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IBM China Research institute, quietly “closed”. It once witnessed the glorious development of global giants in China, but now it has quietly become a star. IBM’s China Development Lab, IBM Systems Lab and customer Innovation Center are located in the same building, and will continue to serve as an innovation center for China’s development in the future.

IBM China Research Institute, one of IBM’s 12 largest research institutes in the world and the most influential one in China, has been reported to have been completely shut down.



Recently, a weibo user @Ma Li broke the news on Zhiqun that IBM CRL (IBM China Research Institute) was closed, with an exclamation to remember this once glorious institute, “Quietly. The wheel of history rolls forward”.



Founded in September 1995, IBM China Research Institute is now 25 years old. Many famous scientific and technological achievements have been produced in this division, including the famous artificial intelligence program Watson.



Xinzhiyuan verified that the news is basically true, “IBM China Research institute has been closed recently, but IBM China Development laboratory, IBM China Systems Laboratory and customer innovation center are also in the same building. IBM’s future RESEARCH and development layout in China, may take these research laboratories and innovation center as the fulcrum.”

The news caused a stir in the tech world.

On the one hand, in the increasingly fierce competition in the Internet era, such a well-known, technical content is quite high foreign research institute closed, inevitably sigh.



On the other hand, IBM recently reported its 10th consecutive quarter of declining revenue, and the former “Big Blue” seems to have turned a corner.



This is the end of an era, but also the end of a generation of foreign companies, let’s start with IBM China Research Institute itself.

IBM’s first research center in the developing world, the cradle of Watson

IBM China Research Center, also known as IBM CRL, is located in zhongguancun Software Park in the northwest corner of Shangdi Information Industry Base in Beijing. It is the first research center established by IBM in a developing country.



In 2008, IBM China Research Institute Shanghai branch was established. Over the past two decades, there have been hundreds of researchers working at the institute, most of whom hold PHDS and masters degrees from world-class universities in China.



IBM CRL focuses on systems and networks, information management and collaboration, distributed computing and systems management, and next Generation services.

In cognitive computing, IBM China is best known for Watson, a 2011 computer system named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson that can answer questions posed by natural language.



Watson has been in development for four years and has been developed by nearly 30 researchers around the world, including IBM’s China Research Institute, Japan research Institute and Israel Research Institute.

Watson is an application of advanced natural language processing, message retrieval, knowledge representation, automatic reasoning, machine learning and other open question answering technologies. According to the researchers, Watson can process 500 gigabytes of data per second, the equivalent of reading a million books a second. In 2011 the system was featured on the US TV quiz show Jeopardy! (Dangerous journey!) He beat two human champions and rose to fame.



The promise of this research, once touted as a medical-assisted artificial intelligence system, seems simple and practical: simply feed the patient’s personal information into the system, and the system will recommend appropriate treatments for doctors based on reams of information from medical studies, medical guidelines, clinical trials and so on.



In addition to cognitive computing, IBM China Research Institute focuses on industry solutions, Computing as a Service, and Internet of Things.

But IBM’s pillar areas may not have lived up to expectations, with Watson’s pioneering entry into healthcare floundering and its “Internet of Things 3.0” failing to bear fruit.

With the rise of domestic Internet companies, IBM and many other foreign companies have played an increasingly marginal role in China. The Times are there, but it may also have something to do with IBM’s overall woes in recent years.

From Watson to Iot 3.0, IBM China Research Institute has developed for 25 years

IBM Research has 12 laboratories around the world, three of them in the United States.

The nine outside the continental United States are Zurich, Switzerland; Haifa, Israel; Tokyo, Japan; Beijing, China; Delhi and Bangalore, India; Nairobi, Kenya; Johannesburg, South Africa; Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil; Dublin, Ireland; and Melbourne, Australia.



As AI media, Shinjiwon also communicated with several deans of IBM China Research Institute.

On March 29, 2018, IBM China research institute of Shen Xiaowei new intellectual yuan AI industry transition summit, the titled “foresee the artificial intelligence in the era of innovation and transition” speech, artificial intelligence, quantum computing is discussed and the block is calculated and commercial chain technology is how to changing the pattern of forward-looking technology innovation trend of artificial intelligence era.



In 2019, Yang Jing, founder of New Zhiyuan, and Ms. Lin Yonghua, the first female director of IBM China Research Institute since its establishment 24 years ago, attended the IEEE WIE Summit.



For a long time, IBM China research institute of research across many disciplines and industry, the key research topics, including big data analytics, cloud computing, Internet of things, and the technology innovation and application of cognitive computing, at present in environmental protection, electric power and energy, logistics and supply chain, medical and financial services, and other fields have a successful solution.

Even so, like many foreign companies leaving China, IBM China Research is saying goodbye.

Will foreign companies become increasingly marginalized in Post-2020 China?

Throughout recent years, there have been many examples of foreign companies and foreign research institutes saying “goodbye” to China, suggesting that the golden age of foreign companies is gone forever.

On March 19, 2015, Yahoo announced its withdrawal from the Chinese market and the closure of its Beijing R&D center.



In 2019, Amazon announced it was pulling out of China.



That same year, Oracle, which makes enterprise software, closed its research and development center in China and laid off about 900 employees after being hit by cloud computing.



Once the high foreign building, now brilliant are not in, a lot of people are lamenting: the era of foreign enterprises has passed, the foreign employees wearing suits and ties, drinking coffee to speak English beautiful scenery line has not.

First of all, it is a way for foreign companies to make strategic adjustments in the new era of technological decoupling between China and the United States. Just like IBM’s tacit response to the closure of its China research institute:



On the other hand, in sharp contrast, Chinese enterprises have set up their own research institutes one after another, such as Huawei Research Institute. Perhaps these research institutes rooted in the local environment have more advantages for long-term development in China.

The closure of IBM China Research Institute has caused a wide discussion among netizens.

Some miss the once-glamorous “dream job” :



But it’s more of a lament for The Times:





Anyway, hats off to IBM China Research! And then a serious goodbye.

Editor: Xiao Yun