On a clear day, David Wetherall can see Mount Rainier from his desk. On a clearer day, he can see the future of Intel. OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But Wetherall, the director of Intel Research Seattle, has certainly been charged with leading an exploratory research effort for the chip-making giant—blue-sky, “off-roadmap” stuff that won’t be in Intel’s products anytime soon, but is nonetheless vital to the company because it could help create the broader future of computing.

Intel Research Seattle, located three blocks from the University of Washington campus, is one of three Intel labs tied closely to universities around the country—the others are at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The Seattle lab, which opened in 2001, has 20 full-time researchers, with about an equal number of students, interns, and visiting researchers at any given time.

I sat down with Wetherall yesterday as he was doing last-minute preparations for today’s annual lab open house. Wetherall has been director of the Seattle lab since mid-2006. He is also an associate professor of computer science and engineering at UW, and his own research has focused on wireless networks and distributed systems. It’s an unusual model, in that Intel hires its research lab directors for three-year terms, after which they typically go back to academia full-time. (Wetherall is the third director of the Seattle lab.) “The lab has a charter, to bring in new people from the university,” says Wetherall. This helps “invigorate things” and keeps the lab’s research on the “cutting edge.”

As Wetherall explains, it’s a pretty open and forward-looking effort. “We have a lot of joint research, projects where university people work here, and we also fund research at the university. It’s a big way we get things done. There is a joint, open collaborative agreement between Intel and UW. People don’t have to sign an NDA,” says Wetherall. “We’re not focused on an immediate product, we’re focused around opening markets…We’re chartered with doing disruptive research that’s not on the product map. Intel is interested in new computing technologies. We’re trying to invent them, and stay ahead of the game. We’re a small scout organization looking for game-changing technologies.”

The Seattle lab’s research theme is “focused on future computer systems woven into the fabric of everyday life,” says Wetherall. It’s the next step in the evolution of computers as they migrate from desktops to mobile devices to embedded devices. “We try to figure out what technologies and usage models work, how to power them, how to provide privacy, how to do sensing,” he adds. Researchers at the lab have expertise in hardware, robotics, machine learning, wireless networks, and human-computer interfaces, among other disciplines. “We believe in prototyping, from hardware through software systems, and we have a user-centered viewpoint,” says Wetherall. “We are finding out what users want.”

It sounds a lot like the “connected computing” (or ubiquitous computing) trend that the founders of Voyager Capital were telling me about last week, from an investor’s perspective—the confluence of software, wireless, and digital media. I asked Wetherall what connections the Intel lab has with the local innovation community in these areas. …Next Page »

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A huge new biotech lab complex is being planned for Burlington, MA, according to a report in the Boston Globe. The proposed $2 billion development is the brainchild of developer Patriot Partners, which is already building out the nearby 96-acre Lexington Technology Park at the site of the old Raytheon headquarters. If realized, the Burlington plan would produce New England’s largest life sciences complex, including 2 million square feet of lab and office space, as well as shops and 2,000 units of housing for the elderly. The plan seems to be rather preliminary, though, given that the company still doesn’t own the land and probably would have to build bridges and ramps to make it accessible.

As the Globe notes, there are already a number of other big developments aiming at the needs of the life science industry under way, like Alexandria Real Estate Equities’ planned 1.5 million-square-foot lab complex near Kendall Square in Cambridge.

Taken together, these Burlington and Cambridge developments would add 3.5 million square feet of life sciences labs to what’s already in existence in the region. If I have done my mental conversion to metrics correctly, that is nearly six times as much space as the former Pharmacia corporate R&D labs used to occupy in my Swedish hometown Uppsala some years ago. Will there really be a demand for all these facilities? (As a Scandinavian, raised on soccer, not baseball, I can’t just believe that if you build it, they will come.)

Patriot Partners doesn’t have any future tenants lined up for the Burlington site, though it hopes that life science companies will continue to move to the suburbs. At the same time, rising gas prizes, and energy costs overall, might make more central locations more attractive. That is why Alexandria is betting on a location close to the Kendall Square subway stop instead, as Xconomy reported in June.

“I think that in the long run the life science industry in the region will continue to grow. Will the growth be adequate to fill all the properties being proposed? That remains to be seen,” says Tom Andrews, senior vice president at Alexandria.

