We maintain ties with academia and keep our researcher current in their technical fields through summer visitor programs, seminar series, and campus visits. IBM has many internal classes to strengthen and reinforce business skills, software skills, and communication skills. We also have mentoring programs and career planning processes. Our marketing teams and consulting groups are a great source of information about real needs of our customers for optimization applications. Many projects are done by teams, which are usually led by a seasoned researcher.
New employees learn by working with experienced employees.
Problems that have the potential to change the way business is done. The most important problem I ve worked on, and the project that I had the most fun on, was developing software that is used by IBM manufacturing planners to figure out what they can build with the parts they ve got. When I began working on this problem, the planners were faced with shortages of a few key components, and these components were used in many different combinations in many different IBM products. The goal was to compute feasible production schedules that made the best use of the constrained parts. With this tool, planners could determine feasible production plans in minutes instead of days.