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Bill Higgins

VP, IBM watsonx Platform Engineering and Open Innovation

Bill Higgins is a well-respected individual in the tech industry, serving as an IBM Vice President and Distinguished Engineer.

In his role at IBM, Bill spearheads the watsonx Platform Engineering team and is a key figure in leading IBM's Open Innovation initiatives.

At IBM Research, Bill oversees a team of skilled software engineers who collaborate with partners like Red Hat to develop crucial AI platform components through active participation in open source communities.

As the Chair of the IBM Open Innovation Community, Bill plays a pivotal role in unifying IBM's vast technical community and driving the company's strategic goals through collective efforts.

Bill has a solid educational background, having obtained a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Penn State University in 2000.

Through his career, Bill has held various leadership positions within IBM, including Director of watsonx Platform Engineering, Chair of the IBM Data and AI Technical Team, and Director of IBM Watson Core, among others.

Additionally, Bill has been involved in pivotal projects such as the transformation of IBM's internal development toolchain and overseeing significant deployments of tools like Slack and GitHub Enterprise.

Currently based in Raleigh, North Carolina, Bill Higgins remains an influential figure in the tech community.

Highlights

Jan 16 · twitter

Sad to hear about the passing of David Lynch. What an artist and an individual. ❤️ https://t.co/Wmr2qnG1KY

Jul 22 · linkedin

A few weeks ago, I hosted a fireside chat with Dario Gil and Ruchir Puri where they spoke to the IBM technical community about the open sourcing of the Granite family of foundation models, and encouraged IBMers to experiment with them.

In the following weeks, a bunch of IBM’s best developers got excited about and started playing with the Granite code models. One of our best watsonx developers, Gabe Goodhart, ran an experiment to see if he could get a dev environment with the following attributes:

  • Entirely open source
  • Runs on his laptop
  • Works offline

He got it working with the combination of VS Code, ollama, Continue, and Granite Code. A bunch of us have been playing with this configuration and adding to it, so I asked Gabe to write an external article on it. It’s below, and I hope you enjoy it, and of course we welcome your feedback.

Special thanks to the folks at VS Code, ollama, and Continue, for creating great open source tools that are individually great and better together, and even better now with Granite Code! 🙌🏻

https://lnkd.in/dqjAx4cc

cc Erich Gamma, Michael Chiang, Ty Dunn

Bill Higgins
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Location

Raleigh, North Carolina, United States