes.”
From his blog post, it is clear that Gil wants to prepare for future crises to ensure that everyday moments aren’t halted or disrupted like they were during the coronavirus pandemic, he concluded: “We can outsmart the next crisis. But we have to act now to make it happen. We must make sure that next time we’re prepared.”