Facebook’s Building 8 team, which focuses on “building new hardware products to advance our mission of connecting the world,” has announced a deal with 17 universities throughout North America. In a Facebook post Wednesday, Regina Dugan, the head of Building 8, wrote it's "built partnerships with many of the best research minds in the world" through its new Sponsored Academic Research Agreement (SARA). Among the universities named in the partnership were three local schools: Harvard, MIT and Northeastern University.
SARA is meant to accelerate innovative research at these institutions. According to Dugan's post, "The SARA (Sponsored Academic Research Agreement) is designed to make it easier and faster for B8 to work with university researchers. Not in the 9-12 months that’s typically required. But within weeks."
Facebook will be paying universities involved in SARA in exchange for their work. And the developments these institutions of higher learning complete will ultimately be used in the real-world.
The full list of universities starting off in SARA is as follows:
- Arizona State University
- University of California-Berkeley
- University of California-San Francisco
- California Institute of Technology
- Georgia Institute of Technology
- Harvard University
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Northeastern University
- Princeton University
- Rice University
- Stanford University
- Texas A&M University
- Virginia Tech
- University of Waterloo
