Anthony LaMarca
Staff Researcher, Intel Research Seattle

I was the first researcher to join the Seattle lab, and there was no guarantee that the lab, and Intel's innovative research model, would succeed. From an industrial research perspective, what Intel was attempting to do was unique; no other company had established a research organization such as the Research Network, with an open IP [intellectual property] model. But I knew the people who were establishing and leading the labs, and I had faith that they could attract top-tier researchers.

If you work for a typical industrial research lab and you want to collaborate with someone in another organization, you might have to tell them, "We'd like to work with you, but here's a sheaf of NDAs [nondisclosure agreements] you have to sign first. And here's a list of topics we're allowed to talk about." This doesn't usually generate a positive response.

You get a completely different reaction if you are able to say, "We'd like to work with you, and we have an open IP model. Everything we're doing is shared, is the code we write can be open sourced. Let's talk about how to make your research tie into our research." That's what we're able to do at Intel Research Seattle, and we've been greeted with open arms by nearly everyone we have approached.

The fact that I can collaborate with students and faculty at the University of Washington, where I earned my Ph.D., is great, and was one reason I joined the lab. The university is extremely collegial; it seems to display none of the internal politics that you hear rumors about at many other schools.

The open IP model makes it easier to attract student interns to the lab, because they can continue their research after the internship has ended, use it in their Ph.D. thesis, and publish it if they choose. At other industrial labs, by contrast, interns often cannot write papers about their research unless the papers are carefully cleared by legal staff.

The lab environment gives students exposure to the corporate world. While our focus is on long-term research, most of the researchers in the lab have industrial experience and have shipped real products. So the students who come and work with us get a different perspective than they get in the university, and I think they really benefit from it.