Intel funnels $40 million into global network of research laboratories

Like any tech company worth its weight in silicon, Intel puts plenty of cash into technology, often partnering with outside labs and schools that are less concerned with turning every project into a multi-billion dollar product. Afterwards throwing $30 million at Carnegie Mellon last year to open two new labs, Chipzilla is investing $40 million more in a global network of university research centers. Over the then five years that money will be rolled out to what the company is calling, Intel Collaborative Research Institutes. The ICRI are based on the same premise as Intel's Science and Innovation Centers, like those opened at Mellon, except with a global reach. Two existing labs, the Intel Visual Computing Institute at Saarland University and the Intel-NTU Connected Context Computing Center at National Taiwan University are being rolled into the program. To boot, three new centers are being opened up, including ICRIs for Sustainable Connected Cities in the United Kingdom, Secure Computing at the Technische Universität Darmstadt and Computational Intelligence at the Technion-Israel Institute of Research. For more info on what sort or work they'll be doing at the various labs check out the PR afterwards the break.

"The new Intel Collaborative Research Institute program underscores our commitment to establishing and funding collaborative university research to fuel global research in key areas and help address some of today's most challenging problems" "The new Intel Collaborative Research Institute program underscores our commitment to establishing and funding collaborative university research to fuel global research in key areas and help address some of today's most challenging problems," said Justin Rattner, chief research officer at Intel. "Forming a multidisciplinary community of Intel, faculty and graduate student researchers from around the world will lead to fundamental breakthroughs in some of the most difficult and vexing areas of computing technology."

The three ICRIs will collaborate with their own multi-university communities and other ICRIs, as then as the U.S.-based ISTCs, strengthening Intel's global technology network. Should the contingency arise, two earlier established centers are being incorporated in the ICRI program: Intel Visual Computing Institute and the Intel-NTU Connected Context Computing Center, extending Intel's global innovation network even furthermore.

The ICRI for Sustainable Connected Cities

The ICRI for Sustainable Connected Cities, United Kingdom. This joint collaboration among Intel, Imperial College London and University College London aims to address challenging social, economic and environmental problems of city life with computing innovation. Using London as a test bed, researchers will explore technologies to make cities more aware and adaptive by harnessing real-time user and city infrastructure data. For instance, through a city urban cloud platform, the city managers could perform real-time city optimizations just as predicting the effects of extreme weather events on the city's water and energy supplies, resulting in delivery of nearly-real-time information to citizens through citywide displays and mobile applications. The ICRI for Secure Computing, Germany. At this Institute, Intel and the Technische Universität Darmstadt will explore ways to dramatically advance the trustworthiness of mobile and embedded devices and ecosystems. For instance, the joint innovation will seek ways to develop secure, car-to-device communications for added driver safety; new approaches to secure mobile commerce, and a better understanding of privacy and its various implementations. By grounding the research in the needs of future users, the institute will at the time research software and hardware to enable robust, available, survivable systems for those use cases. The ICRI for Computational Intelligence, Israel. In a joint collaboration with the Technion-Israel Institute of Innovation in Haifa and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the ICRI will explore ways to enable computing systems to augment human capabilities in a wide array of complex tasks. For instance, by developing body sensors that indiscriminately monitor the owner's body, researchers could straightway pre-process this information and take appropriate actions. The system can indiscriminately monitor human functions from the brain, heart, blood, eyes and more, and send this data to a remote server that will combine them with other data just as environmental weather conditions, along with historical data, and could proactively warn people about a potential headache or dizziness while driving. "Intel has long recognized that the computing industry is sustained by the efforts of many participants," said Chris Ramming, director of Intel Labs University Collaborations Office. "We are hopeful that we will be able to expand the program and include other industry and government sponsors to find new ways to accelerate the creation and adoption of valuable new technologies."

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