Ruchir Puri

Career

Puri has held technical, research and engineering leadership roles across IBM's AI and research businesses. From 2016 to 2019 Puri led IBM Watson as its CTO and Chief Architect, and Puri is now Chief Scientist of IBM Research, an IBM Fellow and Vice President of IBM Technology and Technical Community.¹

Outside IBM, Puri has been an adjunct professor at Columbia University and a visiting scientist at Stanford University, held the John von Neumann Chair at the Institute of Discrete Mathematics at the University of Bonn, and has served as an ACM Distinguished Speaker and an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer.¹

Research

Puri's recent research applies language models to software and hardware engineering. Puri was first author of the 2021 CodeNet dataset paper and co-authored IBM's Granite Code models (2024), the Qiskit Code Assistant for generating quantum computing code (2024) and a study of customizing a language model for VHDL design of high-performance microprocessors (2025).²⁴⁶⁷

Work on AI agents includes ITBench (ICML 2025), a benchmark of IT automation tasks, and a 2026 paper on how far general-purpose coding agents can go in optimizing hardware through high-level synthesis.⁵¹⁸

Work and contributions

• IBM Granite Code models Open weights

  Listed among the authors of "Granite Code Models: A Family of Open Foundation Models for Code Intelligence" (2024), which introduces decoder-only code models from 3 to 34 billion parameters and states that all Granite Code models are released under an Apache 2.0 license.⁴

• Project CodeNet Open data

  First author of "CodeNet: A Large-Scale AI for Code Dataset for Learning a Diversity of Coding Tasks" (2021). The IBM/Project_CodeNet repository, whose code is under the Apache-2.0 license, provides tools for the dataset and download instructions for the full dataset.²³

• ITBench Published research

  Listed among the authors of "ITBench: Evaluating AI Agents across Diverse Real-World IT Automation Tasks" (2025).⁵

Timeline

1. 2016Became CTO and Chief Architect of IBM Watson, serving until 2019.¹
2. May 25, 2021Released the CodeNet AI-for-code dataset paper as first author.²
3. May 7, 2024Co-authored "Granite Code Models - A Family of Open Foundation Models for Code Intelligence".⁴
4. May 29, 2024Co-authored the Qiskit Code Assistant paper on training LLMs to generate quantum computing code.⁶
5. Feb 7, 2025Co-authored ITBench, a benchmark for AI agents on IT automation tasks.⁵
6. May 14, 2025Co-authored a study on customizing a language model for VHDL microprocessor design.⁷
7. Mar 26, 2026Co-authored a paper on general-purpose coding agents for hardware optimization via high-level synthesis.⁸

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• CTO and Chief Architect (2016–2019), IBM Watson¹

Honors and recognition

• IBM Fellow · IBM¹
• IEEE Fellow · Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers¹

Where they work

• IBM 29 people in the wiki

Related people

• Marina DanilevskyAlso at IBM
• Sriram RaghavanAlso at IBM
• Ranit AharonovAlso at IBM
• Kate SouleAlso at IBM
• Avi SilAlso at IBM
• Leo GaoLanguage models · Evaluation and benchmarks
• Jesse DodgeEvaluation and benchmarks · Datasets and data
• Swabha SwayamdiptaEvaluation and benchmarks · Datasets and data
• Eugene YanLanguage models · Evaluation and benchmarks
• Rohan TaoriLanguage models · Evaluation and benchmarks