Intel Corporation today announced it will invest more than $40 million over the next 5 years in a worldwide network of university research communities called the Intel Collaborative Research Institutes (ICRI). The ICRI program is based on the successful U.S.-based Intel Science and Technology Centers (ISTCs), and will bring together experts from academia and industry to help explore and invent in the next generation of technologies that could impact the lives of many 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," 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."

The three ICRIs will collaborate with their own multi-university communities and other ICRIs, as well as the U.S.-based ISTCs, strengthening Intel's global research network. In addition, two previously established centers are being incorporated in the ICRI program: Intel Visual Computing Institute (Saarland University) and the Intel-NTU Connected Context Computing Center (National Taiwan University), extending Intel's global research network even further.

Each institute will have a specialized focus, but is encouraged to incorporate the unique environments within their region, country and area of research. The three new ICRIs include:

• 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 technology. 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 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 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 example, the joint research 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 then 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 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, researchers could then pre-process this information and take appropriate actions. The system can continuously 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 such as environmental weather conditions, along with historical data, and could proactively warn people about a potential headache or dizziness during 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."