Mark Wegman

Overview

Mark Wegman

Title

IBM Fellow/Chief Scientist Software Technology

Location

IBM Research - Yorktown Heights Yorktown Heights, NY USA

Bio

I've recently co-authored a book, The Heart of Innovation. In it we describe innovators as people who want to change the way people and organizations behave. Inventors want to create devices or software that can change the physical world. Inventors study many STEM topics to get good at invention. Innovators need to study people and the situations they find themselves in. We describe some of the lessons they need to learn so that they can plot a course to success.

I'm working with others on the SynAGI team to build a neuronal system that can simulate many of the key functions of the animal and human brain and the evolutionary learning that leads to some of our innate knowledge. An animal brain can be thought of as a recurrent transformer based system, simulating a cortex, a system that can learn what to remember for the long term that can perform tasks that current LLMs can not including tasks like planning, system 2 reasoning and can do deductive and inductive reasoning.

I'm known for my work on compilers being a co-creator of Static Single Assignment form, which is used by all modern optimizing compilers, my work on Universal Hash Functions, which demonstrate that the advantages of hashing can be used no matter what the input is, and work I've done on data compression which for a while was the strongest compression algorithm and has been incorporated in a number of standards.

I'm grateful to have been elected an IBM, ACM and IEEE Fellow, a Distinguished Alumni from UC Berkeley, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. I'm blessed to live in a lovely home in Westchester with my wife of 40 years, with many wonderful friends and family. I enjoy hiking, biking and climbing.

I am deeply concerned about the damage we are doing to our planet and the polarization and inequality of our society. I hope that by what we do in IBM Research will increase productivity of. our society and help relieve some of the pressures creating these problems.

Publications

Patents

Top collaborators

JK
James Kozloski

James Kozloski

Principal Research Scientist - Sr. Manager, Biomedical AI - Healthcare & Life Science Research
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John R. Smith

John R. Smith

IBM Fellow, Discovery Technology Foundations, Accelerated Discovery, IBM Research
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Hui Wu

Hui Wu

Technical Product Manager, Data and Model Factory