Stacy Joines is a pioneer in web site computing performance, capacity, and optimization. As an IBM Fellow within the IBM Watson organization, she applies this expertise to AI and Watson.From a humble start in Franklin, NC, a small town not far from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Stacy took a programming class as a sophomore in high school, and it changed all her plans for college and a career. While attending NC State, she co-op’d with IBM and accepted fulltime employment there upon graduation. She was one of the original team members on the IBM WebSphere Application server product, anchoring the performance consulting role in the product’s lab-based services team. Stacy applied this pattern of strong consulting around performance and operational scale to many of the stack products emerging as part of IBM’s WebSphere portfolio, such as WebSphere Portal and others. She worked with new products and offerings to develop best practices and skilled consultancy in this area. She also delivered and sustained high-volume solutions with multiple teams across a variety of scenarios, including self-service financial sites, B2E portals, and, with the WebSphere Commerce product, major retail web sites around the world. She and her retail web site team worked with numerous clients world-wide located in places such as Brazil, Finland, China, Australia, Canada, the United States, and many others. Stacy developed a practice of capacity management and operational performance to keep clients ready for holiday and sales events throughout the year by partnering with their marketing and business development teams on a holistic look at capacity management. From Black Friday to Sinterklaas to Boxing Day to Asian New Year and a variety of events throughout the year, Stacy guided clients to develop the training, practices, and monitoring to take it all in stride. More recently in her career, she moved into the IBM Watson Group, leveraging her knowledge of web sites, scalability and end-user behavior to develop a more representative analysis of end-user interactions with AI systems. Within the Watson organization, she is positioned to have great influence on the impact that AI will have on our lives. She is enthusiastic about where Watson is headed, and the uses clients and others are finding for the technology. As she says, “Until now, using computing meant meeting the technology on its terms?—?structured data and programming languages. Now, the technology is able to meet us on our terms, learning about unstructured data and working in human languages. We’ve seen only the tip of the iceberg; we can only begin to imagine how our clients will use this power to help people leverage all the data generated by the technology age.”In 2018, Stacy was recognized by the Triangle Business Journal as a ‘2018 Women in Business Awards Winner’. She is also a frequent conference speaker, and author of multiple articles. She also co-authored the book ‘Performance Analysis for Java Web Sites’. Stacy is recognized as co-inventor on seven patents issued in the United States, and one issued in China.