Norishige Morimoto

Norishige (Noly) Morimoto is the director of the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory, leading nearly 200 researchers in various research fields of computer science, services science, and strategic areas of the physical sciences. Noly started his IBM career in computer technologies as a hardware engineer working on displays in 1987.

During 1993-1995, he participated in an IBM scholarship program to conduct data hiding research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, and led a derivative project at Tokyo Research Lab in 1996. Between 1996 and 2002, he conducted research in various areas such as mobile and pervasive computing, and brought Research innovation and collaboration to the industry leaders in movies, electronics, mobile computing, and pervasive computing.

During 2004 and 2005, he worked with IBM Business Consulting Services in TRL's On-Demand Innovation Services (ODIS). He met and worked with many CEOs, CTOs, and lab directors as part of our R&D innovation consulting engagements. He connected researchers with clients and the marketplace in Japan. Noly led the Science and Technology team in 2005, and in the following year, became an executive assistant in the IBM Research Division at Yorktown, and worked with both Paul Horn and John Kelly III.

Noly led the work developing the IBM Collaboratory, a new concept allowing IBM to develop collaborative research relationships anywhere in the world, even in countries where IBM does not have a full scale IBM Research Laboratory. Under Noly's guidance, IBM announced its first collaboratory in 2008 and several more announcements are pending around the world.

Based on his diverse experiences in collaborating with business units, universities, governments, and commercial partners, in 2009 Noly was named the director of Tokyo Research Lab, where he will work to enhance the great research done in Japan, while strengthening the ties all of the research labs and among IBM’s worldwide business units, delivering innovation that matters to our clients and the world.

Noly earned a Bachelor of Science in electronic engineering from Keio University, Japan, and a Master of Science in electronic engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, U.S. He was born and raised in Taiwan until the age of 9, and is fluent in Japanese, English, Mandarin Chinese, and Taiwanese.