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 corporation, multinational information technology company. IBM Research is headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York ...

. Its main laboratory is in

Yorktown Heights, New York 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 northe ...

, 38 miles (61 km) north of

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

. It also operates facilities in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, ...

and

Albany, New York Albany ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. It is located on the west bank of the Hudson River, about south of its confluence with the Mohawk River. Albany is the oldes ...

History

20th century

The center, headquarters of

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

'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, diplomat, Army Air Forces pilot, and philanthropist. The son of IBM Corporation founder Thomas J. Watson, he was the second IBM president (1952–71), ...

, 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; it was subsequently known as IBM. In 1911, the financier and noted trust organizer Charles R. Flint, called the ...

, 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 is called the "physical sciences". Definition ...

and

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity between that of a conductor and an insulator. Its conductivity can be modified by adding impurities (" doping") to its crystal structure. When two regions with different doping level ...

s research), services (business modeling, consulting, and operations research), software (programming languages, security,

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...

, data management, and collaboration tools), systems operating systems and server design, and the mathematics and science that support the

information technology Information technology (IT) is a set of related fields within information and communications technology (ICT), that encompass computer systems, software, programming languages, data processing, data and information processing, and storage. Inf ...

industry. The center was founded at

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

in 1945 as the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory, on 116th Street in

Manhattan Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...

, expanding to 115th Street in 1953. More labs were later opened in

Westchester County, New York Westchester County is a County (United States), county located in the southeastern portion of the U.S. state of New York (state), New York, bordering the Long Island Sound and the Byram River to its east and the Hudson River on its west. The c ...

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 administrative divisions of New York#Village, village in Westchester County, New York, Westchester County, New York (state), New York, United States. The population was 8,327 at the 2020 United States census over 8,070 at ...

, with others in Yorktown Heights, and downtown Ossining. The new headquarters were finally located with a new lab on Kitchawan Road in Yorktown Heights designed by architect

Eero Saarinen Eero Saarinen (, ; August 20, 1910 – September 1, 1961) was a Finnish-American architect and industrial designer who created a wide array of innovative designs for buildings and monuments, including the General Motors Technical Center; the pa ...

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 #Fractals and the ...

, Ralph E. Gomory,

Shmuel Winograd __NOTOC__ Shmuel Winograd (; 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 computational aspects of arit ...

, 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 Argentina, Argentine-United States, American mathematician and computer scientist. Beginning in the late 1960s, Chaitin made contributions to algorithmic information theory and metamathematics, ...

, physicist and presidential advisor

Richard Garwin Richard Lawrence Garwin (April 19, 1928 – May 13, 2025) was an American physicist and government advisor, best known as the author of the first hydrogen bomb design. In 1978, Garwin was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering ...

, inventor

Robert Dennard Robert Heath Dennard (September 5, 1932 – April 23, 2024) was an American electrical engineer and inventor. Biography Dennard was born in Terrell, Texas. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Southern Methodist ...

, roboticist Matthew T. Mason, 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 an American 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 ...

, 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. Early life and ed ...

, 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 logge ...

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 ...

Harry Markowitz Harry Max Markowitz (August 24, 1927 – June 22, 2023) was an American economist who received the 1989 John von Neumann Theory Prize and the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Markowitz was a professor of finance at the Rady Scho ...

(Economics Nobel Prize, 1990), electrical engineer Jeffrey Kephart, chemist Gábor A. Somorjai, 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, German-American physicist who made important contributions in diverse areas of the thermodynamics of information processing, condensed matter physics, and the cond ...

, Charles H. Bennett,

Elliott H. Lieb Elliott Hershel Lieb (born July 31, 1932) is an American mathematical physicist. He is a professor of mathematics and physics at Princeton University. Lieb's works pertain to quantum and classical many-body problem, atomic structure, the sta ...

, J. B. Gunn,

Leroy Chang Leroy L. Chang (; 20 January 1936 – 10 August 2008) was a Taiwanese-American experimental physicist and solid state electronics researcher and engineer. Born in China, he studied in Taiwan and then the United States, obtaining his doctorate f ...

Leo Esaki Leo Esaki ( ; ; born March 12, 1925) is a Japanese solid-state physicist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics with Ivar Giaever and Brian Josephson for his work on quantum tunnelling in semiconductors, which led to his invention of the tu ...

(Physics Nobel Prize, 1973), Jay Gambetta,

Uri Sivan use both this parameter and , birth_date to display the person's date of birth, date of death, and age at death) --> , death_place = , death_cause = , body_discovered = , resting_place = , resting_place_coordinates = ...

(president of the

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology is a public university, public research university located in Haifa, Israel. Established in 1912 by Jews under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire, the Technion is the oldest university in the coun ...

), and

Zvi Galil Zvi Galil (; born June 26, 1947) is an Israeli-American computer scientist. He has served as the dean of the Columbia University School of Engineering and as president of Tel Aviv University from 2007 through 2009. From 2010 to 2019, he was the d ...

(former president of

Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv University (TAU) is a Public university, public research university in Tel Aviv, Israel. With over 30,000 students, it is the largest university in the country. Located in northwest Tel Aviv, the university is the center of teaching and ...

21st century

In 2009, the work done at the center from 1960 to 1984 was named an IEEE Milestone.

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, after Protein biosynthesis, synthesis by a ribosome as a linear chain of Amino acid, amino acids, changes from an unstable random coil into a more ordered protein tertiary structure, t ...

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 Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Livermore, California, United States. Originally established in 1952, the laboratory now i ...

. Another well-known installation is ''

Watson Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) is an ultraviolet Raman spectrometer that uses fine-scale imaging and an ultraviolet (UV) laser to determine fine-scale mineralogy, and detect orga ...

'', an

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

system capable of answering

natural language A natural language or ordinary language is a language that occurs naturally in a human community by a process of use, repetition, and change. It can take different forms, typically either a spoken language or a sign language. Natural languages ...

questions, which won several ''

Jeopardy! ''Jeopardy!'' is an American television 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 g ...

'' 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, former contestant, and author. He is best known for his work on the syndicated quiz show ''Jeopardy!'' as a contestant and later its host. Jennings was born in Edm ...

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 the third-highest-earning American game show contestant of all time, behind Ken Jennings ...

Buildings

Yorktown Heights

The Yorktown Heights building, housing the headquarters of

, 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

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 (EUVL, also known simply as EUV) is a technology used in the semiconductor industry for manufacturing integrated circuits (ICs). It is a type of photolithography that uses 13.5 nm extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light fro ...

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, Massachusetts

The Cambridge research lab can be found at 75 Binney Street in

; 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 contaminatio ...

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 university, private medical school in Valhalla, New York. Founded in 1860, it is a member of the Touro University System. NYMC offers advanced degrees through its three schools: the ...

NYMC
"MEDICAL COLLEGE PURCHASES BUILDING, EXPANDS CAMPUS REACH"

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. Eckert
founder and director of the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University

Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Nine color 1961 photographs by G. E. Kidder Smith of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Kitchawan Road, Yorktown Heights

IBM 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