Ram D. Sriram (Fed)

Ram Sriram is the Chief of the Software & Systems Division in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Information Technology Laboratory (ITL). Before joining the Software and Systems Division, Sriram was the leader of the Design and Process group in the Manufacturing Systems Integration Division, Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory, where he conducted research on standards for interoperability of computer-aided design systems. He was also the manager of the Sustainable Manufacturing Program. Prior to joining NIST, he was on the engineering faculty (1986-1994) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was instrumental in setting up the Intelligent Engineering Systems Laboratory. At MIT, Sriram initiated the MIT-DICE project, which was one of the pioneering projects in collaborative engineering and documented in the book entitled Distributed and Integrative Collaborative Engineering Design, Sarven Publishers, 2002.

Sriram has extensive experience in developing knowledge-based expert systems, natural language interfaces, machine learning, object-oriented software development, life-cycle product and process models, geometrical modelers, object-oriented databases for industrial applications, health care informatics, bioinformatics, and bioimaging. He has consulted for several leading corporations all over the world. His client list (during his tenure at MIT) included Boeing, GE, NTT Data (Japan), NASA, Xerox Corporation, United Technologies, IIC (Spain).

Sriram has co-authored or authored nearly 300 publications, including several books on Artificial Intelligence. He has published in a wide range of journals in engineering, computer science, and health care fields. The papers he and his group wrote have won many recognitions and awards, including many best paper awards and most cited paper awards. Sriram received several awards including: an NSF's Presidential Young Investigator Award (1989); ASME Design Automation Award (2011); ASME CIE Distinguished Service Award (2014); the Washington Academy of Sciences' Distinguished Career in Engineering Sciences Award (2015);  ASME CIE Lifetime Achievement Award (2016); CMU CEE Lt. Col. Christopher Raible Distinguished Public Service Award (2018); IIT Madras Distinguished Alumni Award (2021); and IEEE Reliability Society Lifetime Achievement Award (2023).

Sriram was a founding co-editor of the International Journal for AI in Engineering (1986), which later became Advanced Engineering Informatics. He also served on the Executive Committee of the ASME's Computers in Engineering Division for six years, including as its chair.  Sriram's other professional activities include the following: an associate editor of ACM Computing Surveys and IEEE Transactions on Computers;  advisory board member of the ASME’s Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering and ASTM’s Sustainable Manufacturing Systems;  co-chair of NITRD's Software Productivity, Sustainability, and Quality (SPSQ) group;  President-Elect of the Washington Academy of Sciences;  and federal representative to ONC's Health IT Advisory Committee.  He served as the chair of the 2021 IEEE Computer Society Fellow Evaluating Committee and on the 2023 Steering Committee, Information, Computing and Communication Section, AAAS.  

Sriram has been elected a fellow of the following societies: American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Asia Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE, Life), Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), Solid Modeling Association (SMA), and the Washington Academy of Sciences (WAS). He is a Senior Member (life) of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence  (AAAI) and was inducted into IEEE HKN as a professional member of the Eta Chapter.  In 2023, Sriram was elected as an honorary member of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) – the highest honor IISE grants to an individual of acknowledged professional eminence who is not a member of IISE.