Although the company hasn’t used the “think” marketing term in its television ads for years, IBM is definitely one of the smartest tech companies around. In many ways, IBM transitioned from bring a PC manufacturer to a think tank that creates ideas—and charges the analyst fees you would expect if you want to hear about those ideas. Yet, in the IBM Research arm, there are lofty goals: to create the next kind of storage technology; one that is much faster yet less harmful on the environment, or to invent ways to read data from physical objects, such as a bridge or a waterway, that have not been known for being highly connected.

Each of these research projects is particularly interesting from a PC computing perspective because they will likely make their way into your home or place of work in the next ten years. In some cases, the research has already made an impact. Each project solves a puzzling computing problem, and will help usher in an age of more ubiquitous computing.