Intel Labs Collaborating to Change the World

Introduction

Welcome to Intel Labs Berkeley—one of three labs in the Intel Labs Network, an innovative approach to industry-university research pioneered by Intel to enhance and accelerate long-term research. Researchers flow freely between the lab and UC Berkeley, conducting joint research projects under a model designed to foster collaboration and generate breakthrough results. The lab is exploring a range of research projects in four areas: systems and networking, programming languages, disaster relief, and the user experience. Since its opening in November 2001, Intel Labs Berkeley has made an enormous impact.

The Open and Collaborative Research Model

The open and collaborative research (OCR) model practiced at Intel’s university labs was designed to eliminate the conflicts over intellectual property (IP) rights that hinder or prevent many collaborations between companies and universities. “Our model accelerates innovation by allowing researchers to focus on their work rather than on intellectual property issues,” says Anthony Joseph, Director of Intel Labs Berkeley. “It makes it easy to form flexible collaborations with other academics working on cutting-edge research; we don’t need to spend months working out the legal details.”

Under the OCR model, Intel’s university labs operate on the principles of collaboration and non-exclusive IP rights. Intel owns and funds the labs, but much of their research is published and widely shared. Patents may be issued but are expected to be rare, because of the OCR model’s emphasis on collaboration, not competition. “Because Intel emphasizes sharing of results, it’s much easier to attract researchers to collaborate with the lab,” says Joseph.

The idea of foregoing IP rights is difficult for some companies to embrace, but the benefits are significant, according to Allan Knies, former Associate Director of Intel Labs Berkeley. “Intel had an intellectual breakthrough when it embraced the OCR model for our university research labs,” he says. “Adopting an open IP model requires a strength of conviction that few companies can muster. The agreement has allowed us to work with visionary researchers in the UC Berkeley community. That would not be possible if it weren’t for Intel’s willingness to share IP in order to advance long-term, exploratory research.”

Profiting from Proximity

Both Intel and the university benefit from the proximity of Intel Labs Berkeley to the UC Berkeley campus, which makes it easy for students and lab researchers to collaborate. “We run a systems seminar series that rotates between the lab and campus,” says Joseph. “That brings a large number of students and some faculty to our lab and brings many lab researchers to the campus. Being located next door to UC Berkeley also has enabled us to launch a number of collaborations that have led to fruitful research results.”

Working with researchers across the street from campus can be a richer experience than collaborating with colleagues across the country or even across town. The interchange of ideas is more fluid; student researchers can easily stop by the lab to ask questions, discuss a difficult research problem, or work on a project. Lab researchers can meet with their university colleagues on campus or at a local café to talk about their work. These casual interactions, which require close physical proximity, make the collaboration much more interactive, relaxed, informal, and productive.

Applying the Resources of Intel

For UC Berkeley researchers, another benefit of the Intel lab is the ease with which research can be initiated, according to Knies. “One of the key benefits of our lab is that we can quickly move budgetary resources into new areas,” he says. “We have the ability to support students, provide research grants, and add people to projects without having to spend a year in planning. That allows for innovative ideas to ramp quickly, and with less overhead than researchers would otherwise be subject to if they had to go through a traditional planning or grant-writing process.”

Intel Labs Berkeley also makes it easier for the university to scale its research by providing access to the resources of Intel. That includes resources to support research in emerging areas such as cloud computing, which focuses on leveraging services over the Internet (the “cloud’) to scale computing resources up or down rapidly, by orders of magnitude, in response to changing demand. Cloud computing has the potential to vastly increase the overall efficiency of computing within an organization.

“Intel helped to launch the Open Cirrus project, which aims to give researchers around the world access to cloud computing,” says Joseph. “It’s a global testbed that will enable our lab and the university to jointly explore some important research questions that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to pursue; no university could afford to implement this kind of testbed by itself.”

Access to the Best and Brightest

In exchange for providing resources to UC Berkeley, Intel gains access to some of the best and brightest faculty and students in the world. “Being so close to campus and having the ability to collaborate easily with students gives us a lot of visibility with a group of talented young researchers who might come to work for Intel one day,” says Joseph. “When they think of Intel, they don’t think of a company down in Silicon Valley but as the researchers they collaborate with every day. The lab really enhances Intel’s reputation and the ability recruit top notch talent.”

