Guruduth Banavar leads a worldwide team of scientists responsible for creating one of the most famous cognitive systems in the world known as Watson. Guru and his team are working on a string of cognitive systems which are designed to collect and synthesize great amounts of data with the purpose of finding the most optimal solutions for various needs. The systems headed by Guru within the Thomas J. Watson Research Center of the world-renowned IBM, are designed to create new and better partnerships between people and machines.

In the capacity of Chief Technical Officer of the department of Global Public Sectors, Guru lead the Smart Cities Initiative whose purpose was to bring improvement to infrastructural systems of big cities with the purpose of increasing sustainability, saving resources and dealing effectively with emergencies. One of the high examples of Guru’s work can be found in the City Center Operations office of Rio de Janeiro, which deals with everyday operations of planning and monitoring some of the most important communication and infrastructure processes and connectedness between various agencies.

Under the leadership of Mr. Guru Banavar, Rio’s City Center Operations office learned the handles in coordinating the work of 30 of the city’s agencies. The center’s sophisticated technology monitors underground train stations, main crossings, weather measurement stations, the power grid and lots more. All this goes towards the advantages of increased sustainability of a dynamic, vertical and multimillion city such as Rio. Although the cost of IBM’s project was $14 million, it gives the city a vantage point from where to measure and monitor crucial processes.