Research Lab

IBM Research

Driving the advancements that shape our world

Photo by Carson Masterson on Unsplash

International Business Machines, or IBM, is known to almost everyone due to the impact it has created, right from its inception to the present. IBM is a cloud platform and cognitive solutions company, which works on a wide range of domains right from Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), IT Infrastructure, Digital workplace, Security, etc.

IBM was founded in 1911 as the ‘Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR)’ and was renamed as International Business Machines in 1924. IBM has its headquarters in Armonk, New York, and has more than 350,000 employees serving clients in 170 countries.

Research has been an integral part of IBM since the beginning. Presently, IBM Research is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 12 labs on 6 continents.

IBM covers an extensive range of research areas: -

• Non-volatile Memory Systems: — Semiconductor memory technologies have gained high popularity nowadays because they not only complement the existing memory and storage hierarchy but also reduce the distinction between memory and storage. This research team works on the enhancement of NAND Flash memory in order to enable its employment in enterprise systems.
• Cognitive Healthcare: — The cognitive healthcare team is developing computational platforms for mining heterogeneous biological data, to change the way in which the diseases are prevented, diagnosed, and treated. Currently, this team is mainly focusing on two diseases- Tuberculosis + HIV and cancer, and the research is being carried out using natural language understanding, image understanding, and bioinformatics.
• AI-powered Security Operations: — The main aim of this research is to accelerate the move away from the current generation of reactive systems to a proactive generation of cognitive systems. AI integrated with cybersecurity enhances the security systems making them more efficient and accurate.
• Responsible Computing: — Quantifying and reducing the carbon footprint: — As our world is becoming increasingly digitalized, the ever-growing volume of data is driving significant global growth of data centers. Hence, the research team is aiming to develop techniques to optimally schedule and run workloads on data centers, enabling a faster transition to a renewables-powered digital economy.
• AI and User Experience: — This research combines user experience with Artificial Intelligence, focusing on the following areas:
• Industry-specific AI solutions that support real-world decision-making in the aviation domain.
• Virtual assistants that use conversational natural language to offer task and knowledge-oriented suggestions to employees.
• Solutions that apply analytics and machine learning to enterprise collaboration tools to guide knowledge workers toward proper insights and impactful results.
• Healthcare effectiveness: — The aim of this research is to integrate the health systems with AI, and engage patients, researchers, and other stakeholders, in continually evaluating the effectiveness of AI solutions for improving health outcomes and delivering high-value care.
• Cognitive Discovery: The next frontier in R&D: — Businesses need to access growing amounts of diverse information quickly and easily from highly unstructured sources such as documents, images, and graphs. These are known as “dark” sources of dormant data. Hence, the main motive of Cognitive Discovery is to automate the extraction of knowledge from these dark sources and to store this rich knowledge for future scientific or technological questions.

These are only a few of the examples which manifest the prodigious impact created by IBM in the research domain. A remarkable thing is that the IBM research teams have not worked just on a single domain, rather they have tried to cover almost every area be it health, social issues, data storage, discovery, security, and many more.

On the whole, it can be said that IBM has been through a highly exceptional journey, and has helped mankind in numerous ways, and is continuing to do so.