IBM Research
IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company. IBM Research is headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, near IBM headquarters in Armonk, New York. It is the largest industrial research organization in the world with operations in over 170 countries and twelve labs on six continents.
IBM employees have garnered six Nobel Prizes, six Turing Awards, 20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, 19 National Medals of Technology, five National Medals of Science and three Kavli Prizes., the company has generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years, which is a record.
History
The roots of today's IBM Research began with the 1945 opening of the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University. This was the first IBM laboratory devoted to pure science and later expanded into additional IBM Research locations in Westchester County, New York, starting in the 1950s, including the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1961.Notable company inventions include the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the Universal Product Code, the financial swap, the Fortran programming language, SABRE airline reservation system, DRAM, copper wiring in semiconductors, the smartphone, the portable computer, the Automated Teller Machine, the silicon-on-insulator semiconductor manufacturing process, Watson artificial intelligence and the Quantum Experience.
Advances in nanotechnology include IBM in atoms, where a scanning tunneling microscope was used to arrange 35 individual xenon atoms on a substrate of chilled crystal of nickel to spell out the three letter company acronym. It was the first time atoms had been precisely positioned on a flat surface.
Major undertakings at IBM Research have included the invention of innovative materials and structures, high-performance microprocessors and computers, analytical methods and tools, algorithms, software architectures, methods for managing, searching and deriving meaning from data and in turning IBM's advanced services methodologies into reusable assets.
IBM Research's numerous contributions to physical and computer sciences include the Scanning Tunneling Microscope and high-temperature superconductivity, both of which were awarded the Nobel Prize. IBM Research was behind the inventions of the SABRE travel reservation system, the technology of laser eye surgery, magnetic storage, the relational database, UPC barcodes and Watson, the question-answering computing system that won a match against human champions on the Jeopardy! television quiz show. The Watson technology is now being commercialized as part of a project with healthcare company Anthem Inc. Other notable developments include the Data Encryption Standard, fast Fourier transform, Benoît Mandelbrot's introduction of fractals, magnetic disk storage, the MELD-Plus risk score, the one-transistor dynamic random-access memory, the reduced instruction set computer architecture, relational databases, and Deep Blue.
Notable IBM researchers
There are a number of computer scientists "who made IBM Research famous." These include Frances E. Allen, Marc Auslander, John Backus, Charles H. Bennett, Erich Bloch, Grady Booch,Fred Brooks, Peter Brown, Larry Carter, Gregory Chaitin, John Cocke, Alan Cobham, Edgar F. Codd, Don Coppersmith, Wallace Eckert, Ronald Fagin, Horst Feistel, Jeanne Ferrante, Zvi Galil, Ralph E. Gomory, Jim Gray, Joseph Halpern, Kenneth E. Iverson, Frederick Jelinek, Reynold B. Johnson, Benoit Mandelbrot, Robert Mercer, C. Mohan, Kirsten Moselund, Michael O. Rabin, Arthur Samuel, Barbara Simons, Alfred Spector, Gardiner Tucker, Moshe Vardi, John Vlissides, Mark N. Wegman and Shmuel Winograd.
Laboratories
IBM currently has 19 research facilities spread across 12 laboratories on six continents:- Africa
- Cambridge – IBM Research and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
- Israel
- Ireland
- India
- Japan
- Silicon Valley
- Switzerland
- United Kingdom
- IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
In 2017, IBM invested $240 million to create the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab. Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, the Lab is a unique joint research venture in artificial intelligence established by IBM and MIT and brings together researchers in academia and industry to advance AI that has a real world impact for business, academic and society. The Lab funds approximately 50 projects per year, which are co-led by principal investigators from MIT and IBM Research, with results published regularly at top peer-reviewed journals and conferences. Projects range from computer vision, natural language processing and reinforcement learning, to devising new ways to ensure that AI systems are fair, reliable and secure.
Almaden in Silicon Valley
IBM Research – Almaden is in Almaden Valley, San Jose, California. Its scientists perform basic and applied research in computer science, services, storage systems, physical sciences, and materials science and technology.IBM Research – Almaden occupies part of a site owned by IBM at 650 Harry Road on nearly of land in the Santa Teresa Hills above Silicon Valley. The site, built in 1985 for the research center, was chosen because of its close proximity to Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley and other collaborative academic institutions. Today, the research division is still the largest tenant of the site, but the majority of occupants work for other divisions of IBM.
