Rania Khalaf

Rania is the Chief AI Officer at WSO2 and is based in the US. Prior to joining WSO2, she was the CIO and Chief Data Officer at Inari, a late-stage startup in ag-biotech using CRISPR and AI to create nature positive crops. She helped fundraise over USD220M and built up a comprehensive digital and AI tech function, building AI-driven gene discovery capabilities and maximizing efficiency and efficacy of Inari’s product delivery pipelines.

Before that, she was the Director of AI Engineering and a Distinguished Scientist at IBM Research, where she drove an exceptionally strong scientific research agenda with significant market impact. She balanced long-term research with maturation and delivery of innovation into IBM’s commercial products like the Watson suite and open source initiatives like Istio and OpenWhisk.

Rania’s understanding of customer and market needs is grounded in her early career assignments as TA to the IBM Cloud CTO and Cloud Architect in IBM’s consulting division. She was a co-creator of foundational Web Services technology and standards. She is a frequent invited speaker and guest lecturer on Cloud and AI, including at MIT, Harvard, Yale, and UC Berkeley.

She has been recognized with Outstanding Technical Accomplishment awards and selected for the impact of her work in AI for food and sustainability in The New Creator campaign. Rania serves on the boards of the Hariri Institute at Boston University, the iPark Incubator at the American University of Beirut, and as a member of working groups of the Massachusetts AI Task Force.

She has a PhD from the University of Stuttgart and a bachelor and master’s from MIT.