The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for
IBM Research
IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research org ...
. The center comprises three sites, with its main laboratory in
Yorktown Heights
Yorktown Heights is a census-designated place (CDP) in the town of Yorktown in Westchester County, New York, United States. The population was 1,781 at the 2010 census.
History
Yorktown Heights is in the town of Yorktown, New York, in northern ...
,
New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
New York may also refer to:
Film and television
* '' ...
, U.S., 38 miles (61 km) north of
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
,
Albany,
New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
New York may also refer to:
Film and television
* '' ...
and with offices in
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...
,
.
Overview
The center, headquarters of
IBM's
Research division, is named for both
Thomas J. Watson, Sr. and
Thomas Watson, Jr.
Thomas John Watson Jr. (January 14, 1914 – December 31, 1993) was an American businessman, political figure, Army Air Forces pilot, and philanthropist. The son of IBM Corporation founder Thomas J. Watson, he was the second IBM president (195 ...
, who led IBM as president and CEO, respectively, from 1915 (when it was known as the
Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company
The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) was a holding company of manufacturers of record-keeping and measuring systems subsequently known as IBM.
In 1911, financier and noted trust organizer, "Father of Trusts", Charles R. Flint amal ...
) to 1971.
The research is intended to improve hardware (
physical sciences
Physical science is a branch of natural science that studies non-living systems, in contrast to life science. It in turn has many branches, each referred to as a "physical science", together called the "physical sciences".
Definition
Phy ...
and
semiconductor
A semiconductor is a material which has an electrical resistivity and conductivity, electrical conductivity value falling between that of a electrical conductor, conductor, such as copper, and an insulator (electricity), insulator, such as glas ...
s research), services (business modelling, consulting, and operations research), software (programming languages, security, speech recognition, data management, and collaboration tools), and systems (operating systems and server design), as well as to extend the mathematics and science that support the information technology industry.
The center was founded at
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
in 1945 as the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory, on
116th Street in
Manhattan
Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...
, expanding to 115th Street in 1953. More labs were later opened in
Westchester County, New York
Westchester County is located in the U.S. state of New York. It is the seventh most populous county in the State of New York and the most populous north of New York City. According to the 2020 United States Census, the county had a population o ...
beginning in the late 1950s with the temporary facility and research headquarters at the former Robert S. Lamb estate in
Croton-on-Hudson, New York
Croton-on-Hudson is a village in Westchester County, New York, United States. The population was 8,327 at the 2020 United States census over 8,070 at the 2010 census. It is located in the town of Cortlandt as part of New York City's northern subu ...
, with others in Yorktown Heights, and downtown Ossining. The new headquarters were finally located with a new lab in Yorktown Heights designed by architect
Eero Saarinen
Eero Saarinen (, ; August 20, 1910 – September 1, 1961) was a Finnish-American architect and industrial designer noted for his wide-ranging array of designs for buildings and monuments. Saarinen is best known for designing the General Motors ...
completed in 1961, with the 115th Street site closing in 1970. IBM later donated the New York City buildings to Columbia University; they are now known as the Casa Hispanica and Watson Hall. The lab expanded to Hawthorne in 1984.
Notable staff have included the mathematicians
Benoît Mandelbrot
Benoit B. Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010) was a Polish-born French-American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of phy ...
,
Ralph E. Gomory
Ralph Edward Gomory (born May 7, 1929) is an American applied mathematician and executive. Gomory worked at IBM as a researcher and later as an executive. During that time, his research led to the creation of new areas of applied mathematics.
...
,
Shmuel Winograd
__NOTOC__
Shmuel Winograd ( he, שמואל וינוגרד; January 4, 1936 – March 25, 2019) was an Israeli-American computer scientist, noted for his contributions to computational complexity. He has proved several major results regarding the ...
,
Alan Hoffman,
Don Coppersmith
Don Coppersmith (born 1950) is a cryptographer and mathematician. He was involved in the design of the Data Encryption Standard block cipher at IBM, particularly the design of the S-boxes, strengthening them against differential cryptanalysis ...
,
Gregory Chaitin
Gregory John Chaitin ( ; born 25 June 1947) is an Argentine-American mathematician and computer scientist. Beginning in the late 1960s, Chaitin made contributions to algorithmic information theory and metamathematics, in particular a computer-t ...
, the inventor
Robert Dennard
Robert Heath Dennard (born September 5, 1932) is an American electrical engineer and inventor.
Biography
Dennard was born in Terrell, Texas, U.S. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Southern Methodist University, ...
, roboticist
Matthew T. Mason
Matthew Thomas Mason (born August 24, 1952 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) is an American roboticist and the former Director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Mason is a researcher in the area of robotic manipulation, and is t ...
, author
Clifford A. Pickover
Clifford Alan Pickover (born August 15, 1957) is an American author, editor, and columnist in the fields of science, mathematics, science fiction, innovation, and creativity. For many years, he was employed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research ...
, computer scientists
Frances E. Allen
Frances Elizabeth Allen (August 4, 1932August 4, 2020) was an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. Allen was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, and in 2006 became the first woman to win the Turing ...
