IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center — Cambridge
The lab in Cambridge was founded in 1992 as Lotus Research by IBM Fellow Irene Greif, joining the IBM Research – Thomas J Watson Research Center in 2000. It has been at the forefront of advances in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), publishing academic papers, generating numerous patents, and transferring technology to many products.
Today, the lab is home to diverse research groups working on technological innovations affecting people in all walks of life.
- The Cognitive User Experience Lab builds and studies novel technologies and applications in the area of Cognitive Computing. The engineers and scientists' research approach combines user-experience with applied analytics focused on three areas: (1) industry-specific cognitive solutions that support complex real-world decision-making in the aviation domain, (2) enterprise virtual assistants that use conversational natural language to offer task- and knowledge-oriented suggestions to employees, and (3) cognitive social solutions that apply analytics and machine learning to collaboration tools to guide knowledge workers toward actionable insights and effective collaborative results.
- IBM Accessibility shapes IT standards and global government policies in technology innovation so that digital access is possible across society, regardless of an individual's age or ability. Accessibility can be easily embedded in client solutions in a way that enhances usability and engagement across all platforms.
- The Health Analytics Research Group, part of the Center of Computational Health, focuses on the research, development and application of data mining and machine learning techniques to analyze, model and derive insights from real world healthcare data. Areas of research include similarity analytics, predictive modeling, interactive visual analytics, disease modeling, translational medicine, and scalable analytic platforms.
- The Computational Science Center, part of Watson Data Centric Systems, addresses the challenges of achieving Petascale and Exascale performance on IBM's very high end system platforms, running real workloads to obtain significant results in science, engineering, business and social policy, and partnering and collaborating with key IBM clients on the most challenging applications and workloads on these large systems.
- The video analytics team develops systems that emulate the human ability to integrate input over time from multiple modalities (audio-visual data streams) into deep video understanding. To achieve this challenging goal, the team will collaborate with researchers from the MIT Department of Brain & Cognitive Science, bringing together brain scientists, cognitive scientists, and cognitive computing scientists – each gaining from each others experience, insights and innovations.

Meet the researchers
-
Casey Dugan
Senior Software Engineer, Cognitive User Experience
-
Nicola Palmarini
Global Digital Creative and Technology Advocate, IBM Accessibility
-
Kenney Ng
Research Staff Member and Manager, Health Analytics Research
-
Kirk Jordan
Distinguished Engineer, Computational Science Center-Data Centric Systems
Our work
What's happening in Cambridge
- IBM Accessibility on Facebook
Everyone can reach their potential, regardless of age or ability.
- Internal Crowdfunding at IBM
Could this be a way to surface the next best ideas?
- UMass Boston Women in Science Club visit IBM Cambridge
Don’t be afraid to take risks!
- Boston Business Journal
Named IBMer@casey_dugan one of 25 Women to Watch in 2015
Featured Projects
- Social Pulse
Taking the real-time temperature of an enterprise - beyond the static survey
- #SelfieStation
A "selfie" station that remembers you and your network
- Client Experience Jam
Four days of data from 248,000 IBMers around the world
- Business Process Insight
Enabling the management of semi-structured processes