Intel's Embedded and Comms University Program

One of my jobs at Intel is to be the director of the Intel's Embedded and Communications University Program. It's not a big job. I only spend an average of an hour or so per week on it. Most of that time coming in two big bursts: when we run our annual conference and our annual call for proposals. There is a third major activity, the Intel Cup which doesn't require much of our time becuase it has its own team. Still, despite the low amount of effort required on my part, this position gives me some interesting perspective.

The annual conference gives us a good chance to interact with the researchers. We try to balance the agenda so that we have about 50% presentations from Intel employees (to let the researchers know what problems we are working on and would find interesting to have help on) and 50% from the academic community (so that they can present their work and ideas back to us). The face-to-face connections we make at that conference are invaluable.

The call for proposals allows us to hand out money. This reminds me of one of current corporate mottoes: It's not just what we make; it's what we make possible. Many of the grants allow us to seed uses of our chips in ways that have never been attempted. The researchers build lots of things that Intel would and should never build. Giving them money and hardware can make that possible.

Of course, we also give grants for things that we are working on. For example, my area of expertise is regular expressions. There we have handed out several grants to help design optimized hardware to solve that problem. Not only did we get access to that research, it also helped us hire top notch interns. One in particular, Michela Becchi from Washington University in St Louis, has done very good and innovative work that I was proud to sponsor. Hopefully, when she becomes a professor, we will get the opportunity to fund her and her students.

That brings me to what prompted me to write about this, GENI modems and routers. This looks like a very promising coming wave. And, one where Intel clearly is making a mark. Not only are we sponsoring research in that direction, but some of Intel's chips are clear choices for modems and routers at the next level of complexity. The advantage of the ubiquitous Intel architecture also helps build them easier. You can leverage the existing free software community and all that work that has been done for PCs to get added functionality. A win-win situation.

The next area of research that is very interesting is low-power research. The atom processor has made a whole new range of devices that Intel can serve. Moreover, many of them need to run in environments where they need to run on batteries, solar power, or scavenged power. The last area being particularly interesting and difficult. Many of the researchers we are funding in this area are building something that Intel itself will never commercialize, and some of them are combining atom with "motes" very small sensors that are beyond Moore's law for Intel to build today.

At a more commercial level, we also have numerous in-vehicle projects that we have sponsored. If your next car is safer, it may just be because of research we sponsored. If it has a better audio-video system, we may have had a hand in that too.

As a worker in the security field I would be remiss not to mention that we also sponsor work in that area. As Intel drives the world to have 15 billion embedded and connected devices, we need safe networks and secure computers. We have a projects that we sponsor to help make that happen. We also have internal projects. Some of those will make it out the door and result in better and more reliable devices for you. (Unfortunately, some won't too, which is why we can't talk about them. Don't promise something you may never be able to deliver.)

The last thing I want to mention is the Intel Cup. This has been a very successful third-leg of our tripod. It started as a project to fund embedded work in Chinese universities. However, it has grown to a more international competition, with schools around the world participating. Like our research grants, we supply hardware for building an embedded solution, but we don't place undue constraints on what the participants can build. We want innovative new ideas.

I'm sure many of you would like links to follow up on this. I will add them soon. I have to go ask the people who track that stuff what they are, and before that I need to focus on getting what I'm suppose to be innovating on one step closer to in your hands....