IBM Research - Zurich (Officially) Turns 50

On 22 May 1963, IBM Research was officially inaugurated in Rueschlikon, Switzerland, the leafy suburb of Zurich. A temporary lab was actually established in 1956 in the nearby town of Adliswil, but it was on this day where the current lab was opened in front of hundreds of guests, including IBM's CEO Thomas Watson Jr.

A History of Success

While he never could have imagined it, the Zurich lab's first director Ambros Speiser made a significant dent in the history of science when he helped build IBM's first research lab outside of the United States.

From left to right, Ambros Speiser,  the first lab director,
and Thomas Watson Jr, CEO of IBM at the opening
of the Rüschlikon lab on May 22, 1963.

Five Nobel prizes have been awarded to members of IBM Research, four of which went to scientists in Zurich.

In 1986, Gerd Binnig and the late Heinrich Rohrer received the Nobel Prize for physics for their invention of the scanning tunneling microscope. Only one year later, Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller received the same award for their discovery of high-temperature superconductivity.

Other breakthroughs include the token ring, the secure electronic transaction protocol, storage sequence detection and energy efficient supercomputers.

Since its founding 50 years ago, the Zurich laboratory has grown its spectrum of research areas, which now ranges from exploratory research to software and services, such as the optimization of supply chains and trains schedules and routing.

Why Switzerland?

Original invitation to the opening in 1963.

IBM had many reasons for founding a research lab outside of the United States in the 1950s. And with the success of its recently opened San Jose lab, management realized the benefits of having research conducted with the support of -- but not the proximity to -- headquarters in New York.

Switzerland wasn’t IBM’s first option for a European research lab. In 1955, an IBM electrical engineer named Arthur Samuel was tasked with scouting the final short list of cities. IBM eventually selected Switzerland for its proximity to talent, which included access to universities, such as ETH Zurich. The country is also an attractive place to live for expatriates -- today, employees from 45 different nationalities currently work at the lab.

The Zurich Lab Today

Scientists at the Zurich Lab planted
trees in Rueschlikon in 2011.

The expansion in Zurich continued well into 2000s. Today, there are five departments including storage, computer science and systems, in addition to physics (science and technology) and mathematics (mathematics and computational sciences).

In addition, the lab has a new cutting edge facility called the Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center, named for the two Nobel Laureates. Speiser’s intuition to keep the lab close to ETH Zurich proved prescient. Nobel Laureates K. Alex Müller, Georg Bednorz and Heinrich Rohrer all came from ETH. And now, five decades later, the partners' $90 million facility features a large clean room and six noise-free labs unlike any in the world.

In addition to exploring nanotech, IBM scientists are working on some of the greatest challenges of our society today, including:

• ASTRON, The Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and IBM are collaborating on a 32.9 million euro, five-year project to build an extremely fast, but low-power exascale computer systems targeted for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The SKA is an international consortium to build the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. Scientists estimate that the processing power required to operate the telescope will be equal to several millions of today’s fastest computers. 

• IBM’s Battery 500 project, led by scientists at IBM Research – Almaden in California, is an interdisciplinary consortium to develop a lithium–air battery that aims to increase the range of electric vehicles to 500 miles (approximately 800 km). This is more than five times the range of today’s batteries, which average some 150 km per charge. If the project is successful, battery-powered vehicles could finally become a practical reality and thus overcome the main obstacle to becoming generally accepted and widespread. In a recent survey conducted by IBM, 64% of consumers said that the limited range was their strongest objection to driving electric vehicles.

• To improve the much-strained energy grid, IBM scientists are collaborating with utility companies in Denmark and Switzerland to improve the balance between demand and the supply of renewable energy in projects including EcoGrid EU and Flexlast.

While much as changed at IBM Research – Zurich, the essence of collaboration and the spirit of innovation and excellence that Speiser envisioned remains true to this day.


 

Profile of an IBM Scientist: Abu Sebastian

Who: Abu Sebastian

Location: IBM Research - Zurich

Nationality: Indian (born in Kerala)

Abu (right) accepting the IFAC Award.

Something about me: I’ve lived on four different continents for at least three years including India (Asia), Nigeria (Africa), the state of Iowa in the U.S. (North America) and Switzerland (Europe).

Focus: Dynamics, modeling and control at the nanometer scale.

