Lisa Amini is a Distinguished Engineer and the founding Director of IBM Research Ireland. She is also the first woman Lab Director for an IBM Research Global (i.e., non-US) Lab.

IBM Research Ireland is located on the IBM Technology Campus in Dublin, Ireland. The mission of the Dublin Research Lab is Smarter Cities, Exascale Computing, Hybrid Systems, and Risk Analytics. Researchers at the Smarter Cities Technology Centre focus on advancing science and technology for intelligent urban and environmental systems, with a current focus on creating analytics, optimizations, and systems for sustainable energy, constrained resources (e.g., urban water management), transportation, and the underlying city fabric that assimilates and shares data and models for these domains. The Exascale Computing team focuses on workload optimized systems (targeting big data), exascale simulation, cloud computing, large scale system software, and networking. The Hybrid Systems team is creating next generation software stacks for high performance hybrid systems and appliances, and the Risk Analytics team creates risk models, efficient algorithms, and risk communications interfaces to enable the use of uncertain data in decision support systems.

Previously, Lisa was Senior Manager of the Exploratory Stream Processing Research Group at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, where she worked for 14 years. She was the founding Chief Architect for IBM's InfoSphere Streams product. The Streams product is the result of a Research technology, System S, for which Lisa was also architectural lead from inception. Streams is a software platform for continuous, high throughput, and low latency mining of intelligence from massive amounts of sensor and other machine generated data. She also led her team in formative Smarter Planet/Cities pilots analyzing real-time data for cyber security, manufacturing, telecom, market data analysis, radio astronomy, environmental (water) monitoring, and transportation.

Lisa has served on program committees, hosted panels, and presented keynotes and papers in numerous IEEE, ACM and other conferences and workshops. She has worked at IBM the areas of stream processing systems and algorithms, distributed and high performance systems, content distribution, multimedia, and networking for over 21 years. She received her PhD degree in Computer Science from Columbia University.