Originally published January 4 2006
Three technology giants to fund research at UC-Berkeley
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems will each contribute $500,000 per year over the next five years to fund UC-Berkeley lab research. The researchers will seek alternative methods of software engineering.
Three technology giants have banded together to provide researchers at the University of California-Berkeley with $7.5 million to help entrepreneurs make their innovations available to as wide an audience as possible.
Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems each will contribute $500,000 a year over the next five years to fund research at a new UC-Berkeley lab.
The Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed systems Laboratory, or RAD Lab, will be staffed with six UC-Berkeley faculty members and about a dozen computer science graduates.
The goal is to create technologies that can help Internet entrepreneurs or inventors more easily make growing services available to hundreds of thousands or millions of users, said David Patterson, UC-Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and founding director of the RAD Lab.
Any technologies developed by the lab will be freely available under the Berkeley Software Distribution license.
``Innovation is critical to next-generation network technology,'' Greg Papadopoulos, Santa Clara-based Sun's executive vice president and chief of technology, said in a statement.
Google's vice president of engineering, Alan Eustace, said the Mountain View company looks forward to ``the exciting ideas and technology that will be developed there.'' The RAD lab is the latest in a string of research facilities at UC-Berkeley to open with private-sector partners.
Former UC-Berkeley professor Marc Davis runs the lab, which is staffed by Yahoo employees and UC-Berkeley graduate students.
For now anyway, Google, Sun and Microsoft will be strictly hands-off when it comes to RAD Lab research, serving only as advisers and funders.
The three tech companies are contributing the bulk of the funding for the lab, along with smaller contributions from other companies.
Patterson said he asked the private sector for donations because government funding for computer science research has plummeted in recent years.
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