Rice signs on to Facebook’s Building 8 research agreement

Rice University researchers are being offered the opportunity to work with Building 8, a new hardware-development division of Facebook.

Rice and 15 other American research universities have signed sponsored academic research agreements with Facebook, the company announced.

Building 8 is led by Regina Dugan, former director of the government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It was formed to advance Facebook’s “mission of connecting the world,” according to the company.

To that end, Building 8 plans to mimic DARPA’s work “at the intersection of science and product,” forming partnerships with universities and businesses to introduce new products.

Facebook officials expect the agreement will allow them to engage with individual faculty members and labs on joint technology projects in as little as 30 days rather than the months it often takes for deals to be struck.

The partnership may also provide research and funding opportunities for Rice researchers, said Yousif Shamoo, Rice’s vice provost for research and a professor of biosciences.

Other universities that are part of the agreement are the California Institute of Technology, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the University of California at San Francisco, Northeastern, Princeton, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Arizona State, the University of Waterloo, Texas A&M, Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech.