“If you met me as a child, you’d know my life has always been about the magic of science and technology,” Bhattacharya said. “I used to take things around the house apart (very carefully!) just so I could rebuild them and learn how they work. The intrinsic beauty and transformative power of science for humanity has always intrigued me. I love finding elegant ways of expressing the possibilities of technology, and understanding why things work, why they don’t, and how they can be improved.”
That inquisitiveness has served her well throughout her career. It propelled her to write mission-critical code for the Linux kernel used around the world and to explore further groundbreaking uses of data in AI.
Bhattacharya’s passion for science and building things from the ground up is one the principal reasons Hewlett Packard Labs is proud to announce her promotion from Distinguished Technologist to HPE Fellow.
“Suparna has been leading an effort around AI data that has proven groundbreaking and very novel in the industry, and her knowledge makes her the first to point to strategic directions,” said Paolo Faraboschi, HPE Fellow, Vice President, and Director of the AI Research Lab at Hewlett Packard Labs. “Fellowships are career recognition, and this promotion is a reflection of her elite stature in the data management community.”
Pioneers in their fields, HPE Fellows set the standards for technical excellence and drive the direction in their disciplines. Not only are they exceptional technologists, they also have an eye on the future. Their contributions help shape HPE and the world around them. Bhattacharya’s stellar background and experience as a trailblazer for women in technology have earned her this distinction, along with her contributions in the fields of AI and systems advancement.
After she decided to focus on engineering for her career, Bhattacharya was mesmerized by her early exposure to system software and set a goal to pursue excellence in a technical career path. A pivotal opportunity arose when she took her first steps working on open-source projects. This community gave her the ability to directly learn from and work alongside some of the best engineers in the field. Her experiences in this area sparked a love for building foundational technology and an interest in the fields of AI and pattern recognition. This interest set her up for widespread future success in those fields.
Before she gained industry recognition, Bhattacharya was a thoughtful child deeply interested in learning how the world around her works. Born in Ghana, this love of understanding the world was instilled in her by her parents. Her father, Dr. C.G. Bhattacharya, is a retired professor from the Indian Statistical Institute, and her mother, Ms. Pampa Bhattacharya, studied science in college. “We grew up surrounded by books which lit my imagination,” she said.
Driven by her passion for technology, she began her focus on science in school, taking particular interest in physics. This translated into a love for engineering, when she got to work on her first computer, a BBC Micro (with just 32KB memory!). She later completed her B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (which, incidentally, was also where she met her husband, now a professor at the Indian Institute of Management). Mid-career, she earned her PhD in computer science from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. Bhattacharya’s doctoral thesis on energy efficient software systems was awarded the IISc Alumni gold medal.
Throughout her career, Bhattacharya has made contributions of lasting impact in the domain of system software, which have resulted in interdisciplinary top-tier research publications (28), patents (40 filed, 28 granted) and widely adopted open-source contributions. She was elected as a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) in 2020, was recognized with the India-level Zinnov Next Generation Women Leaders Award in 2019, and won the HPE Women’s Excellence Award in 2017 and 2022. In 2022, Bhattacharya was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) alongside Cullen Bash, Vice President and Director of the Systems Architecture Lab at Hewlett Packard Labs.
Bhattacharya lives in India. Her early life took her to Ghana, Canada and Nigeria, and her work led her to visit many cities in North America, Europe and Australia. As Bhattacharya was exposed to new environments, she developed new perspectives and collaborations with technologists across the globe. She began her career working on a micro-kernel operating system, where she learned to love foundational work. She later contributed code to the Linux kernel that helped enable the operating system to function at an enterprise level and is now used to power most datacenter servers. Her time working on Linux earned her the first Linux contributor from India and the first woman in the world to be invited to the Linux Kernel summit for six years in a row from 2002 to 2007.
After developing a love for foundational technology, she joined HPE, becoming the first woman Distinguished Technologist in HPE India. Her role saw her working on emerging technology in a global scale.
“At HPE, I wanted to learn how we can build systems that are suitable, not for the applications we have now, but the applications and solutions that are coming in the future,” Bhattacharya said. “I wanted to be in a position to have answers to questions about the future that nobody has been able to answer yet, and design technology such as machine learning effectively for that future.”
As a Distinguished Technologist, Bhattacharya has been leading Hewlett Packard Labs’ research in Data Centric and Trustworthy AI. Here, she has worked to advance technical strategies for HPE and product architectures for AI, containers, persistent memory, and edge-to-core computing. She uses insights from diverse technical domains to explore innovations that span technology boundaries and has published a book on Resource Proportional Software Design for Emerging Systems. She accepted the role in the AI Research Lab at Hewlett Packard Labs to establish and lead the company’s research agenda on an intelligent data foundation for AI.
Today, she’s contributing on behalf of Hewlett Packard Labs to Project Data Map, an open Common Metadata Framework owned and driven by HPE’s Office of the CTO that correlates and scores metadata relationships derived implicitly from data and model usage signals. Bhattacharya’s industry-leading work in AI is helping the project democratize access to valuable enterprise data, data analytics, as well as leading the efforts around building more trustworthy AI models.
“We still have lots of work to do in the field of trustworthy AI, but we are working on breakthroughs that will make the next generation of AI even more reliable,” Bhattacharya said about her work on the project.
Bhattacharya credits those who she has worked with over the years as being instrumental in getting her to where she is today. Innovation is not easy to create, and she says her colleagues and mentors over the years have helped her foster a sense of collaboration and community in her work that has helped her get so far.
“Without my peers and mentors, these ideas I’ve had and worked on are just dreams,” she said. “But with the support of so many over the years, they can become a reality.”
In her role as HPE Fellow, she will continue leading efforts around AI research and open-source work, and developing new ways for improving AI data. Bhattacharya said that she will continue using her work as a force for good in the technological community.
Though she isn’t breaking apart electronics as much these days, Bhattacharya’s vision for engineering the world around her from the ground up is strong as ever. She will continue carrying this vision as she embarks in her new role as HPE Fellow.
