Intel Corporation on May 24 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.

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.

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 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.

§ 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. By grounding the research in the needs of future users, the institute will then research software and hardware to enable robust 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. 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," Chris Ramming, director of Intel Labs University Collaborations Office, told Business Wire. "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."

Source: TheStreet.com; Business Wire