Jim Spohrer

Director, Almaden Services Research, IBM Almaden Research Center

Jim Spohrer is the Director of Services Research at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA, focused on innovations for IBM Global Services (IGS), a people-intensive, information-intensive business of over 170,000 professionals worldwide that accounts for half of IBM's yearly revenues. Human sciences, On-Demand Innovation Services (ODIS), deep industry knowledge of future trends, and operations technology are areas of active exploration.

From 2000-2003, at IBM, he was CTO of IBM's Venture Capital Relations Group, where he identified technology trends and worked to establish win-win relationships between IBM and VC-backed portfolio companies. Previously, Dr. Spohrer directed the IBM Almaden Research Center's (ARC) Computer Science Foundation Department, and before that was senior manager and co-strategist for IBM's User Experience / Human Computer Interaction Research effort.

From 1989-1998, at Apple, he was a DEST (Distinguished Engineer, Scientist, and Technologist) and program manager of learning technology projects in Apple's Advanced Technology Group (ATG). He lead the effort to create Apple's first on-line learning community and vision for anytime, anywhere e-learning. From 1978-1982, he developed speech recognition algorithms and products at Verbex, an Exxon Enterprises company.

Spohrer received a B.S. in physics from MIT in 1978 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University in 1988. In 1989, Jim lived in Rome, Italy where he was a visiting scholar at the University of Rome La Sapienza, and lecturer at major universities across Europe. Jim has published broadly in the areas of speech recognition, empirical studies of programmers, artificial intelligence, authoring tools, online learning communities, open source software, intelligent tutoring systems and student modeling, new paradigms in using computers, implications of rapid technical change, as well as the coevolution of social, business, and technical systems. Jim has also helped to establish two education research non-profit web sites: The Educational Object Economy and WorldBoard: Associating Information with Places. Jim is a frequent advisor to the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, and other groups http://www.merlot.org & http://www.newmediacenters.org on the implications of rapid technological change to the future of education.

Source: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/bio.spohrer.html

See details on Dr. Spohrer's invited talk at Ontolog on "Services Sciences, Management, Engineering (SSME): A next frontier in education, innovation, and economic growth and the role of knowledge representation techniques in services innovation" on our ConferenceCall_2005_12_08 session page.