Gargi Dasgupta's technical abilities stood out even as a child. She remembers how at school she was attracted towards analytical problems such as solving the Rubik cube and magic square. "My father and I would spend weekends addressing the harder problems that my sisters, five and seven years older, would be solving. I recognised that I always had the knack of questioning and problem solving. STEM career was natural for me," she says.
The chosen career path took her places, making her the first woman to head IBM Research India. As Chief Technology Officer and Director of IBM Research India, Gargi is in charge of setting and executing the technical agenda of IBM Research and developing the company's overall technical vision and strategy by working closely with all business units in India and South Asia to drive local innovations. She has been driving the company's leadership in artificial intelligence (AI) and helping clients move to Cloud. She has personally contributed nearly 10 years of research in AI Operations, including creation of Watson AIOps, which uses AI to automate how enterprises detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies. Gargi has 17 IBM patents to her credit and 36 patent filings. She has authored 50-plus papers, 12 in the last fiscal, and has to her credit 1,600-plus citations.
Gargi says her drive to excel comes from not being afraid to put her career first and going after what she wants.
As a leader, she says, "open criticism is the only way high-performing teams can go forward."