Berkeley RAD Lab:Building Successful Industry Partnerships for Fun & Profit

Armando Fox

Research Associate & Co-founding PI, UC Berkeley RADLab

Visiting Assistant Prof., Stanford

RAD Lab 5-year Mission

• Today’s Internet systems complex, fragile, manually managed, rapidly evolving– To scale Ebay, must build Ebay-sized company– This area of IT is vital to Calif. Economy, yet innovation impeded by

obstacles to scale-up

• “Moon shot” mission statement: Enable a single person to Develop, Assess, Deploy, and Operate

the next-generation IT service– “The Fortune 1 Million” by enabling rapid innovation

• Major partnership with industry: natural players with a stake in these problems

• The bet: statistical machine learning can be applied to systems & networks to greatly facilitate problem detection & diagnosis

• PI’s considered leaders in each of those 3 areas

“RAD Lab” = Reliable, Adaptive, Distributed systems

Steps vs. Process

• Process: SupportDADO Evolution, 1 group

• Steps: Traditional, Static Handoff Model, N groups

Develop

Assess Deploy

Operate

Develop

Assess

Deploy

Operate

How do we pay for this?

• PI’s (and UCB EECS) have long track record of successful large multidisciplinary projects, tech transfer to industry– RAID, RISC, NOW, INGRES, CAD, …

• National Academy of Engineering mentions Berkeley in 7 of 19 $1B+ industries that came from IT research– NAE mentions Berkeley 7 times, Stanford 5 Times,

MIT 5, CMU 3; Berkeley research catalyzed several $5-15B/yr industries within IT

• Traditionally, multiyear DARPA grants (~$3-5M over 3-4 years) + modest industry support

State of Research Funding Today

• Most industry research shorter term, small $• DARPA exiting long-term (exp.) IT research

– ’03-’05 BAAs IPTO have 12-18 month “go/no go” milestones– Academic led funding reduced 50% (so far) 2001 to 2004– Faculty ≈ consultants in consortia led by defense contractor, grants

≈ support 1-2 students (~ NSF funding level)

• NSF swamped with proposals, conservative– 2000 to 6500 proposals in 5 years

• IT has lowest acceptance rate at NSF (between 8% to 16%)

– “Ambitious proposal” is now a negative review– Awards reduced to stretch NSF $: e.g., 3 x 1/3 faculty, 6 grad

students, 0 staff, 3 years– (To learn more, see www.cra.org/research)

• RAID, NOW, INGRES cannot be done on these budgets– Yet all catalyzed $5-15B/yr industries

The Pitch to Industry

• Chance to Partner with the #1 University in Computer Systems (US News & World Report) on the “Next Great Thing”

• Berkeley one of the top suppliers of systems students to industry and academia

• Goal: small # of “founding” companies ~$500K/yr each; “affiliates” $50-100K/yr– Ease of management– Narrowly focused research agenda

Value Proposition

• Work with university researchers on long-range, pre-competitive technology

• Working with researchers with track records of successful technology transfer– RAID, RISC, NOW, BARWAN, IRAM…

• $2.5M/yr ~65% industry, ~25% state, ~10% fed – 30 grad students + 10 undergrads+ 6 faculty + 2 staff

• Founding Company Model – Prefer founding partner technology in prototypes– Designate employees to act as consultants– Many from company attend retreats, advise on directions

• 3-year project review by founding partners

Collaboration Model

• Partners want to steer research agenda?• WRONG! “If we knew what to do, we’d be doing it

ourselves”– Prefer to be “consultants” to projects– Benefits both industry and students, leads to internships

• 2x/year offsite retreat (long tradition)– Intensive preparation, intensive intellectual activity – Student talks on progress, brainstorming/breakouts,

detailed feedback from partners– Attendance tied to financial support of lab

• Retreat materials restricted to partners only for 6 mos., then made freely available

Intellectual Property

• Industry partners want assurances regarding IP licensing?

• WRONG! “We want to avoid getting sued”– Open source or BSD License is fine– History: negotiated by Deans Hodges & Newton for all UC

EECS Departments– Attitude: “Improving the ecosytem [with freely-available

software] benefits everyone”

• Many good reasons to do this in EECS– different role for patents, often near-meaningless– Software usage a key measure of impact (like refereed

papers) for students’ careers

• Make IP public domain or BSD/open-source

Value Proposition

• Most valuable are SW artifacts, research prototypes, implementable IP?

• WRONG! “Students graduating from your programs don’t understand our problems”– Shortage of visionary IT leaders imminent– Co.’s can work directly with students as well as

shaping discussion about courses, training

• Exploit liberal IP policy to encourage closer collaboration with industry

• Students do research using founders’ technology

RAD Lab

• Affiliate Company Model – $100k for “big” companies, at least $50k in cash– $50k (cash) for “small” co’s/new to research– attend retreats, head start on results

• State Support via UC matching programs– MICRO: ≤$0.5M/yr from industry, UC match rate ~1.6X,

donation– UC Discovery: $2M+/yr from industry, UC match rate

~1.3X, grant, 1 proposal for 4 years vs. year-at-time like MICRO

• Fed Support– Current NSF Grant for 3 years, $0.3M/year (Fox, Jordan,

Patterson)

PR/Outreach/Recruiting

• Capitalized at ~$2.5M, good-faith commitments of ~$7.5M, >70% industry ($1.3M NSF; UC MICRO & Discovery grants pending)

• Outreach/communications very important– Markoff NYT article announces Lab founding (1/06) with

Sun, Google, Microsoft– Press release (5/06) announces new Affiliates: IBM, HP,

NTT MCL, Nortel, Oracle– Easier to get once others signup, sense of urgency created – PI’s give high-profile keynotes to promote lab

• Recruiting incoming PhD students, preparing for Fall06 graduate projects course

Pros & Cons (to date)

—Must be conservative since no long-term contract

—Most co’s (& NSF) setup for much smaller grants—Not forced to do extensive strategic preplanning+ Few founding co.’s => avoid “too many cooks”+ Liberal IP => doesn’t impede research+ PI’s steer, companies consult & provide

feedback => deep engagement w/o micromanagement

+ Student presentations to partners at retreats => public speaking, networking, internships