IBM opened its first West Coast research center, the San Jose Research Laboratory in 1952, managed by Reynold B. Johnson. Among its first developments was the IBM 350, the first commercial moving head hard disk drive. Launched in 1956, this saw use in the IBM 305 RAMAC computer system. Subdivisions included the Advanced Systems Development Division. Directors of the center include hard disc drive developer Jack Harker.
Prompted by a need for additional space, the center moved to its present Almaden location in 1986.
Scientists at IBM Almaden have contributed to several scientific discoveries such as the development of photoresists and the quantum mirage effect.
The following are some of the famous scientists who have worked in the past or are currently working in this laboratory: Rakesh Agrawal, Miklos Ajtai, Rama Akkiraju, John Backus, Raymond F. Boyce, Donald D. Chamberlin, Ashok K. Chandra, Edgar F. Codd, Mark Dean, Cynthia Dwork, Don Eigler, Ronald Fagin, Jim Gray, Laura M. Haas, Jean Paul Jacob, Joseph Halpern, Andreas J. Heinrich, Reynold B. Johnson, Maria Klawe, Jaishankar Menon, Dharmendra Modha, William E. Moerner, C. Mohan, Stuart Parkin, Nick Pippenger, Dan Russell, Patricia Selinger, Ted Selker, Barbara Simons, Malcolm Slaney, Arnold Spielberg, Ramakrishnan Srikant, Larry Stockmeyer, Moshe Vardi, Jennifer Widom, Shumin Zhai.
Australia
IBM Research – Australia was a research and development laboratory established by IBM Research in 2009 in Melbourne. It was involved in social media, interactive content, healthcare analytics and services research, multimedia analytics, and genomics. The inaugural lab director was IBM Distinguished Engineer Glenn Wightwick and the lab was subsequently headed by several directors over its 10 years lifespan, including Vice President, Joanna Batstone and Professor Iven Mareels. It was to be the company’s first laboratory combining research and development in a single organisation.The opening of the Melbourne lab in 2011 received an injection of $22 million in Australian Federal Government funding and an undisclosed amount provided by the State Government.
The Melbourne Research lab was closed in 2021, approximately at the same time as the deal for tax breaks from the State Government ended. Approximately 80 full-time researchers were made redundant.
Brazil
IBM Research – Brazil is one of twelve research laboratories comprising IBM Research, its first in South America. It was established in 2011, with locations in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Research focuses on Industrial Technology and Science, Systems of Engagement and Insight, Social Data Analytics and Natural Resources Solutions.The new lab, IBM's ninth at the time of opening and first in 12 years, underscores the growing importance of emerging markets and the globalization of innovation. In collaboration with Brazil's government, it will help IBM to develop technology systems around natural resource development and large-scale events such as the 2016 Summer Olympics.
Engineer and associate lab director Ulisses Mello explains that IBM has four priority areas in Brazil: "The main area is related to natural resources management, involving oil and gas, mining and agricultural sectors. The second is the social data analytics segment that comprises the analysis of data generated from social networking sites , which can be applied, for example, to financial analysis. The third strategic area is nanotechnology applied to the development of the smarter devices for the intermittent production industry. This technology can be applied to, for example, blood testing or recovering oil from existing fields. And the last one is smarter cities."
Japan
The IBM Research – Tokyo, which was called IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory before January 2009, is one of IBM's twelve major worldwide research laboratories. It is a branch of IBM Research, and about 200 researchers work for TRL. Established in 1982 as the Japan Science Institute in Tokyo, it was renamed to IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory in 1986, and moved to Yamato in 1992 and back to Tokyo in 2012.IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory was established in 1982 as the Japan Science Institute in Sanbanchō, Tokyo. It was IBM's first research laboratory in Asia. Hisashi Kobayashi was appointed the founding director of TRL in 1982; he served as director until 1986. JSI was renamed to the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory in 1986. In 1988, English-to-Japanese machine translation system called "System for Human-Assisted Language Translation" was developed at TRL. It was used to translate IBM manuals.