After his work for Bell Laboratories since 1928, mostly on vacuum tubes, including improvements of Radar during World War II, the distinguished electrical engineer Arthur Lee Samuel (1901-1990), became a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he initiated the ILLIAC project. ILLIAC (Illinois Automatic Computer) was a series of supercomputers, built at a variety of locations. In 1949, Samuel left the University before its first computer was complete, and joined IBM's Poughkeepsie Laboratory in New York, where he would conceive and carry out his most successful work. Samuel is credited with one of the first software hash tables, and influencing early research in using transistors for computers at IBM. There he also continued his seminal research on machine learning.