Dr. Jinjun Xiong is currently Empire Innovation Professor with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University at Buffalo (UB). Prior to that, he was a Senior Researcher and Program Director for AI and Hybrid Clouds Systems at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He co-founded and co-directed the IBM-Illinois Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research (C3SR) from 2016-2021, the success of which led to the $200M 10-year investment to establish the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute in 2021. His research interests are on across-stack AI systems research, which include AI applications, algorithms, tooling, and computer architectures.