The Indian-American inventor Rajiv Joshi, an IBM scientist, has won the 2020 Inventor of the Year Award, awarded by The New York Intellectual Property Law Association (NYIPLA). 

Dr Joshi, who is also IBM’s Master Inventor since 1997, has been attributed for several innovations that helped advance the electronic industry as well as improve artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. His contribution to research is impressive too. According to the IBM blog where they announced this news, Rajiv has “more than 250 US and more than 350 international patents…more than 200 publications, including conferences and journals. Dr Joshi is also the key technical lead at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center, where his core focus is advancing technology on integrated circuits and enhancing memory chips. 

His innovations are not limited to one field; they spread across varied fields - machine learning techniques for predicting failure analysis, creating high performing integrated circuits that can perform on low power, memory and its usage in hardware accelerators, amongst other innovations. These innovations have impacted the fields of communication, health sciences and medicine. Several of these innovations are used in technology that we use in our everyday lives - laptops, supercomputers, handheld devices and even supercomputers. 

Dr Joshi, an IIT Mumbai alumnus, also received his MS degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), later receiving his PhD in mechanical/electrical engineering from Columbia University, New York. In his acceptance speech. In his acceptance speech, Dr Joshi emphasised on the future of artificial intelligence and quantum computing, as not only buzzwords but have a widespread application that only grows with leaps and bounds.