,
John Cocke,
Stuart Feldman
Stuart Feldman is a computer scientist. He is best known as the creator of the computer software program ''make''. He was also an author of the first Fortran 77 compiler, was part of the original group at Bell Labs that created the Unix operat ...
,
Ken Iverson,
Irene Greif
Irene Greif is an American computer scientist and a founder of the field of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Biography
Greif's ...
, and
Mark N. Wegman
Mark N. Wegman is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to algorithms and compiler optimization. Wegman received his B.A. from New York University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined IBM Resea ...
,
Barry Appelman
Barry Appelman is recognized as being the father of the "buddy list" and AOL instant messenger. Companies had been using crude forms of Instant messaging within their own networks for over forty years, but the idea of presence, i.e. who is logged ...
,
Wietse Venema
Wietse Zweitze Venema (born 1951) is a Dutch programmer and physicist best known for writing the Postfix email system. He also wrote TCP Wrapper and collaborated with Dan Farmer to produce the computer security tools SATAN and The Coroner's To ...
,
Harry Markowitz
Harry Max Markowitz (born August 24, 1927) is an American economist who received the 1989 John von Neumann Theory Prize and the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Markowitz is a professor of finance at the Rady School of Management ...
(Economics Nobel Prize, 1990), electrical engineer
Jeffrey Kephart, and physicists
Llewellyn Thomas
Llewellyn Hilleth Thomas (21 October 1903 – 20 April 1992) was a British physicist and applied mathematician. He is best known for his contributions to atomic and molecular physics and solid-state physics. His key achievements include calculat ...
,
Rolf Landauer
Rolf William Landauer (February 4, 1927 – April 27, 1999) was a German-American physicist who made important contributions in diverse areas of the thermodynamics of information processing, condensed matter physics, and the conductivity of disor ...
,
Charles H. Bennett,
Elliott H. Lieb
Elliott Hershel Lieb (born July 31, 1932) is an American mathematical physics#Mathematically rigorous physics, mathematical physicist and professor of mathematics and physics at Princeton University who specializes in statistical mechanics, Cond ...
,
J. B. Gunn
John Battiscombe "J. B." Gunn (13 May 1928 – 2 December 2008), known as Ian or Iain, was a British physicist, who spent most of his career in the United States. He discovered the Gunn effect, which led to the invention of the Gunn diode, t ...
,
Leroy Chang
Leroy L. Chang (; 20 January 1936 – 10 August 2008) was an experimental physicist and solid state electronics researcher and engineer. Born in China, he studied in Taiwan and then the United States, obtaining his doctorate from Stanford Univ ...
,
Leo Esaki
Reona Esaki (江崎 玲於奈 ''Esaki Reona'', born March 12, 1925), also known as Leo Esaki, is a Japanese physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Ivar Giaever and Brian David Josephson for his work in electron tunneling in ...
(Physics Nobel Prize, 1973),
Jay Gambetta
Jay M. Gambetta is a scientist and executive, leading the team at IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center working to build a quantum computer.
Education
Following his Bachelor of Science and Honours degree at Griffith University in 1999 (gaining four ...
,
Uri Sivan
Uri Sivan (אורי סיון)(born 1955), an Israeli physicist, is the 17th President of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. He is also the holder of the Bertoldo Badler Chair in the Technion's Faculty of Physics.
Biography
Uri Sivan' ...
(president of the
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology ( he, הטכניון – מכון טכנולוגי לישראל) is a public research university located in Haifa, Israel. Established in 1912 under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire, the Technion ...
), and
Zvi Galil
Zvi Galil ( he, צבי גליל; born June 26, 1947) is an Israeli-American computer scientist and mathematician. Galil served as the President of Tel Aviv University from 2007 through 2009. From 2010 to 2019, he was the dean of the Georgia Instit ...
(former president of
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv University (TAU) ( he, אוּנִיבֶרְסִיטַת תֵּל אָבִיב, ''Universitat Tel Aviv'') is a public research university in Tel Aviv, Israel. With over 30,000 students, it is the largest university in the country. Locate ...
).
The work done at the center from 1960 to 1984 was named an
IEEE Milestone in 2009.
Supercomputers
As of November 2010, the center houses three
TOP500
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...
supercomputers; the oldest and still fastest of which, a
BlueGene/L system designed for
protein folding
Protein folding is the physical process by which a protein chain is translated to its native three-dimensional structure, typically a "folded" conformation by which the protein becomes biologically functional. Via an expeditious and reproduci ...
simulations, called ''BGW'' (Blue Gene Watson), entered the list in the 06/2005 issue, then positioned second behind fellow Blue Gene/L in
LLNL
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...
.
Another well-known installation is ''
Watson
Watson may refer to:
Companies
* Actavis, a pharmaceutical company formerly known as Watson Pharmaceuticals
* A.S. Watson Group, retail division of Hutchison Whampoa
* Thomas J. Watson Research Center, IBM research center
* Watson Systems, make ...
'', an
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
system capable of answering
natural language
In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages ...
questions, which won several ''
Jeopardy!
