A Canadian security expert will receive IBM’s most prestigious technology distinction as one of the 11 scientists to be named to this year’s IBM Fellow program.
Sandy Bird, who is head of enterprise IT security of the IBM Software Group in Fredericton, New Brunswick, is among this year’s IBM experts whose combined efforts produced 283 patents for the company. The program celebrates its 51st year this year. Only 257 IBM personnel have earned the title of IBM Fellow throughout the years. Throughout its existence, the program generated more 7,700 patents for IBM, received five Nobel prizes as well as thousands of government and professional citations.
Bird studied electrical engineering at the University of New Brunswick and specializes in database design and development for Web applications.
Prior to his current role at IBM, Bird co-founded Q1 Labs, a security intelligence firm specializing in advanced analytics of massive amounts of data and network flows. The company was acquired by IBM in 2001 and became a new division of Big Blue. Bird was responsible for the development of the QRadar, a network anomaly detection tool. He also led the effort to transform QRadar into IBM’s security intelligence platform.
QRadar conducts an analysis of network activity in real-time, detecting and reporting activity that falls outside a normal baseline behaviour which can be determined by using algorithms that monitor IT systems.
IBM said Bird will soon server the company’s technology ambassador to Singapore.
The 2014 IBM Fellows have influenced a broad array of technologies in the following areas:
• Cognitive computing – machine learning that mimics the way the human brain works
• Security platforms – intelligent optimization for addressing security exposures
• Computational science – mathematical algorithms to solve large, complex problems
• Cloud computing – storing, managing and processing data on Internet hosted servers
• Business database and analytics – intelligent database for querying business metrics
• High performance, enterprise storage – storage for large scale, technology settings