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Late last year a fire destroyed the biochemistry department at the Southern University of Chile and dealt a severe blow to its researchers. But thanks to Seeding Labs, a non-profit based in Cambridge, MA, the labs might soon be up and running again. The organization collects discarded lab equipment, sorts and packs it, and ships it to scientific institutions in developing countries.

“We see ourselves as a kind of angel investor,” says Seeding Lab founder and executive director, geneticist Nina Dudnik. “We can give our fellow scientists in developing countries a kick-start. The equipment makes it possible to get research done, publish articles, attract international funding and in the end build a self-sustaining lab through international grants.”

Seeding Labs was started five years ago by a group of graduate science students at Harvard. Almost all of the founders had worked in developing countries.

“I had worked at an agricultural research institute in the Ivory Coast in West Africa which had a molecular biology department,” Dudnik says. “When I came to Harvard I was struck by the stark differences in resources. Here, if you need something, you can order it in the morning and it comes the next day. In West Africa we would have to wait for months. Often the only way to get reagents was to ask a colleague who was going to a conference to pick them up.”

So far, Seeding Labs has sent equipment to 20 labs in 12 countries in Latin America and in Africa. The recipients—or their co-sponsors—pay for the shipping.

During its early years, Seeding Labs got its equipment from the academic sector, mainly from Harvard. But this year the organization has also started to collect used hardware and unused supplies from the private sector.

“We got an incredible generous donation from Biogen Idec—It consisted of lab equipment and consumables sufficient to send to five labs,” Dudnik says.

The Biogen Idec donation was organized by Mahin Aratsu, at the company’s neurobiology discovery department in Cambridge. “A co-worker had seen a flyer from Seeding Labs and had brought it over,” says Aratsu. “I thought it was a perfect opportunity to clean up our labs and get rid of equipment and send it over to places that would probably use it a lot more than we did. It turned out that our immunology department did something similar after we did, and we are hoping to continue this on at least every couple of years.”

The supplies and equipment collected at Biogen Idec range from test tubes and petri dishes to centrifuges and gel electrophoresis systems. After being packed up by a group of about thirty volunteers, part of the donation is now in Seeding Labs’ warehouse, waiting to be shipped to the Southern University of Chile.

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When Xconomy set up shop in Kendall Square, Cambridge, last year, we knew it was the innovation hub of New England, but we still didn’t realize just how deep the bench is here. Practically every week we learn about a new startup or an established technology firm with an office near ours. My most recent discovery was VMware (NYSE: VMW)—the virtualization company I usually describe as “a Palo Alto, CA, subsidiary of Hopkinton, MA-based EMC.” Turns out VMware has a 150-strong research and development laboratory right in the Cambridge Center complex, a stone’s throw from the Kendall subway station and just upstairs from Google’s new Cambridge spread.

VMware has been in the spotlight for months, thanks mainly to a spectacular August IPO and the seemingly unstoppable stock climb that followed. (Share prices peaked at almost $125 on Halloween, but have since returned to the much more earthly $40 to $60 range.) But here at Xconomy we’ve also cast a critical eye on the company’s long delay in issuing a patch for a critical software vulnerability affecting three of its workstation virtualization products. A fix was finally released on March 18, more than five months after Boston-based security firm Core Security notified VMware about the problem.

I’d spoken with several company officials for those stories by phone, but recently I got an invitation to meet some of the folks at VMware personally. So I headed over to the Cambridge facility and had breakfast with senior director of R&D Julia Austin, who is the lab’s site director, as well as director of product management Ben Matheson. They gave me the lowdown on the lab’s activities, which focus on advanced product development—”visionary work looking at new architectures and solutions not core to VMware today but where we think there is a business opportunity three to five years out,” in Austin’s words.

VMware, whose software helps companies save money on computer servers by allowing multiple operating systems to run on the same machines, opened a small R&D shop in Kendall Square shortly after EMC (NYSE: EMC) acquired the company in 2003. About three years ago, the operation moved to its current location, a 50,000-square-foot space on the tenth floor at Five Cambridge Center. (Soon the lab will swallow up an additional floor and double its capacity to 300 staff members, Austin says.)