Nanotechnology was an emerging area when I was starting my PhD. We found that control and system-theoretic concepts can play a key role in addressing some of the challenging problems in the area. That is how I got into this field of research. The multi-disciplinary nature of the research as well as the strong experimental component makes it particularly attractive.

I have worked on, and continue to work on areas such as scanning-probe technology, nanopositioning, nanoscale sensing, and data storage. More recently, I have focused my attention on emerging memory  technologies. One area that keeps me awake at night is the development of a low-power, high endurance, scalable non-volatile memory concept that can bridge the wide performance gap in a computing system (between storage and the rest of the computing system).”

If I have to predict the future,  I see great potential for a memory element to serve simultaneously as both memory and logic, or even as component of a non-von-Neumann neuromorphic computing hardware.

Career Advice: The current multi-disciplinary nature of research demands a diverse background. For example, during my studies I focused my attentions in math, physics, systems theory and engineering.

Fond Memory:When I first joined IBM as a post-doc, I had the privilege to work on a project with IBM Fellow and Nobel Laureate Gerd Binnig. He was incredibly humble. I remember him once politely knocking on my office door asking, ‘Would it be okay if we scheduled some time for a chat?’

What's New: Abu was recently awarded the International Federation of Automatic Control’s Young Researcher Award for 2013.

The award is presented triennially to a researcher who is 40 years or younger (on the first of March of the year of the award), who has an established a history of participation in and contributions to IFAC mechatronic systems activities, and who has demonstrated outstanding research contributions in mechatronics, either of a fundamental or applied nature.

Connect with Abu on LinkedIn.

Atom + Atom = Molecule

IBM Research scientists Susanne Baumann and Ileana Rau explain how atoms form molecules, and why they used carbon monoxide in the film A Boy and His Atom.

What properties attract atoms to connect and form molecules?

Susanne Baumann

Atoms contain charged particles such as electrons and protons. The protons reside in the nucleus, while the electrons orbit around it. When you put atoms together, some of their electrons get shared between the atoms. This binds the atoms together, and they may form a molecule or a more complex structure such as a crystal.

Atoms can also interact (connect) via electrostatic forces (attraction or repulsion between charged particles), which can also lead to the formation of a bond between atoms. Depending on the details, such as what kind of atoms you use, you can have ionic bonds, covalent bonds, hydrogen bonds, or others.

Traditionally, physical chemists study the bonds between different atoms.

Why were carbon monoxide molecules used to film "A Boy and His Atom"?

Ileana Rau

First, the atoms that make up the surface (for the movie shoot) are all the same kind -- copper (but silver and aluminum are also used). They are arranged in a periodic pattern called a crystal lattice. As a result, these atoms are tightly stuck together. Now, depending on what kind of atom we put on top of this surface, the bond between this atom and the copper surface can be weak (the atom just slips around the surface easily), strong (the atom is stuck to the atoms in the surface) or somewhere in between.

To make the movie, we used carbon monoxide because the bond between its carbon atom and the copper are well balanced. The oxygen atom also must bind with the tip of the scanning tunneling microscope so that we could move the entire molecule.

We also need the carbon atom to bind with the copper surface tightly enough to hold still while acquiring the image. It turns out that carbon monoxide on copper has just the right balance of these bonds between the atoms of the surface, the atoms of the tip, and the oxygen atom to be arranged on top of the surface (although we can also slide single atoms such as iron, cobalt, manganese, sodium, cesium, and iodine on a copper surface).

The carbon atom in the molecule attaches to a copper atom in the surface, while the oxygen atom sticks out. The atoms in the STM tip pull the oxygen atom around. The oxygen atom then pulls the carbon along with it.

We don't see the atoms that make up the copper surface -- we're actually "seeing" their electrons. Inside the copper crystal, the conduction electrons are shared among all atoms, which forms a uniform background at the resolution that we used (a magnification of 100 million). You see these electrons as a cloud or waves that appear around the individual structures we built out of carbon monoxide -- that make up the frames of the movie.

Feeling an Atom

 

How to move an atom

Chris Lutz
IBM Research scientist
and atom mover

IBM scientists take you inside the workings of a scanning tunneling microscope and the discoveries they’ve made.

