Intel Research Lablets

The Intel Research Labs were a research division of Intel. The organization was known for most of its life as Intel Research, but towards the end of its life the name Intel Research was re-defined to refer to all research performed in Intel, including work done outside the labs.

At its peak, there were six Intel Research Labs. The four university labs were each hosted by a partner university, while the two on-site labs were embedded inside normal Intel sites. Intel Research Berkeley was hosted by UC Berkeley, Intel Research Seattle by the University of Washington, Intel Research Pittsburgh by Carnegie Mellon University, and Intel Research Cambridge by the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. In addition the People and Practices Research Lab (PaPR) performed ethnographic research at Intel's Hillsboro, Oregon campus, and Intel Research Santa Clara worked at Intel's Santa Clara headquarters.

History

Intel Research (as it was then known) was created in 2000, under the leadership of David L. Tennenhouse. Tennenhouse aimed to model his new research organization based on DARPA, where he had previously been director of the Information Technology Office. The labs followed an Open Collaborative Model, in which Intel researchers would work closely with host universities and shared IP rights. . David introduced Proactive Computing - where he envisioned users would interact with surrounding things and things would be able to have "digital-life".

In 2005, Tennenhouse left and Andrew A. Chien, a former professor with high performance computing background at UC San Diego took over his position. Chien left Intel in May 2010 to return to academia as a professor at the University of Chicago. Justin Rattner, CTO of Intel, then took over Intel Labs and in addition, several VPs of INTEL Labs are appointed.

The Cambridge lab closed in 2006 , and the other labs were shut down in 2011.

Open collaborative research

Intel Research followed a model called open collaborative research. In this model, Intel Researchers worked directly with professors and students at the host university and shared knowledge freely. The contract between Intel and the host university stated that all IP that resulted from a research project was jointly owned by both parties. Each lab was led by a professor from the host university, both with the goal of building deep connections to the university and avoiding any conflicts or misunderstandings between the lab and the university. Lab Directors included David Culler, Eric Brewer, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Todd Mowry, Gaetano Borriello, James Landay, and David Wetherall.

Due to the open nature of the Open Collaborative Research agreement, the labs focussed on areas that were not core to Intel's business, so that Intel did not need to control the intellectual property. Instead the labs worked or topics such as Ubiquitous Computing and Sensor Networks which might help create demand for aligned Intel products.

Notable research projects

The Intel Research Labs were involved in several notable research projects. In most cases, projects were done in partnership with a host university:

• Wireless identification and sensing platform (WISP)
• Claytronics
• TinyOS
• nesC
• Familiar Stranger
• Urban Computing
• Prefix hash tree
• PlanetLab