Siting the lab was a no-brainer. “Being right here in Kendall Square has been a phenomenal opportunity for us,” says Austin. “Being across the street from MIT, and just down the street from Harvard and BU and Northeastern, and not too far from Columbia and Carnegie-Mellon, has been very helpful for us, for recruiting and growing our academic programs.” In addition to its core staff, the VMware lab hosts 25 summer interns from local universities, as well as visiting researchers such Richard West from Boston University’s computer science department as Larry Rudolph and Saman Amarasinghe, both from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

While there are at least three advanced development projects underway at the Cambridge lab, Austin and Matheson could only speak publicly about one of them—a system for disaster recovery that’s currently exiting the development stage and becoming a real product.

In a post-9/11, post-Katrina world, “the ability to recover from a disaster—natural or man-made—is one of the biggest problems across businesses of all sizes,” says Matheson. “Say an earthquake hits Boston. [Which isn't as implausible as it may sound---the city was badly damaged by a 6.0-to-6.5 temblor in 1755.] An IT administrator hits the proverbial big red button, and our site recovery manager is going to start all of the servers at your backup site in the right order, in a very fast, reliable way, so that you can recover really quickly.”

Virtualized systems actually lend themselves to being transplanted from an operations site to a backup site, since virtual machines look pretty much like …Next Page »

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Microsoft announced yesterday that by July Cambridge, MA, will be home to the fifth R&D outpost outside the company’s Redmond, WA, headquarters, joining existing Microsoft Research facilities in Silicon Valley, Beijing, China, Cambridge, England, and Bangalore, India. The new lab, to be located at One Memorial Drive adjacent to the MIT campus and led by mathematical physicist and 10-year Microsoft veteran Jennifer Chayes, will focus in part on blending computational and social-sciences approaches to understanding the needs and behaviors of people within online social networks.

Late yesterday I reached Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s senior vice president of research and the man who has been overseeing the growth of Microsoft Research worldwide since 1994, to ask about how the company decided to place a lab in Cambridge and what value he hopes it can create for the software giant.

Xconomy: Why put a research lab in Cambridge now, as opposed to, say, five years ago?

Rick Rashid: For us, what makes this a good time is simply that Microsoft as a company has been growing its presence in the Boston area. Before, if you’d tried to put a research lab there, there would have been wonderful universities to talk to, but it wouldn’t necessarily have been anchored in other parts of the company. Now with the really substantial, growing presence the company has there, it really makes sense. And we’ve been getting an incredibly enthusiastic response from within Microsoft—from people in the Boston area. Now that Microsoft Research is going to have a lab there, it gives them access to more really smart people and really great ideas. I think everybody is excited about what that could produce.

X: Why here? What makes Cambridge an attractive place for Microsoft to have a research center?

RR: One of the key things is that obviously, there is this incredible intellectual environment in the Boston-Cambridge area, and really in the Northeast in general. When we site our labs you have to think about, what are the opportunities to recruit and bring great people into the lab, and what are the opportunities to collaborate and work together with others? Being right next to MIT, near Harvard, not that far from Brown, not that far from New York, that will open up a lot of new collaboration opportunities and access to faculty and students. And clearly we will be able to hire some great people there. The way I think about research labs, first and foremost research programs are about people—the quality of the people you’re getting. It’s not like a product group. You are not hiring them to do something specific. What you’re doing is hiring for opportunities, hiring for the future. The people you bring in are really the critical resource that makes it go, or not.

X: The vision that Jennifer Chayes and her husband and deputy managing director, Christian Borgs, have outlined, of a lab where theoretical math will overlap with sociology and psychology and economics, would make it pretty unique among the system of Microsoft Research labs, wouldn’t it?

RR: The personality of each of our locations is really determined by its people. Jennifer and Christian, they have a vision, and there are things they’ll be doing, and that’s certainly going to have an impact.

But also, over time, we’ll have opportunities to hire great people who may be in very different areas. If they find some incredible person that that may be somewhat off the direction they may have been thinking about, I would still encourage them to hire that person, because that’s the way you win. You draft for the quality of the player, not for the position, or because you have some great plan for the team.

That said, having a lab in Boston will bring us access to some incredible people in a number of the areas that Jennifer is talking about.

X: What makes Chayes the kind of person you’d want to appoint to start a Microsoft Research outpost?

RR: Have you met Jennifer, face to face? If you had, you probably wouldn’t ask that question. She’s brilliant, first off. That’s a critical criterion. But also, she’s one of these people that has …Next Page »

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