Want to see what an atom really looks like close up; or try to actually move one? All you’ll need is a two-ton scanning tunneling microscope – otherwise known as an STM. Not something you can easily buy or use as part of a personal science lab.

But don’t worry. IBM Research has a couple at its lab in Almaden, California. They work at negative 268 Celsius (the temperature needed to hold the atoms still) and operate in a completely clean and still environment. To demonstrate the precision of an STM – and explain the properties and possibilities of nanotechnology and manipulating atoms – my colleagues and I worked with animators and movie makers to produce several videos, including the world’s smallest stop-motion film, "A Boy and His Atom."

Atomic Memory In 2012, IBM Research scientists create the world’s smallest magnetic memory bit using only 12 atoms. The still-experimental atomic-scale magnet memory is 100 times denser than today’s hard disk drives and solid state memory chips.

The microscope works by moving a sharp metal needle. The tip of the needle is both our eyes and our hands. It senses the atoms to make images of where the atoms are located, and then we move it closer to the atoms to tug them along the surface of a copper sheet to new positions.  

The needle – a copper-tipped iridium wire – is moved around by attaching it to three piezoelectric crystals, which are little blocks of ceramic material that slightly change their size when a voltage is applied to them. When we change the electrical voltages, the piezos move, which then makes the needle move and pulls the atoms into new places.

Making “A Boy and His Atom”

A tiny current flows between the needle tip and the surface by a process called quantum mechanical tunneling – thus the reason for the word “tunneling” in the name of the microscope.

A scanning tunneling microscope does not have an eyepiece lens like typical light microscopes do. Each frame in the film is a computer-synthesized image that measures where the needle feels a “bump” of carbon monoxide on top of the tightly honeycombed copper surface – magnified about 100 million times.

Another way to understand this is to imagine you are in a dark room, but want to draw a picture of the objects on a table in the room. To do so, you would carefully sweep your hand over the objects to feel their shape, and note down or remember the shape in order to draw a picture of the shape you felt. 

With atoms, the STM does this by sensing a small electrical current that flows when the tip nearly touches the atoms.

Our team chose carbon monoxide – a molecule with only two atoms – because the oxygen atom sticks out, or away from, the copper surface (the “bump”). It also holds its position well, while also not being too sticky, so it’s easy to pull carbon monoxide into new positions.

The team arranged and shot 242 different alignments of carbon monoxide molecules to make the film.

Moving a single atom takes only a few seconds, but that's after the days it takes to cool the microscope and prepare a clean surface, the hours it takes to get the microscope poised over the surface, and the minutes to zoom in on a suitably clean patch of the surface to find an atom.

Not just a fun way to make movies

IBM Fellow Don Eigler ushered in a new wave of nanotechnology research by writing “IBM” with 35 xenon atoms in 1989. Since Don’s experiment, we have learned how to move other kinds of atoms on a variety of surfaces, and have invented new ways to move atoms.

Our biggest breakthroughs have come through building structures that have never existed before, as we have tried to answer scientific questions related to the magnetic effects of atomic structures, how atoms move and interact and how they guide the flow of electrical current. We demonstrated phenomena and technologies so unique that we needed to coin new names for them: quantum corrals, molecule cascades, and atomic memory.

Last year, our team proved that a bit of data can be stored on a mere 12 iron atoms. Today’s storage devices use about one million atoms per bit. A commercial device with this kind of density would be the size of a thumbnail and could store every movie ever made. Right now that bit is being stored within 12 extremely cold atoms. But as we reach the limits of Moore’s Law, nanotechnology experiments like this will be what keeps compute power – and storage – on pace to double every two years, and perhaps well beyond that. 

This article is by Chris Lutz, physicist and research scientist at IBM Research – Almaden.
  

IBM Fellow Chieko Asakawa awarded Medal of Honor

Awarded in Japan's Emperor's name, the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon is given to outstanding contributors in valuable invention, creation, and modernization in academic and artistic fields.

IBM Fellow
Chieko Asakawa

The government of Japan awarded the 2013 Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon to IBM Fellow Chieko Asakawa for her outstanding contributions to accessibility research, including the development of a voice browser for the visually impaired. 

