History of IBM research in Israel
IBM opened its Israel research presence in 1972 with the IBM Haifa Research Lab, based on the University of Haifa campus and with activity in Haifa and Tel Aviv. The lab works on health care, cloud computing, image and video analytics, and other areas. About a quarter of its technical staff hold doctoral degrees, and many researchers teach at leading Israeli universities such as Technion and supervise graduate theses. Numerous employees have received IBM awards for their achievements. The lab aims to balance short-term, applied work with long-term industrial research, staying closely connected to academia while helping IBM develop new products and shape the future of information technology. Since its inception, IBM Haifa has sought to respond to both IBM’s research goals and the needs of Israeli industry—from non-invasive medical diagnostics to computer-controlled irrigation, scheduling El Al crews, and Hebrew voice recognition. Its work has contributed to IBM technologies such as eLiza (self-managing systems), iSCSI storage, InfiniBand networking, enterprise storage, and information retrieval engines, and its verification tools are used across IBM labs.
The center’s history began when Dr. Alfred Inselberg visited Israel in the early 1970s, and Shimon Yagil and David Cohen promoted the idea of an IBM Scientific Center in Israel. The IBM Israel Scientific Center opened in 1972 at the Technion with Raviv as manager and a small team, tackling projects in medicine, agriculture, economics, computer science, and applied mathematics. Projects were done in partnership with Israeli research groups and published publicly.
In the late 1970s, Raviv sought European collaborations and the team acquired its first computer to solve irrigation problems on kibbutzim. A notable project was the development of an ultrasound system for early liver cancer detection, in collaboration with IBM Austria and Sheba Hospital, along with computer-assisted medical diagnosis work in endocrinology and other fields.
In 1982, IBM sponsored the Haifa Research Group, which helped form the Haifa Research Laboratory. By 1983 the center and HRG were under IBM Israel’s Science and Technology Division, and in 1989 it became a legal IBM Israel subsidiary. In the 1990s, HRL contributed to products and tools, becoming IBM’s largest research lab outside the United States.
Raviv retired in 1999, and the Israel Systems and Technology Group focused on storage technologies, high-speed networks, VLSI design, and software/hardware integration. The Haifa lab later moved to a new building on the University of Haifa campus, with researchers teaching at the Technion, the University of Haifa, and Tel Aviv University, and collaborating with universities in Israel, the United States, and Europe.
Today, IBM Haifa Research Lab employs many PhDs and is part of IBM’s R&D network in Israel. Its researchers participate in international conferences and contribute to IBM products, research tools, and information retrieval technologies across IBM.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 20:52 (CET).