IBM Research and ETH Zurich open a new era of innovation We spoke with Alessandro Curioni, director of the IBM Research Zurich lab, about the future of computing and IBM’s long and productive collaboration with Switzerland’s top research university. IBM Research and ETH Zurich just signed a new research agreement, with the goal of creating the algorithmic underpinnings of the next era in computing. This partnership has been longstanding, with the IBM-ETH relationship dating back 70 years, to the very start of IBM’s presence in Zurich. The Zurich lab’s inaugural director, Ambrose Speiser, was a young computer science professor at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), hired by Thomas Watson Jr. himself to build a premier European lab staffed by the brightest minds on the continent. “It turned out – not unexpectedly – that the new IBM laboratory in Zurich was an attractive proposal for young engineers looking for a position,” Speiser later wrote in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. “Accordingly, it was not difficult to assemble a group of capable people.” Capable was an understatement. Far from IBM’s main research lab in New York, IBM Zurich grew into a scientific powerhouse in its own right, with two Nobel Prizes to its name and discoveries that helped pave the way for nanoscale semiconductors and electronics, as well as high-performance scientific computing. IBM’s close tie to ETH Zurich has been part of the winning formula. ETH supplied fresh talent to IBM, and sometimes the reverse, as seasoned researchers left IBM to teach at ETH, ensuring a steady exchange of ideas between academia and industry and applied science. The lab’s outsized reputation drew Alessandro Curioni, then a PhD student at Italy’s elite Scuola Normale Superiori in Pisa. He came as an intern to IBM Research Zurich, then a hotbed for computational