About Advanced Technology Labs

Welcome to the Advanced Technology Labs, Adobe's research and advanced development organization!

Over 25 years ago, Adobe’s founders and world-class researchers, Charles Geschke and John Warnock, founded the Advanced Technology Labs (ATL).  In doing so, they recognized the importance of supporting a dedicated group of researchers that could work on technologies that go beyond the current needs of the product teams.  Our researchers look years into the future, giving them the opportunity to explore innovations well in advance of clearly identified customer needs.  

In ATL, we create innovative technologies relevant to our software products for consumers, creative professionals, developers, and enterprises. While that mission sounds simple enough, it takes a special mix of passionate employees, committed leadership and trust in the creative process to make it all happen. We begin by bringing together the smartest, most driven people we can find, and we allow them the freedom to nurture their intellectual curiosity, while providing them with the necessary resources, support and freedom to shape their ideas into tangible results.

 
Our research model blends our goal for business impact and our desire to collaborate with researchers outside of Adobe.  Collaborations comprise about half of the labs’ projects.  On average, each of our researchers hosts at least one intern a year.  We also collaborate with over fifty university partners – students and faculty - working at their home universities.  Furthermore, about half of our collaborative work is published in peer-reviewed conferences and journals, ensuring the impact of our research goes beyond Adobe and into the research community at large.

This unique formula has enabled us to develop some of Adobe’s most innovative technologies and to delight our customers with cutting-edge features such as Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5.  It has also given our student collaborators the opportunity to demonstrate their work at Adobe’s MAX conference, with projects such as RubbaDub.

ATL has consistently delivered cutting-edge research that has helped build Adobe’s reputation as a pioneer in technologies as diverse as digital imaging and secure documents.  Today, our lab is growing in new research areas.  We are particularly eager to grow our research expertise in analytics, machine learning and data mining; relatively new research areas for us motivated by Adobe’s commitment to provide its customers mission-critical digital marketing solutions.

Through all our efforts, ATL is committed to developing innovative technologies that will advance Adobe’s mission to change the world through digital experiences.

I invite you to explore this site to learn more about who we are, what we do and what makes us unique.  Enjoy!

Tom