Announcing the BAIR Open Research Commons
The University of California Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab is pleased to announce the BAIR Open Research Commons, a new industrial affiliate program launched to accelerate cutting-edge AI research. AI research is advancing rapidly in both university and corporate research settings, with existing collaborations already underway driven by individual researcher-to-researcher collaborations. The BAIR Commons is designed to enhance and streamline such collaborative cutting-edge research by students, faculty, and corporate research scholars.
The Commons agreement has been framed with the goal of promoting open research in AI: all on-campus effort, data, and results in the Commons program will be non-exclusive with open publication and open-source code release expected. Fostering an environment for excellence for graduate student research is the primary motivation of the new program: Berkeley students will lead the design of projects in the Commons, and the program of research must be approved by their home departments before a project commences. Students are expected to benefit from collaboration with leading researchers in industrial research labs, as well as the availability of partner resources useful to investigate certain open questions in state-of-the-art AI research. The University will benefit from membership fees paid by partners to participate in the program. The Commons agreement provides for collaborative joint projects between the partners and Berkeley, with intellectual property shared jointly and equally by the parties.
The agreement also provides for joint research “lablets”, which will be embedded collaborative open research spaces inside BAIR’s 27,000 sq. ft. research facility in the Berkeley Way West facility on the Berkeley campus. More than a dozen faculty and 120 students will be assigned space in the new lab, with an equal number of visiting positions allocated for researchers from other BAIR labs and for visiting industrial partners.
Alliance participants include Alibaba, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung. Funding for over twenty joint projects has been committed in the initial launch of the program, which will support both BAIR facilities and research efforts. Over 50 faculty and 300 graduate students and postdocs at Berkeley are affiliated with BAIR. For more information about BAIR or the Commons program please contact bair-admin@berkeley.edu.
