A Canadian security expert will receive IBM’s most prestigious technology distinction as one of the 11 scientists to be named to this year’s IBM Fellow program.

Sandy Bird, who is head of enterprise IT security of the IBM Software Group in Fredericton, New Brunswick, is among this year’s IBM experts whose combined efforts produced 283 patents for the company. The program celebrates its 51st year this year. Only 257 IBM personnel have earned the title of IBM Fellow throughout the years. Throughout its existence, the program generated more 7,700 patents for IBM, received five Nobel prizes as well as thousands of government and professional citations.

Bird studied electrical engineering at the University of New Brunswick and specializes in database design and development for Web applications.

Prior to his current role at IBM, Bird co-founded Q1 Labs, a security intelligence firm specializing in advanced analytics of massive amounts of data and network flows. The company was acquired by IBM in 2001 and became a new division of Big Blue. Bird was responsible for the development of the QRadar, a network anomaly detection tool. He also led the effort to transform QRadar into IBM’s security intelligence platform.

QRadar conducts an analysis of network activity in real-time, detecting and reporting activity that falls outside a normal baseline behaviour which can be determined by using algorithms that monitor IT systems.

Related Articles

IBM Maximo goes SaaS — quietly

LAS VEGAS – The cloud is the centre of attention at IBM’s annual Pulse conference, which highlights its latest products and strategies for making everything-as-a-service. Interestingly, there’s only a little light being shone

Published on: February 25th, 2014 Howard Solomon @itworldca

IBM touts new method for cutting network bottlenecks

Technology company IBM Corp. said it has patented a way to remove bottlenecks and performance issues afflicting many cloud application by dynamically shifting virtual machines to match bandwidth demand. Ed Suffern, an IBM systems

Published on: October 15th, 2013 Nestor E. Arellano @NestorArellano

IBM boosts security portfolio

IBM Corp.’s move into security has been long and short: The company has had security products for years, but only set up a security division recently. As if to make up for lost

Published on: October 29th, 2012 Howard Solomon @itworldca

Could data scientist be your next job?

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. —  Want to extract real value from your data? Better hire a data scientist or two.In the past several months, large enterprises, staffing firms and universities have observed increasing interest in

Published on: June 6th, 2012 Sandra Gittlen @itworldca

IBM said Bird will soon server the company’s technology ambassador to Singapore.

The 2014 IBM Fellows have influenced a broad array of technologies in the following areas:
• Cognitive computing – machine learning that mimics the way the human brain works
• Security platforms – intelligent optimization for addressing security exposures
• Computational science – mathematical algorithms to solve large, complex problems
• Cloud computing – storing, managing and processing data on Internet hosted servers
• Business database and analytics – intelligent database for querying business metrics
• High performance, enterprise storage – storage for large scale, technology settings

Related Download
Sponsor: IBM Canada Ltd
New expectations for a new era – CHRO insights from the Global C-Suite Study
This IBM white paper provides an in-depth analysis of 342 responses by Chief Human Resource Officers to a Global C-Suite Survey.
Register Now