Eben Upton
Ph.D. student, University of Cambridge
Intern, Intel Research Cambridge

I have a number of friends who started working at Intel after finishing their Ph.D.s at Cambridge, so I had already visited the Intel lab several times before becoming an intern. I enjoyed the friendly atmosphere and was interested in the work that is being done here.

Although I came to the Intel lab to work on compiler research, I rapidly found myself drawn into the Haggle project, which aims to create an open architecture for peer-to-peer message forwarding on mobile devices. The goal of the research is to find a use for the large amounts of unused local bandwidth available to modern phones and PDAs, and could enable a number of novel distributed applications.

Having the Intel lab on campus benefits both Intel and the university. Intel can recruit high-quality researchers from the Ph.D. program of the Computer Laboratory [the Computer Science Department of the University of Cambridge] and can tap the Lab's staff for advice on emerging trends in research. The Computer Lab gains access to an industrial collaborator, which is helpful in developing grant applications and enables researchers to pursue projects that couldn't be funded by the Computer Lab alone.

By publishing its results openly, Intel gains credibility as a serious research organization. That helps the Intel lab to build a reputation as a trustworthy collaborator.