The value to Intel goes beyond having access to top university researchers who may become employees one day. Having labs located near leading universities also helps the company stay up to date on the latest academic research developments. “Intel was strategic in locating its research labs close to three top universities, which ensures that we’ll hear about every important new research concept that people are working on or faculty are discussing,” says Joseph. “Not only that, it also gives us the opportunity to influence the direction of research toward areas that we feel are the most important or promising.”

That exposure to leading-edge academic research also helps to ensure that Intel’s university labs will not become insular. “One of the real dangers of industrial research labs is that, despite everybody’s best effort to the contrary, they become isolated and self-reinforcing,” says Scott Shenker, Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and Group Leader of Networking at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI). “The Intel labs, by being small and so closely connected to the university, have a constant influx of new ideas and new talent. That ‘s one aspect of the labs that I think is really crucial.”

Lab Leadership

In July 2008, Anthony Joseph took the reins of leadership from Eric Brewer, becoming the fourth Director of Intel Labs Berkeley, following in the footsteps of Founding Director David Culler, Joe Hellerstein and most recently, Brewer, who returned to his tenured position as Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley in the summer of 2008 after a three-year rotation as Director. Under Joseph’s leadership, the lab has continued to build its reputation as a place where groundbreaking research is performed, according to Shenker. “Intel Labs Berkeley, under the leadership of Joseph, continues to pursue a set of exciting, world-changing research projects,” he says. “The intellectual depth of the ideas involved, and the level of resources Intel has committed to these projects, is extraordinary."

Research Agenda

Under Intel's model, when a university research lab transitions to a new director (every two or three years), roughly two-thirds of the research agenda remains the same, while the new director sets the remaining third of the agenda. The new component of the research agenda that Joseph brought to the lab reflects his strong interest in disaster relief and cloud computing.

Learn more about the research projects.

Beyond Research: Advancing Education

The close connection between Intel Labs Berkeley and the university next door extends beyond research to education. "We have to tried to establish an environment in the lab that makes it feel like an extension of the Berkeley campus,” says Joseph. The systems seminar series that rotates between lab and campus is a good example of that effort. In addition, some of the lab's researchers teach courses at UC Berkeley, further strengthening the bond with the university. "Graduate students often move into research as a result of taking advanced level courses, so having Intel lab researchers teach at UC Berkeley complements the lab’s research mission,” says Edward Lee, Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. “The lab offers our students and faculty exposure to cutting-edge industry research, and an opportunity to collaborate on that research within an open environment.”

A Crossroads for Computer Science Research

Joseph is pleased with how Intel Labs Berkeley is evolving and excited about its prospects for the future. "Over time our lab has become a crossroads for computer science research," he says. Reinforcing the lab's strong reputation for research is the fact that a number of top postdoctoral students who worked at Intel Labs Berkeley have gone on to academic careers at leading universities. That includes two students who postponed accepting faculty positions to spend more time working at Intel Labs Berkeley: Sam Madden spent six months at the lab before joining the faculty of MIT and Carlos Guestrin decided to work for a year at the lab before accepting an Assistant Professor position at Carnegie Mellon University.

"The Intel lab is one of the best places in the world—if not the best—for research in sensor networks," says Guestrin. "When I was offered the opportunity to work there, I was thrilled. The lab has given me the opportunity to explore the interaction between sensor networks and machine learning. This unique learning opportunity, along with the possibility of interaction with Intel researchers and UC-Berkeley students and faculty, was irresistible and has been extremely productive."

Many former lab researchers continue to collaborate with Intel Research Berkeley in their new academic positions. "I loved the four years I spent as a Principal Researcher at Intel Research Berkeley, and I'm proud to retain an association with the lab,” says Timothy Roscoe, who is now a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zürich. “The combination of industry resources, the openness of the university relationship, and the energy brought by the students lead to a ‘friction-free’ research atmosphere that it is unparalleled in my experience—fun, stimulating, and highly effective.”

“It’s always hard to see researchers leave our lab, but losing them to academia is unusual and very positive,” says Joseph, who notes that researchers typically move on to jobs in industry, not academia. “I think one reason that some of our researchers have been able to move on to faculty positions in top schools is that the lab allowed them to pursue research that is both broad and deep, much like the university environment demands.”

Eric Paulos agrees that his experience at the lab was good preparation for his new role in academia. “Intel Labs Berkeley is a world class research lab,” says Paulos, who spent almost six years at the lab before accepting a position as assistant professor in the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “The cutting-edge research we were able to pursue, and the ability to work closely with faculty members, to advise students, even to be involved in teaching courses at UC Berkeley, prepared us to be on a par with academic researchers. That made for a smooth transition to my job at Carnegie Mellon. It was very hard to leave the lab, because there were so many exciting and rewarding aspects of the job. But I still feel very connected to Intel, and Intel’s open research model will enable me to continue collaborating on projects. I’ve already started to explore potential collaborations with Intel’s Pittsburgh lab, which is right next door to my office.”

Each year, Intel Labs Berkeley showcases the results of its collaborative approach through an open house. “The open house gives people the chance to learn about the research we’re doing at the lab, and it enables researchers to make connections that can lead to new opportunities for collaboration with industry,” says Joseph.

The March 2008 event provided more evidence that Intel Labs Berkeley has become a computer science crossroads. More than 300 guests attended the event, including academic researchers from more than a dozen universities, from UCLA to the University of Tokyo, as well as representatives of more than 50 companies, from Apple to Yahoo! The guests mingled with lab researchers and viewed 35 demonstrations of research projects underway at the lab, including innovative projects such as RouteBricks, a project to explore a novel cluster-based approach to building high-speed programmable Internet routers, and MindMix a tool that overlays a network of factual claims on top of the existing Web, enabling users to access competing claims quickly and evaluate more easily which are true.

“I think the most important thing about the open house is that it makes people realize how broad the research agenda is at Intel,” says Eric Brewer, commenting on the 2008 open house, the last held during his tenure. “It shows that we are exploring not only classic technologies like networking and systems, but also innovative areas such as urban computing and technology for developing regions. That’s what makes Intel such a great place to do research; there are always some exciting projects underway.”

Looking Ahead

From the viewpoint of UC Berkeley, Intel’s experiment in establishing a new model of industry-university collaboration has thus far been a success. “Intel’s open and collaborative research model has set a new standard for university-industry research,” says Scott Shenker. “Being very open and public about the agreement between Intel Labs Berkeley and UC Berkeley not only helped the relationship between Intel and the campus; it also gave the campus a template that it can show to other companies who want to collaborate, as a starting point for the discussion. I think that openness helps to preserve the integrity of university research.” Under Brewer’s direction, Intel Labs Berkeley is expanding its relationship with the university next door, Allan Knies notes. “As our lab has become a fixture near campus, our set of collaborators has expanded dramatically,” he says. “Of course, we have many ongoing projects with engineering and computer science faculty, but we are also working with atmospheric chemistry faculty and the Department of Statistics as well as campus research centers such as CITRIS. All of this relationship building provides a foundation for even greater collaboration with the university in the coming years.”

Joseph plans to continue building the relationships with academia that have been nurtured by the three previous leaders of the lab. “One of my goals is to continue advancing our relationship with UC Berkeley, and to increase the number of joint research projects that we pursue,” he says. “We have already begun to involve more students in the lab, and I want to expand the number even further.”

During his tenure as Director of Intel Labs Berkeley, Eric Brewer noted that the lab’s “ultimate goal is to change the world with our research.” Under his leadership, the lab made major progress toward bringing affordable computing and communications technology to the developing world—a key component of Brewer’s research agenda.

Joseph’s goal is to extend the lab’s legacy of advancing research that could change the world, as Intel Labs Berkeley continues research begun by Brewer and expands into new areas of exploration. “I want to focus more of our researchers’ efforts on disaster relief and cloud computing, two areas where I think that Intel can make a huge contribution, he says. “It’s my hope that the name Intel will one day become synonymous with cloud computing, and that our lab will have the opportunity to make a unique contribution toward improving disaster relief with the help of technology. If we achieve both of those goals, I think the world will be changed for the better.”