IBM Espana SA was allocated $38.4m of the US parent’s $6,000m worldwide research and development budget last year, and spent it at three main centres in Spain. The first, one of IBM’s 15 scientific centres worldwide, is developing a help environment for translating documents into Spanish. So far, it have completed a lexicon for spelling checks, a morphology analyser and a synonym dictionary, all accessible on line. In collaboration with Madrid’s Polytechnic University, work is also being carried out on numerical calculus for fluid mechanics and a project involved in the applications of digital images to the study and structural analysis of viruses. At the International Centre for Software Development, the second research station, IBM Espana is working on software for the financial sector. However, it is still continuing work into computer-integrated manufacturing at its plant in Valencia. It is also helping to fund research into language processing and artificial intelligence in two institutes. The Knowledge Engineering Institute, a joint venture between the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Madrid’s University and IBM Espana, has grants of $19.6m for the next four years, of which $4.2m is from the Ministry, to study economic and industrial applications of artificial intelligence. The Technology Centre, a collaborative effort between IBM, the Andalucian Public Works Insitiute and Expo’92, aims to research Spanish language speech synthesis and recognition, dictionaries and automatic computer translation. In addition to this, the Technology Centre is working on the design and development of the visitors information service for Seville’s Universal Exhibition in 1992. IBM will be contributing two thirds of its $14.8m budget over the next four years.
