Thomas J. Watson Research Center

The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for the IBM Research Division.

The center is on three sites, with the main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, 45 miles north of New York City, a building in Hawthorne, New York, and offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The research center is named for both Thomas J. Watson Sr and Thomas J. Watson Jr, who led IBM as president and CEO respectively from 1915 (when it was known as CTR) to 1971.

The research is intended to improve hardware (physical sciences and semiconductors research), services (business modelling, consulting, and operations research), software (programming languages, security, speech recognition, and data management), and systems (operating systems and server design).

The center was founded at Columbia University in 1945 as the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory, on 116th Street in New York, expanding to 115th Street in 1953. The headquarters were moved to Yorktown Heights in 1957, with a new lab designed by architect Eero Saarinen 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 include the mathematicians Benoît Mandelbrot, Shmuel Winograd, Gregory Chaitin, the inventor Robert Dennard, and computer scientists John Cocke, Stuart Feldman and Irene Greif.

Buildings

File:Eero Saarinen - IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.jpg

Corridors on the Yorktown Heights buildings designed by Eero Saarinen.
Photo by George Cserna, 1961

Yorktown Heights

The Yorktown Heights building, situated on private land not generally accessible to the public, is a large crescent-shaped structure consisting of three levels by 40 aisles. 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 (See Map of Yorktown Heights Center in the External Links section). The building houses a library, an auditorium and a cafeteria.

Hawthorne

The Hawthorne building is a leased facility located on Skyline Drive, which is part of an industrial park shared by several area businesses. (As with all IBM Research facilities, secured access is still required for the building and parking area.) 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 is smaller than its sister site at Yorktown Heights (with none of the wet lab space found in the Yorktown Heights facility). The primary focus at Hawthorne is software- and services-related research, whereas Yorktown Heights focuses on chemistry, physics, silicon technology, and electrical engineering research, as well as some software and services. The building also contains a cafeteria, presentation center and library. The site, opened in 1984, was designed by Michael Harris Spector.

Cambridge

The Cambridge facility can be found at 1 Rogers Street, Cambridge, MA; it is located in one of IBM's Lotus Software development locations. Research at Cambridge comprises the Collaborative User Experience Group and the XML Standards/Technology Team.

External links

Wallace J. Eckert Founder and Director of the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University
IBM Watson Laboratory at Columbia University
The Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau (1937)
Watson Lab Gallery
Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Map of Yorktown Heights Center
IBM Research Division

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Buildings

See Also

External links