Rania Khalaf is the Director of AI Platforms and Runtimes at IBM Research where she leads teams pushing the envelope in AI platforms to make creating AI models and applications easy, fast, and safe for data scientists and developers. Her multi-disciplinary teams tackle key problems at the intersection of core AI, distributed systems, human computer interaction and cloud computing. Prior to this role, Rania was Director of Cloud Platform, Programming Models and Runtimes. Rania serves on the Advisory Board of the Hariri Institute for Computing at Boston University. She has received several Outstanding Technical Innovation awards for major impact to the field of computer science and was a finalist for the 2019 MassTLC CTO of the Year award.