Kommy Weldemariam

Kommy Weldemariam is the Chief Scientist for Amazon's Worldwide Sustainability organization. His team drives the science and innovation vision and execution across Amazon to meet the company's Carbon, Waste, Water, Materials, Circularity, and Biodiversity. For eleven years before joining Amazon, he worked at IBM Research in various roles, with his last role being a Distinguished Engineer and CTO of IBM Research's Accelerated Discovery organization, where he helped establish and co-led the Climate and Sustainability division, guided worldwide teams on architectural, technology, and system innovations for the Healthcare and Life Sciences, and Materials Innovation research portfolio. Kommy also helped establish the IBM Research Africa labs in Kenya and South Africa, where he served as the Chief Scientist. In his early career, he held roles at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy, working on the world's first formally verified end-to-end electronic voting system with a voter-verified paper audit trail and various education and sustainability projects, such as preventing food waste through socially-inspired tech solutions.

Kommy has received recognitions from NASA, IBM, the World Economic Forum, and the Next Einstein Forum. He holds over 300 US patents and has authored over 100 scientific publications in top conferences and journals. Kommy holds a BSc in Computer Science from Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia), a M.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (India), a PhD in Computer Science and Information Engineering from the University of Trento (Italy), and was a visiting academic scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA).