Intel Invests Over $40 Million In Universities To Push Semiconductor Innovation
Intel is to invest more than $40 million over the next five years in a worldwide network of university research communities known as Intel Collaborative Research Institutes" (ICRI).
The ICRI program is based on the U.S.-based Intel Science and Technology Centres (ISTCs), and will bring together experts from academia and industry to help explore and invent in the next generation of semiconductor technologies that could impact the lives of many people in the future.
"The new Intel Collaborative Research Institute program underscores our commitment to establishing and funding collaborative university research to fuel global innovation in key areas and help address some of today's most challenging problems," says Justin Rattner, chief technology 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," he adds.
The three ICRIs will collaborate with their own multi-university communities and other ICRIs, as well as the U.S.-based ISTCs.
What's more, two previously established centres are being incorporated into the ICRI program. These are the Intel Visual Computing Institute (Saarland University) and the Intel-NTU Connected Context Computing Centre (National Taiwan University).
Each institute will specialise in a particular area and use its research to focus on the unique environments within its region, country and area of research.
The three new ICRIs include the ICRI for Sustainable Connected Cities based in the United Kingdom. This joint collaboration between Intel, Imperial College London and University College London aims to address challenging social, economic and environmental problems of city life with computing technology. Using London as a test bed, the scientists 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 optimisations such as predicting the effects of extreme weather events on the city's water and energy supplies. This is expected to result in the delivery of near-real-time information to citizens through citywide displays and mobile applications.
One of the other collaborators is the ICRI for Secure Computing, Germany. At this Institute, Intel and the Technische Universität Darmstadt will explore ways to advance the trustworthiness of mobile and embedded devices and ecosystems.
For instance, in the development of secure, car-to-device communications for added driver safety, using 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 then research software and hardware to enable robust systems suited to these applications.
The final institute, the ICRI for Computational Intelligence is based in Israel. It is a partnership between the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology 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 example, by developing body sensors that continuously monitor the owner's body enabling doctors and/or patients to take the appropriate actions.
If the system can continuously monitor human functions from the brain, heart, blood, eyes and more, and send this data to a remote server, then combining this with other data such as environmental weather conditions and historical data could warn people about a potential headache or dizziness during driving.
"Intel has long recognised that the computing industry is sustained by the efforts of many participants," says 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."
