The president of Bell Labs tells Karlin Lillingtonwhy he is so happy with the research lab's work in Ireland

BELL LABS views its research lab in Dublin as a “spectacular success” –- which is why its president Jeong Kim said this week that the Irish lab would quadruple its number of high-level researchers.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs – one of the world’s most famed technology research labs – has been considered a jewel in Ireland’s research crown since it set up a modest operation five years ago. It currently employs 27 researchers and the plan is to add 70 more in the next five years.

Kim, a thoughtful, polite Korean and a successful researcher, academic and entrepreneur (he joined Lucent when it bought out his company in 1998), says: “What’s unique about the Irish location is the special collaboration here between academia and government. The Government is quite visionary, to my mind.”

In what way? Over the five years that Bell Labs has been in Ireland, Kim says, the Government has taken on board the need to move from low-end manufacturing and outsourcing to higher-end jobs in areas like research, continuing to invest in a downturn.

He adds that from Bell Labs’ point of view, “no one has a monopoly on bright people” – the company could have increased its numbers in any of its other locations. But he feels the relationship the company has in Ireland is particularly good and productive, therefore the jobs went here.

“I think our research effort, supported and co-ordinated with academia here and with the Government and IDA, has benefited everybody.”

He says that what researchers really need is stability, to know that their jobs are there for the duration of the projects they are working on. He notes that the planned expansion will be beneficial in this way. In addition, “by having a critical mass here, we get the job done”.

According to sources, there had been concerns that State funding might collapse for the Bell Labs initiative, which has a close relationship with Centre for Telecommunications Value-Chain Research, headquartered at Trinity College.

All that Kim will say is: “We have been through many challenges. There’s been the economy in Ireland, but our company went through mergers and changes too. But each time we required accommodations, we worked through them.”

The Irish centre is considered an important part of the lab’s fresh focus on the “smart growth energy sector”, a topical area in which Bell Labs is expanding research, especially through its Green Touch initiative to make the communications industry more efficient.

“One of the research discussions we had at Bell Labs was how do we make the ICT sector more energy efficient and get the sector to help contribute to solving the problem of climate change. And we were asking the more fundamental question of how energy efficient the sector can actually be. The answer was very interesting – if you design the network from an energy efficient perspective, you can improve the efficiency 10,000 times,” says Kim.

It’s a topic that every country is now concerned about, and Kim spoke on the subject recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “We’re going to hit a wall. Energy consumption per user is going to explode and we have more and more users coming in.”

The ICT sector, with the increasing growth of data-heavy services and applications, is due to be hit hard. He notes that data centres are actually defined in terms of their energy consumption, not their square footage or the number of servers.

“Energy is their greatest limiting factor and an area in which we can have the greatest breakthrough. With Moore’s Law, we’re reaching limits. With manufacturing, there are set costs, but in the energy sector there’s a 10,000-time improvement to be claimed.”

The Green Touch initiative is built around collaboration and open innovation, Kim says. “We are saying, this problem is too big. Let’s work together and include our competitors – but also our customers, and governments.”

The goal is a 1,000-fold improvement – the equivalent of powering communications networks and the internet for three years on what it takes to run them for a single day today.

That is where Ireland comes in.

“Now, Ireland has a special place in this area,” says Kim. Research at Bell Labs in Dublin has already been focusing on sensors and network management, both central to the Green Touch project.

Perhaps there is also a level of personal interest in some of the Irish work: Kim is big on sensors. Thinking about sensors is what brought him to his current job at Bell Labs in the first place.

Kim, who lives in the Washington DC area, was deeply shaken by the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11th, 2001.

“All of a sudden, many things were not as important as survival. I thought about biotechnology, because there was also the deaths from anthrax at the time. I thought of a nano wire sensor that could fit into a cell phone and that could be set to react to different substances.”

In other words, a widespread advance warning system that could be carried by anybody.

Kim says that everyone he talked to thought it was a wonderful idea, “but how do you actually implement such a system? I realised I needed to be in a place of greater influence”. That place eventually turned out to be Bell Labs.

Ironically, Kim had been offered the job to head up the lab in 2000 and had turned it down, taking up an academic post instead.

“But nobody has ever turned down heading up the Bell Labs,” Kim was told by the chief executive of parent company Lucent when he said no. In 2005, he accepted the role – and his mobile phone sensor idea was developed further and taken on by the Department of Homeland Security.

Kim says when he stepped into the job, he gathered a group of Bell researchers and asked them to name some things that Bell Labs had created. They were quick to respond with key technologies like the transistor – the invention that will forever immortalise the lab – but Kim pointed out that everything they named had come out of the lab many years ago and that they weren’t able to name more recent breakthroughs.

Changing that has been his manifesto since – to produce transformational technologies. Thus, Bell Labs is doing work in areas from quantum computing to Green Touch.

“And why do we care about technology? Because we believe it improves our lives. What people care about is really just that.”