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Intel To Invest $40 Million in Global Research Communities

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 05/24/12

Intel will invest more than $40 million over the next five years to launch a network of research communities, dubbed Intel Collaborative Research Institutes (ICRI), in partnership with universities around the world.

Based on the company's Intel Science and Technology Centers (ISTC) in the United States, each ICRI will be led by a "hub" university with several "spoke" schools, and will have its own focus.

The initiative will launch with three new institutes--a Sustainable Connected Cities ICRI based in the United Kingdom, an ICRI for Secure Computing in Germany, and another focused on Computational Intelligence and based in Israel--and will also bring Saarland University's Intel Visual Computing Institute and National Taiwan University's Connected Context Computing Center into the network. The institutes will also collaborate with the company's ISTCs.

The ICRI for Sustainable Connected Cities will launch with the cooperation of Imperial College London and University College London and will use computing technology to examine social, economic, and environmental problems associated with city life.

"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," according to information released by Intel. "For example, through a city urban cloud platform, the city managers could perform real-time city optimizations such as predicting the effects of extreme weather events on the city’s water and energy supplies, resulting in delivery of near-real-time information to citizens through citywide displays and mobile applications."

The Technische Universität Darmstadt will serve as the hub for the ICRI for Secure Computing, which will look "ways to dramatically advance the trustworthiness of mobile and embedded devices and ecosystems," according to Intel. Other areas of research at this IRCI will include car-to-device communications, secure mobile commerce, and privacy.

The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Hebrew University will host the ICRI for Computational Intelligence, where researchers will explore ways to augment human abilities with computing systems. One example provided by Intel includes the development of sensors that would monitor a user's body, including his or her blood, brain, heart, and eyes, and send the information to a server where it will be combined with environmental and historical data and analyzed to warn the user of an impending headache or dizziness while driving.

"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," said 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."

Chris Ramming, director of Intel Labs University Collaborations Office, said, "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."

For more information, visit blogs.intel.com/research, where there are separate entries detailing the missions of the ICRI for Computational Intelligence, the ICRI for Sustainable Cities, and the ICRI for Secure Computing.