Intel Corporation announced plans to invest $100 million directly into U.S. university research over the next 5 years to drive innovations in computing and communications. The company will open Intel Science and Technology Centers across multiple universities throughout the year.
The centers will focus on projects in select technology areas that align with the company’s research agenda including visual computing, mobility, security and embedded solutions. This new model is expected to result in U.S. researchers receiving up to five times more funding from Intel Labs when compared to the previous approach.
As an initial step, Intel Labs also announced that Stanford University will be the hub for the first center, which will focus on improving visual computing experiences for consumers and professionals. Researchers at Stanford will collaborate with a community of researchers from seven other universities. The recently introduced 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ processor with combined visual and 3-D graphics will be a key R&D platform for researchers to develop innovations which improve the quality and the way images are captured or created, manipulated or interpreted and ultimately displayed to the viewer.
This first Intel Science and Technology Center, as well as those that will follow later this year, represents a new model of collaboration for the company. Until now, Intel Labs ran open collaboration centers near research universities and a substantial portion of the company’s funding focused on operating, maintaining and staffing these facilities. The new centers will be Intel-funded and jointly led by Intel and university researchers. They are designed to provide more dollars in the hands of researchers, and to encourage tighter collaboration between academic thought leaders in essential technology areas such as visual computing, security and mobile computing.