Pervasive computing enables a wide variety of applications, ranging from secretarial support to technical support for customers to services for automobile drivers to retail and business-to-business e-commerce. Secure exchange of monetary value and other items of value, enabling e-commerce through mobile devices, is just one focus of the security research at IBM.

As computing power becomes pervasive in a wide variety of environments, traditional keyboard, mouse, and monitor interfaces will give way to novel interfaces, including natural-language recognition of speech and handwriting, visual recognition of gestures, and even recognition of emotions. Thanks to such interfaces, pervasive applications will help people remain focused on a task rather than distracting their focus from the task to a computer. Interfaces in support of pervasive computing are an important part of IBM's research on human-computer interaction and natural-language processing.

Mobile computing devices must be lightweight, stingy with power, and easy to use. Since revolutionizing laptop computers with the TrackPoint pointing device, IBM Research has been a leader in the design of novel devices for mobile computing.

IBM pursues an extensive worldwide program of research in computer security. Security is especially important in mobile computing because wireless transmissions can be sent and received by unknown parties, and because mobile devices are susceptible to loss and theft.

Mobile applications are difficult to write without middleware providing fundamental mobile-computing services. These services include reliable asynchronous messaging, data storage and synchronization, disconnected publication and subscription, transcoding data to a format appropriate for a particular device and network connection, and service discovery. Much of this work draws on IBM's research in data management.

Wireless communication, whether over a wide area, a local area, or a range of a few feet, is fundamental to many mobile computing applications. IBM research in communications explores the challenges of maintaining reliable connections with mobile devices and enabling wireless communications in small, low-power devices.