page_title: IBM
section_title: Research
hierarchical_section_title: IBM / Research
caption_attribution_description: IBM's w:Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY Stitched with "http://hugin.sourceforge.net/"
context_page_description: International Business Machines Corporation is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York. It was founded in 1911 in Endicott, New York as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and was renamed "International Business Machines" in 1924. IBM is incorporated in New York and has operations in over 170 countries.
  IBM produces and sells computer hardware, middleware and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. It is also a major research organization, as of 2020 holding the record for most U.S. patents generated by a business for 27 consecutive years. Inventions by IBM include the automated teller machine, the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the SQL programming language, the UPC barcode, and dynamic random-access memory. The IBM mainframe, exemplified by the System/360, was the dominant computing platform during the 1960s and 1970s.
  IBM has continually shifted business operations by focusing on higher-value, more profitable markets.
context_section_description: Research has been a part of IBM since its founding, and its organized efforts trace their roots back to 1945, when the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory was founded at Columbia University in New York City, converting a renovated fraternity house on Manhattan's West Side into IBM's first laboratory. Now, IBM Research constitutes the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 12 labs on 6 continents. IBM Research is headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, and facilities include the Almaden lab in California, Austin lab in Texas, Australia lab in Melbourne, Brazil lab in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, China lab in Beijing and Shanghai, Ireland lab in Dublin, Haifa lab in Israel, India lab in Delhi and Bangalore, Tokyo lab, Zurich lab and Africa lab in Nairobi.
  In terms of investment, IBM's R&D expenditure totals several billion dollars each year. In 2012, that expenditure was approximately US$6.9 billion. Recent allocations have included $1 billion to create a business unit for Watson in 2014, and $3 billion to create a next-gen semiconductor along with $4 billion towards growing the company's "strategic imperatives" (cloud, analytics, mobile, security, social) in 2015.
  IBM has been a leading proponent of the Open Source Initiative, and began supporting Linux in 1998. The company invests billions of dollars in services and software based on Linux through the IBM Linux Technology Center, which includes over 300 Linux kernel developers. IBM has also released code under different open source licenses, such as the platform-independent software framework Eclipse (worth approximately US$ million at the time of the donation), the three-sentence International Components for Unicode (ICU) license, and the Java-based relational database management system (RDBMS) Apache Derby. IBM's open source involvement has not been trouble-free, however (see SCO v. IBM).
  Famous inventions and developments by IBM include: the Automated teller machine (ATM), Dynamic random access memory (DRAM), the electronic keypunch, the financial swap, the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, RISC, the SABRE airline reservation system, SQL, the Universal Product Code (UPC) bar code, and the virtual machine. Additionally, in 1990 company scientists used a scanning tunneling microscope to arrange 35 individual xenon atoms to spell out the company acronym, marking the first structure assembled one atom at a time. A major part of IBM research is the generation of patents. Since its first patent for a traffic signaling device, IBM has been one of the world's most prolific patent sources. In 2018, the company holds the record for most patents generated by a business, marking 25 consecutive years for the achievement.
  Five IBMers have received the Nobel Prize: Leo Esaki, of the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., in 1973, for work in semiconductors; Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, of the Zurich Research Center, in 1986, for the scanning tunneling microscope; and Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller, also of Zurich, in 1987, for research in superconductivity. Several IBMers have also won the Turing Award, including the first female recipient Frances E. Allen.
  Current research includes a collaboration with the University of Michigan to see computers act as an academic advisor for undergraduate computer science and engineering students at the university, and a partnership with AT&T, combining their cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) platforms to make them interoperable and to provide developers with easier tools.
  The company is also involved in research into advanced algorithms and machine learning and their decision-making processes. To that end, the company recently released an analysis tool for how and why algorithms make decisions while scanning for biases in automated decision-making.
caption: The Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, is one of 12 IBM research labs worldwide.
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