Chieko joined IBM Research - Tokyo in 1985, before PCs and the Internet were commonplace, to work on Braille digitization. In the late 1980s, she collaborated with Braille libraries and volunteer groups from across Japan to advance the digitization project. The group launched an inter-library Braille network in Japan with the goal of putting Braille books online in 1988. 

Chieko and her team further opened the Internet to the visually impaired in the 1990s by developing the earliest practical voice browser. Until the Home Page Reader's creation, information on the Internet was closed to the visually impaired. The voice browser interprets web coding, and designs a simple way to navigate web pages -- which proved to be one of the biggest challenges in developing the software because the visually impaired cannot use a mouse.

After much trial and error, the team designed an intuitive navigation system that let the blind and visually impaired surf the web using a numeric keypad. A male voice read text, while a female voice read links. Home Page Reader gave the blind and visually impaired the same online access as the rest of society -- no more waiting for today's news in tomorrow's newspaper. It was ultimately used by a significant number of Japan's visually impaired citizens, and others around the world. 

By the early 2000s Chieko and her team created aDesigner, a tool for web designers and developers to check accessibility issues on their pages at a glance -- in hopes of accelerating web accessibility adoption. The team's disability simulator overcomes the limitations of current industry offerings by ensuring a website's usability and compliance to current accessibility guidelines. With this tool, designers can experience their site as a user who is blind, color blind, or has other impairments such as cataracts might experience it.

IBM contributed aDesigner to the Eclipse Foundation as part of the Accessibility Tools Framework, a collection of accessibility tools and building blocks developed by Chieko and her team. Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications made another tool, miChecker, available to help drive social inclusion and active social participation of Japan's citizens. Based on the aDesigner, miChecker offers user-friendly features for government agencies and municipalities to ensure accessibility compliance with the accessibility guidelines, JIS X 8341-3:2010. 

In 2008, Chieko and her team launched the Social Accessibility research project. It's a collaborative crowdsouring environment for the visually impaired and other volunteers to work together online to improve the accessibility of the Internet. The project also explores how computer and human intelligence can complement each other, combining the intelligence of man and machine to find out if crowdsourcing can correct automatic translations made by a computer. And can a computer learn from the changes?

"As aging progresses, social connection becomes more important than ever. Accessibility technologies will play an increasingly important role not only in the cyber world but also in the real world. In pursuit of my aspiration to help realize the era of social inclusion for everyone, I am strive to advance my research work together with my colleagues around the world," Chieko said.

The world's population exceeds 7 billion, of which about one third consists of those who are disabled, elderly, or illiterate. Chieko's research work is creating opportunities for more people to participate in society, through technologies such as social computing and mobile computing.

Earth Day Collaboration Aims to Harness the Energy of 2,000 Suns

It would take only two percent of the Sahara Desert’s land area to supply the world’s electricity needs. Unfortunately, current solar technologies on the market today are too expensive and slow to produce, require rare Earth minerals and lack the efficiency to make such massive installations practical. To address this scientists aren't thinking bigger, in fact they are thinking much smaller -- at the nanoscale.

A new collaboration between IBM, Airlight Energy and Swiss university partners 
will develop an affordable photovoltaic system capable of concentrating, on average, the power of 2,000 suns, onto hundreds of 1x1 cm chips.

Rendering by Airlight Energy of the prototype
HCPVT system.

The prototype High Concentration PhotoVoltaic Thermal (HCPVT) system uses a large parabolic dish, made from a multitude of mirror facets, which is attached to a tracking system that determines the best angle based on the position of the sun.

Once aligned, the sun’s rays reflect off the mirror onto several microchannel-liquid cooled receivers with triple junction photovoltaic chips -- each 1x1 centimeter chip can convert 200-250 watts, on average, over a typical eight hour day in a sunny region. 
Such system can be profitably applied in sunny regions where sustainable energy, drinkable water and cool air are in short supply.

The direct cooling solution with very small pumping power is inspired by the hierarchical branched blood supply system of the human body and has been already tested by IBM scientists in high performance computers, including Aquasar. An initial demonstrator of the multi-chip receiver was developed in a previous collaboration between IBM and the Egypt Nanotechnology Research Center.

“We plan to use triple-junction photovoltaic cells on a microchannel-cooled module which can directly convert more than 30 percent of collected solar radiation into electrical energy, and allow for the efficient recovery of waste heat above 50 percent,” said Dr. Bruno Michel, manager, advanced thermal packaging at IBM Research - Zurich.

