Marie Wallace

Marie Wallace is an IBM Distinguished Engineer who has spent more than two decades building AI tech which today underpins such solutions as IBM Watson. Her work on AI has fueled her passion for the ethics of data science and led her to work on technology to empower individuals with their own data to address a variety of real-world use cases. In 2020, Marie applied her work to the Covid-19 pandemic where she built IBM Digital Health Pass, a decentralized identity solution that allowed individuals manage their own Covid status and which was successfully deployed in New York State, as the Excelsior Pass, to manage re-opening of the economy for tens of millions of New Yorkers.

Since 2018 Marie has worked on blockchain innovation, leading design and implementation of blockchain solutions to solve a variety of healthcare use cases; from bundled payments to consent management to provider credentialing. She was chief architect of IBM Digital Health Pass, a solution that fundamentally changed how health data was exchanged by allowing individuals to hold their own data and selectively share with third parties in a way that could be trusted and was highly scalable, verifiable in real-time, peer-to-peer, and fully decentralized.

Between 2010 and 2018, Marie worked across multiple IBM divisions as an analytics strategist, helping product teams develop their analytics roadmaps. She contributed capabilities ranging from retention analysis for the Smarter Workforce portfolio to recommendation systems for the Collaboration division. Marie also built the IBM Personal Social Dashboard for the IBM CIO Office; a solution that combined algorithms for measuring expertise and influence, with techniques for modelling knowledge flow, to provide sophisticated social network analysis that was used by 40,000+ IBMers globally.

Prior to 2010, Marie was one of the founders of IBM LanguageWare, IBM’s next generation natural language processing technology, which was adopted by dozens of products across IBM, including IBM Watson.

Marie has proven herself to be a leader that teams trust and follow, and she is fearless in the steps she will take to see her vision realized. Marie also demonstrates an honesty, openness, and authenticity which makes her a trusted advisor and someone who is increasingly asked to guide clients as they try to unravel the complexities of innovating within their business.