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Technology rivals step up to support Internet research at Berkeley
Google, Microsoft and Sun join forces
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RAD Lab founding director and EECS professor David Patterson (center) says creative new arrangements are needed to support information technology research in the United States to compensate for a drop in federal funding. Patterson is also the E.H. and M.E. Pardee Chair of Computer Science.
PEG SKORPINSKI PHOTO
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Berkeley Engineering computer sciences faculty and three industry giants are uniting their talents to launch a new research center that will revolutionize Internet service technology in the face of dwindling federal funding for such research.
The Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed systems laboratory (RAD Lab) will be underwritten by $7.5 million over five years from Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. Six founding faculty will provide the brain power, including RAD Lab founder David Patterson; EECS professors Randy Katz, Scott Shenker and Ion Stoica; EECS/statistics professor Michael Jordan; and Stanford’s Armando Fox (Ph.D.’98 EECS), expected to join the Berkeley faculty this July.
“It takes a large company employing hundreds of really smart people to support Internet services,” Patterson says. “Our goal is to develop technology that eliminates the need for such a large organization, opening up innovation opportunities for small groups or even individual entrepreneurs.” The key to that technology is statistical machine learning, an area of artificial intelligence that teaches computers to learn from their own prior results and automatically improve their statistical processes, which both increases speed and cuts costs.
Federal funding of information technology research—which over the last four decades fueled such groundbreaking developments as the modern microprocessor, the Internet, the graphical user interface and single-user workstations—has dried up dramatically in the last three years. Computer science experts, including Patterson, say the consequences could be crippling for U.S. industries, and alternative funding must be found.
With RAD Lab, the three Internet competitors enter into a truce of sorts, in support of basic “pre-competitive” research in the academic setting. Terms specify that any software or applications emerging from the research be made available to the public through the Berkeley Software Distribution license, in keeping with UC’s mission of maximizing the work’s impact and spurring new industry and job growth.
Research will initially be conducted by RAD Lab faculty and 10 graduate students, with participation expanding as research progresses. Within two or three years, Patterson says, the tools under development will be tested in graduate courses and will provide research opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students. RAD Lab faculty envision that some of the prototypes and ideas coming out of these courses could result in Internet services with potential applications in everything from e-mail to online calendars.
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