Per Fortune magazine — there’s a new partnershp between the University of Illinois and everyone’s favorite social media platform, The Facebook:
Facebook’s hardware development division on Wednesday announced a new partnership with Harvard, Princeton and 15 other universities intended to allow swifter collaboration on technology research projects.
The agreement between Facebook’s Building 8 and the universities comes as the social media company seeks to find new revenue streams in virtual reality and artificial intelligence, after the company signaled last month it had begun to hit some advertising growth limits on its network of 1.8 billion monthly active users.
Research partnerships between universities and companies typically take nine to 12 months to facilitate, but the new agreement will allow for collaboration on new ideas within weeks, said Regina Dugan, who joined the company in April to run the new Building 8 unit.…
Other participating universities include Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Johns Hopkins University, Northeastern University, Rice, University of California-Berkeley, University of California-San Francisco, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Arizona State University, Texas A&M University, and the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Remember, U of I students are pretty damn smart.
Top photo by Sam Logan. Photoshop job by me.