Candidate Statement - David Boloker

Dear Readium Foundation Members,

I would like to offer my candidacy as a Readium Board of Director’s member as a representative of IBM Corporation. I believe I can offer the Foundation my extensive knowledge of Open Source as well as my experience sitting on the boards of Dojo Foundation and being on the board and being President of Open Ajax Alliance from inception.

As CTO in IBM, I am responsible to insure we have an Accessibility Strategy for our products and the documents we create. IBM joined the Readium Foundation because we feel strongly that EPUB should be the standard for digital publications both internally and externally. Additionally, we are going to work within the foundation to insure that the SDK produces accessible output so as to provide equal access to all.

EPUB is very important to us as it is based on Web Technologies that we have been working in the industry on for many years; namely XHTML, XML, CSS, SVG.

If elected to the board, I will be committed to assisting on the board on all matters relating to the foundation including trying to attract new members and developers.

Biography:

David Boloker is CTO of IBM’s Emerging Internet Technology group and also holds the title of Distinguished Engineer. David is leading work in many areas including Cloud Computing, Mobile, Graphics, Mobile Identity and Big Data analytics. Previously, he was responsible for the commercialization of the “Watson machine.” David has worked with the COPDGene Foundation to study the inherited factors that make some people more likely to develop Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). David was responsible for the Internet platform created so that the doctors and Researchers could collaborate online sharing textual, CT and genetic information.

David is also responsible for forming IBM’s technical strategy around the emerging areas of Mobile Identity and gaining insights from big data. In this role, he leads an globally distributed IBM team researching new areas in software design and development. In the Watson work, David and his team took the system that played Jeopardy (TM ) and created a multipurpose machine that can analyze information and provide solutions across the industry from Healthcare to Financial to Retail.

Throughout David’s extensive career at IBM, he has held the role of CTO for Java technology, he’s worked at IBM’s esteemed Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and the Cambridge Scientific Center doing research in the area of remote distribution and control of hardware and software systems and secure internet gateways.