Howard Ho is a Research Staff Member at IBM Almaden Research Center and a development manager of IBM Watson Organization. He has been research manager of Search and Analytics Group including SystemT text analytics and Gumshoe enterprise search projects, and research manager of Intelligent Information Integration (a.k.a. Clio) Group for over 10 years. His current research interests big data analytics backend (including NLP, Data Integration, and Machine Learning) to support cognitive APIs. Past research has included schema mapping, XML, data mining, on-line analytical processing (OLAP), communication issues for interconnection networks, algorithms for collective communications, graph embedding, fault tolerance, and parallel algorithms and architectures. He is a recognized expert on parallel systems having led the Foundations of Massively Parallel Computing group, served on Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard committee, served as the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Interconnection Networks and on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, served as the program co-chairs for the ISPAN-2009 and as the vice-chair for 2 parallel processing conferences, and co-edited Large-Scale Parallel Data Mining. He has served as a program co-chair of 2015 IEEE Big Data Conference held in late October at Bay Area. Dr. Ho has received multiple formal awards from IBM and has published over 20 patents, over 30 journal papers, and over 60 conference papers in these areas. He received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University, Taiwan in 1979 and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Yale University in 1990.