I am a researcher at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York. I try to find ways to make computer data centers and, more generally, buildings more energy efficient. To get a sense of the significance of IBM's work in the area of energy efficient data centers, you may be interested in the April, 2008 study by McKinsey & Co. which projected that the world's data centers will surpass the airline industry in total greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020.

I work closely with IBM Tivoli to help add energy management capability to our various systems management products. Lately I have been working on a mobile robot for autonomously mapping, monitoring and managing the energy and thermal properties of a data center. A paper on our robot recently won the Best Paper award at the 2011 International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC).

In the past year I have started working in the area of distributed computing. My colleagues and I are trying to come up with a way of providing a highly available monitoring infrastructure, by applying the principles of autonomic computing, using distributed databases. We are also working on a distributed framework for building applications and analytical components on top of the emerging "Internet of Things."

In 2010 I was named an IBM Master Inventor. I worked on the strategy component of the IBM Jeopardy-playing program known as Watson, culminating in our celebrated victory over best-ever human players, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

I began working at IBM in 1994 and have been in Research since April, 2000. I have previously worked in the areas of Just-in-time Supply Chain Management, Help Center Diagnostics, Internet Search, Internet Security, eCommerce, Human-Computer Interaction, Unstructured Information Management, and knowledge management applied to large scale systems management environments.

My academic interests are in the areas of discrete, combinatorial, and computational geometry. I am particularly attracted to simple to state problems in discrete geometry. Recently I have been applying geometric ideas to help solve problems associated with energy efficiency and robotics. For copies of some of my latest papers look here.

Phone: +1-914-784-7257

Fax: +1-914-784-6912

Email: lenchner@us.ibm.com