AT&T Labs
 | |
| Company type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Industry | Research & Development |
| Predecessor | AT&T Laboratories (1925-2005) |
| Founded | 1988 |
| Headquarters | Atlanta, Georgia Austin, Texas Middletown, New Jersey Redmond, Washington San Ramon, California Warrenville, Illinois |
| Owner | AT&T |
| Parent | AT&T Communications |
| Website | www |
AT&T Labs, Inc. is the research & development division of AT&T, the telecommunications company. It employs some 1,800 people in various locations, including: Bedminster NJ; Middletown, NJ; Manhattan, NY; Warrenville, IL; Austin, TX; Dallas, TX; Atlanta, GA; San Francisco, CA; San Ramon, CA; and Redmond, WA. The main research division, made up of around 450 people, is based across the Bedminster, Middletown, San Francisco, and Manhattan locations.
AT&T Labs traces its history from AT&T Bell Labs. Much research is in areas traditionally associated with networks and systems, ranging from the physics of optical transmission to foundational topics in computing and communications. Other research areas address the technical challenges of large operational networks and the resulting large data sets.
Achievements
Since its creation in 1996, AT&T Labs has been issued over 2,000 US patents. Researchers at AT&T Labs developed UWIN a package for running Unix applications on Windows; Graphviz, a graph visualization system; Natural Voices text-to-speech software; speech recognition software; E4SS (open source software for developing telecommunications services); very large databases; video processing software; and other useful open-source tools and libraries. Researchers at AT&T Labs wrote Hancock, a data mining language that sorted through 100 million records nightly from the parent company's long-distance phone network.[1] The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (now operated by the OEIS foundation) is the creation of former AT&T Researcher Neil Sloane.[2][3]
Researchers at AT&T Labs have successfully transmitted 100 Gigabits per second over a single optical link. In 2009, AT&T researchers led the winning team in the Netflix Prize competition for helping to improve Netflix's movie recommendation algorithm.[4]
History
AT&T Laboratories, Inc., known informally as AT&T Labs, was founded in 1996, as a result of the split of AT&T Bell Laboratories into separate R&D organizations supporting AT&T Corporation and Lucent Technologies. Lucent retained the name Bell Labs and AT&T adopted the name AT&T Laboratories for its R&D organization.
AT&T Labs also traces its origin to Southwestern Bell Technology Resources, Inc. (SWB TRI) which was founded in 1988 as the R&D arm of Southwestern Bell Corporation. It had no connection to Bellcore, the R&D organization owned equally by all of the Baby Bells.[5]
In 1995, Southwestern Bell Corporation renamed itself SBC Communications, Inc., resulting in the subsequent name changes of companies such as SWB TRI to SBC Technology Resources, Inc. (SBC TRI).
In 2003, SBC TRI changed its name to SBC Laboratories, Inc..[6] SBC Laboratories focused on four core areas: Broadband Internet, Wireless Systems, Network Services, and Network IT.
In 2005, SBC Communications and AT&T Corporation merged to form AT&T. AT&T Labs, Inc. became the new name of the combined SBC Laboratories, Inc. and AT&T Laboratories along with its research facilities in New Jersey.
In 2006, BellSouth Telecommunications Science and Technology (S&T) was also merged with AT&T Labs. BellSouth Science and Technology had offices in Birmingham, Alabama and Atlanta, Georgia.
Executives
- Jeff McElfresh (president, AT&T Technology & Operations) (2018-present)[7]
- Andre Fuetsch (oresident and CTO, AT&T Labs)
References
- ^ Cortes, Corinna; Fisher, Kathleen; Pregibon, Daryl; Rogers, Anne; Smith, Frederick (2004-03-01). "Hancock: A language for analyzing transactional data streams". ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. 26 (2): 301–338. doi:10.1145/973097.973100. ISSN 0164-0925. S2CID 12915177.
- ^ Neil Sloane (2016-06-29). "Biography". Retrieved 2017-10-16.
- ^ "The Achievement of The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences". article: labs research. AT&T Labs. 2012-03-06. Retrieved 2017-10-16.
- ^ Buskirk, Eliot Van. "AT&T Will Donate Share of $1 Million Netflix Prize to Science Organizations". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2022-09-12.
- ^ "Southwestern Bell Telephone Co., gorm 10-K405, filing date Mar 12, 1996". secdatabase.com. Retrieved May 14, 2018.
- ^ AT&T - News Room, June 16, 2003
- ^ "AT&T Communications Leadership".
