Meet The Fellows
GO INSIDE THE INVENTIVE MIND
Follow along as we share the passion and anecdotes of IBMers who helped send people to the moon, hatched trillions of barcodes, launched the computer industry and then even taught one to play Jeopardy! They’re just some of the innovations we’ve been working on to build a smarter planet.
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Patent No. 6236968. 2001.
Sleep prevention car system
Patent for the design of an AI-based “artificial passenger” that helps keep a driver alert with conversation, jokes, stories. When the system detects drowsiness from vocal or visual cues, it could switch topics or even spray the driver with cold water—a time-tested backup to “Wake up!”
Patent No. 7545978. 2009.
Large-scale video stream monitoring.
Cameras capture everything imaginable these days, creating an overwhelming amount of footage. This patented innovation uses analytics to distill torrents of video into an orderly flow of information. Now computers can recognize what’s important—zeroing in on the man driving dangerously—while leaving the guy belting out ’80s power ballads to work on his falsetto in peace.
Sometimes the greatest scientific breakthroughs happen by chance. Dropping a piece of silicon into hydrofluoric acid, for instance, allowed IBM Fellow Bernard Meyerson to discover the silicon germanium chip. The rest, as they say, is history, as SiGe influences how our WiFi, cell phones and GPS devices work today.
Inventing is great. But sometimes it’s fun to break things apart, too.
Watson, and his uncanny ability to answer anything from trivia to critical medical inquiries, came from a patented IBM innovation.
(Thanks for the photo Stefania!)
Gone, but not forgotten. Time recording machines came from a patented IBM innovation.
(Thanks for the photo, Heidi!)
So long, silicon chip? This innovation for one-atom thick graphene transistors can transmit electrical pulses 1,000 times faster than silicon. That could give a jolt to the rate that our computers and electronics improve—and uphold Moore’s Law for decades to come. See the newly-awarded Patent No. 8,344,358.
That little, one-finger, laptop doohickey (or as we like to call it, a TrackPoint pointing stick) came from a patented IBM innovation.
(Thanks for the photo Dimitri!)
From StarWars’ Planet Mustafar to StarTrek’s Planet Genesis, hyper-realistic computer animated graphics came from fractal geometry, a patented IBM innovation.
“As a huge fan of photography and admiring Benoit Mandelbrot’s genius since college, I believe fractals are one of the most brilliant depiction of intelligence. Sadly we lost him last year, but we will never lose his work!”
(Cool screensaver. Thanks for the photo, Silvia!)
Space Shuttle Endeavour’s orbiter avionics data processing system came from a patented IBM innovation.
(Thanks for the photo, Britt!)
One Smart Century:
No one earned more patents from 1993-2012. But in fairness, we did have 80 years to prepare.
Game on! The microprocessors in the Sony PlayStation came from a patented IBM innovation.
(Thanks for the photo, Tommy!)
Flex circuits, the bendable backbone for next-gen smart phones, biomedical devices and wearable gadgets came from an IBM innovation.
(Thanks for the photo and video, Stephen!)
