IIT-Madras graduate bags IBM's highest honour

Chennai, April 22: The prestigious IBM Global Fellow title, the biggest honour bestowed by the IBM has been conferred on to Chitra Dorai, a senior researcher at IBM and an alumnus of IIT Madras.

Chitra Dorai, is the first Indian woman to be conferred with the prestigious honour, holds her graduation in electrical engineering from IIT Madras in the year 1987.

Chitra Dorai, a global leader for research and innovation in financial services has her stint in the IBM for 18 years.

Her achievements includes innovations in machine learning, multimedia content analysis, unstructured data mining and computer vision. Her recent works focused on transforming mortgage services in the banking industry.

Dorai's goal is to enable people to fulfill their dreams of home ownership by reducing the potential for mortgage-driven market crisis.

Of 320 students at IIT-M, Dorai was one of the nine women in the undergraduate engineering class.

"My parents and teachers', independent thinking nurtured my love for Maths and Science. I opted to pursue engineering instead of medicine, which was considered more prestigious and also preferred for women among Indian families back then," she said.