“The design of the system is elegantly simple.” said Andrea Pedretti, CTO of Airlight Energy.

He adds, “We replace expensive steel and glass with low-cost concrete and simple pressurized metalized foils. The small high-tech components, in particular the microchannel coolers and the molds, can be manufactured in Switzerland, with the remaining construction and assembly done in the region of the installation. This leads to a win-win situation where the system is cost competitive and jobs are created in both regions.”

To provide fresh water, IBM scientists and engineers are utilizing a world leading technology they developed for water-cooled supercomputers. With both the Aquasar and SuperMUC supercomputers water is used to absorb heat from the processor chips, which is then used to provide space heating for the facilities.


In the HCPVT system, instead of heating a building, the 90 degree Celsius water will be used to heat salty water that then passes through a porous membrane distillation system where it is vaporized and desalinated to generate 30-40 liters of drinkable water per square meter of receiver area per day. A large multi-tracker system could thereby provide enough water for a town.

With such a high concentration and a radically low cost design, scientists believe they can achieve a cost per aperture area below $250 per square meter. This is three times lower than comparable systems. The levelized cost of energy will be less than 10 cents per kilowatt hour (KWh).

The scientists envision the system providing sustainable energy and fresh water to locations around the world including Southern Europe, Africa, Arabic peninsula, southwestern United States, South America, and Australia. Remote tourism locations are also an interesting market, particularly resorts on small islands, such as the Maldives, Seychelles and Mauritius.

Happy Earth Day.

Research transportation team designs smarter railways simulator

An Open Collaborative Research project in Zurich is using algorithmic technology to automate train movement and identify impediments to smooth, timely train travel.

Marco Laumanns
Project Leader, Transportation
& Operations Research

Simulated scenarios have an obvious advantage over real world environments: When the Law of Unintended Consequences strikes, nobody gets hurt. Nowhere is this more true than in the railroad industry where a disabled train can spark a cascade of dispatching problems. To help create a more efficient railway system, a team of IBM researchers is working on a smarter transportation project that will help the industry optimize train movement across a nation's entire railway system.

The simulation project – part of an Open Collaborative Research effort to share open source code with university partner Zurich University of Applied Sciences – began in response to the increasing demand for rail transportation in Europe. Railway networks have become more congested, especially in hub stations.

Transportation planners compared two basic mitigation strategies: Building new railway infrastructure versus managing existing networks through smarter transportation solutions, such as algorithms. They asked a key question: What is the best way to evaluate train activity and metrics? The answer: Through simulation.

Modeling networks: an engineering challenge

Modeling train networks is a long-standing engineering challenge. Older train simulations involved studying track layout to get a fix on the effectiveness of various signaling systems. Indeed, some railway functions, such as signaling, are well served by existing physical simulations. The IBM team is using new algorithmic technology to address other network issues, such as network-wide dispatching; performance analysis and visualization, and passenger behavior and other impeding external events.

Dispatching in China Comparable railway optimization efforts are under way in China, where IBM opened a Global Rail Innovation Center to advance next-gen rail systems.

The IBM team, coordinated by Marco Laumanns, project leader for the Transportation and Operations Research Group at IBM Research - Zurich, points out that the team's focus is on the simulation framework's "logical layer," the interface between the management layer -- which includes a sophisticated train scheduler -- and the physical layer -- which ultimately mimics the real railway network.

"Think of that middle logical layer as the place where data is shoveled back and forth between the other two layers," says Laumanns, who spoke in January about the evolution of railway scheduling optimization techniques at IT13 Rail. The day-long symposium drew experts from IT research, industry and government.

System-wide benefits

At present, a framework does not exist for a coordinated simulation of a complex railway system, such as the one that crisscrosses Europe. Only aspects of Europe's railway system have been simulated, including train runs and simple dispatching rules.

For commuters, an optimized and simulated railway network would help ensure a more predictable travel experience. For network operators, such a framework would offer up a system-wide picture of commuter and freight trains across countries -- and continents. Moreover, it would enable the seamless integration of existing railway tools.

For IBM -- and for optimization researchers overall -- the open source project will demonstrate the power of analytics and optimization science to develop more responsive control systems in high-speed rail and other logistics industries.