''Jeopardy!'' is an American game show created by Merv Griffin. The show is a quiz competition that reverses the traditional question-and-answer format of many quiz shows. Rather than being given questions, contestants are instead given genera ...
'' games against human contestants in February 2011 on the site, and defeated ''Jeopardy!'' super-champions
Ken Jennings
Kenneth Wayne Jennings III (born May 23, 1974) is an American game show host, author, and former game show contestant. He is the highest-earning American game show contestant, having won money on five different game shows, including $4,522,70 ...
and
Brad Rutter
Bradford Gates Rutter (born January 31, 1978) is an American game show contestant, TV host, producer, and actor. With over $5.1 million in winnings, he is currently the 2nd highest-earning American game show contestant of all time, behind Ken Je ...
.
Buildings
;Yorktown Heights
The Yorktown Heights building, housing the headquarters of
IBM Research
IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research org ...
, situated on private land not generally accessible to the public, is a large crescent-shaped structure consisting of three levels with 40 aisles each, radiating out from the center of the circle described by the crescent. Due to this construction, none of the offices have windows. The lowest level is partially underground in some areas toward the shorter side of the crescent, which also leads to the employee parking lots. A large overhang protrudes from the front entryway of the building, and faces the visitor parking lot. The building houses a library, an auditorium and a cafeteria. It was designed by the architect
Eero Saarinen
Eero Saarinen (, ; August 20, 1910 – September 1, 1961) was a Finnish-American architect and industrial designer noted for his wide-ranging array of designs for buildings and monuments. Saarinen is best known for designing the General Motors ...
and built in 1956–1961. The original building named Mohansic, for the area, was in Yorktown Heights; this building is in Yorktown proper. The Mohansic building was the temporary area for Research while the TJ Watson building was being constructed.
;Albany NanoTech
The facility can be found at 257 Fuller Rd, Albany, New York; it is located in facilities owned by th
State University of New York's Polytechnic Institute's Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (SUNY-CNSE)which also hosts the Center for Semiconductor Research (CSR). The IBM occupied portion of the site is the main facility o
IBM Research's Semiconductor Group The group focuses on next generation semiconductor technology research, and is the group most associated with a number of innovations related to semiconductor scaling, including the introduction of a 7 nm test chip in 2015, a 5 nm test chip in 2017. and a 2 nm test chip in 2021. This group operates an advanced
extreme ultraviolet lithography
Extreme ultraviolet lithography (also known as EUV or EUVL) is an optical lithography technology used in steppers, machines that make integrated circuits (ICs) for computers and other electronic devices. It uses a range of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) ...
enabled research line which is used to support their research both in support of and beyond traditional scaling. This work is done in a collaborative ecosystem based environment which includes academic and industrial partners.
;Cambridge
The Cambridge research lab can be found at 75 Binney Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts; it is located in the IBM Watson Health HQ. Research at Cambridge focuses on AI.
;Hawthorne
The Hawthorne building was a leased facility located on Skyline Drive, which is part of an industrial park shared by several area businesses. In 2012 the Hawthorne lease was closed by IBM and remaining employees were relocated to the Yorktown Heights site. The Hawthorne building (located at 19 Skyline Drive) is easily recognizable by its mirrored facade and large blue pole. Located approximately 25 miles north of New York City, the Hawthorne site was smaller than its sister site at Yorktown Heights (with none of the
wet lab A wet lab, or experimental lab, is a type of laboratory where it is necessary to handle various types of chemicals and potential "wet" hazards, so the room has to be carefully designed, constructed, and controlled to avoid spillage and contamination ...
space found in the Yorktown Heights facility). The primary focus at Hawthorne was software- and services-related research, whereas Yorktown Heights focuses on chemistry, mathematics, physics, silicon technology, and electrical engineering research, as well as some software and services. The building also contained a cafeteria, presentation center and library. The site, opened in 1984, was designed by Michael Harris Spector. The building is now part of
New York Medical College
New York Medical College (NYMC or New York Med) is a private medical school in Valhalla, New York. Founded in 1860, it is a member of the Touro College and University System.
NYMC offers advanced degrees through its three schools: the School o ...
[NYMC]
"MEDICAL COLLEGE PURCHASES BUILDING, EXPANDS CAMPUS REACH"
See also
*
Tech companies in the New York metropolitan area
Tech or The Tech may refer to:
* An abbreviation of technology or technician
*Tech Dinghy, an American sailing dinghy developed at MIT
*Tech (mascot), the mascot of Louisiana Tech University, U.S.
* Tech (river), in southern France
* "Tech" (''S ...
Notes and references
Bibliography
*
*
* 500+ pages, including several chapters on IBM's Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University in the 1940s and 50s. Also available in PDF.
External links
Wallace J. Eckertfounder and director of the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University
Thomas J. Watson Research CenterNine color 1961 photographs by G. E. Kidder Smith of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Kitchawan Road, Yorktown HeightsIBM Research Division
{{authority control
IBM facilities
Supercomputer sites
Eero Saarinen structures
Modernist architecture in New York (state)
Yorktown, New York
Computer science research organizations
Buildings and structures in Westchester County, New York
Buildings and structures completed in 1961
Laboratories in the United States