Working from offices in Kendall Square—a neighborhood that’s become an incubator for many hybrid academic/corporate startups—researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab will be focused on basic research with an eye toward commercializing what they discover. IBM wants to “encourage MIT faculty and students to launch companies that will focus on commercializing AI.”
MIT has had a number of these academic/corporate partnerships over the years. Perhaps most famously, the MIT Media Lab has contributed to countless successful products, and tech companies can pay to outsource their research and development to Media Lab groups.
IBM’s AI project Watson is already focused on health care, and MIT has a long history of generalized AI research. MIT professors John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky founded one of the world’s first Artificial Intelligence Labs at MIT in 1959, and they popularized the term AI. The AI Lab became so well-known that, in the late 1960s, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke asked Minsky to advise them on how to create a realistic AI called HAL for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
