From 2020-2021 Sam Lightstone was IBM Chief Technology Officer for AI. From 2017-2020 Sam was the IBM Chief Technology Officer for Data focusing on IBM’s database and big data portfolio. He is cofounder of the IEEE Workgroup on Self-Managing Database Systems. Sam has more than 65 patents issued and pending and has authored 4 books and over 30 papers. Sam’s books have been translated into Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. In his spare time, he is an avid guitar player and fencer. His Twitter handle is “samlightstone”.