Since its inception in April 1998, the IBM Research – India has been driven by one mission: to advance the state-of-the-art in information technology through research in software and services and to provide leadership by delivering innovations to IBM’s clients globally. Collocated in New Delhi and Bangalore, the lab is focused on a wide array of research areas, blending pure and applied research.
IBM Research – India is unique in its clear focus, unmatched talent pool and innovation culture that thrives on worldwide collaborations. As a result, IBM Research – India has emerged as a premier research lab in the region with an impressive list of achievements. These include innovations dealing with unique challenges in emerging markets such as Spoken Web, cleansing of noisy data and scalable analytics platforms for the telecom industry. Some of our innovations for service delivery that have had a significant impact on IBM’s services business include Voice of Customer Analytics for contact centers, OptiManage and Prospect technologies for workforce management, Application Assembly Optimization for streamlining global delivery, and Defect Prevention.
The technical areas being pursued in the India lab include information management, software technologies, IT infrastructure management, high performance computing, mobile-enabled emerging technologies, analytics and human language technologies. Researchers at the lab regularly publish papers in top conferences and journals and had over 100 publications in premier international conferences in 2011 alone. IBM Research – India has won 12 best paper awards since 2009, including five awards in 2011.
IBM has been recognized with the 2009 National Award for Empowering Persons with Disability, given by the President of India for the Spoken Web technology, developed at the India lab. The award recognizes the enormous potential of Spoken Web for improving the lives of persons with disabilities. IBM Research – India is the first IBM lab outside of US lab to have led an IBM Research Big Bet, namely the Mobile Web big bet. Big Bets are IBM Research’s long term, high investment exploratory projects.
One of the handful of business houses to continue with long term investments in R&D, IBM has been awarded the highest number of US patents for 19 years in a row with 6180 U.S. patents issued in 2011. IBM Research is home to five Nobel Prize winners; six A.M. Turing Award winners, including Frances Allen, the first woman recipient; 14 U.S. National Medals of Technology, five National Medals of Science and 19 memberships in the National Academy of Sciences and 11 inductees into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.