Working together to solve technical challenges
Our researchers actively partner with university faculty, post-doctoral researchers, and doctoral students to work together to explore and solve many of the deep technical challenges facing our industry today.
We engage in numerous academic collaborations across engineering, business, and research disciplines. Collaborators work directly with Meta research, engineering, and product teams on efforts that are both incremental to existing work or completely new, helping to advance fundamental science.
The specific nature of each collaboration varies depending on the expected outcomes and timescales. Project scopes range in size and complexity, from short-term, small-scale engagements and sponsorships to broader multi-year open-ended research challenges. Certain projects will operate on fixed timelines with very targeted outcomes and deliverables.
Our collaborative projects are anchored on a Meta research topic from one of our key research areas and have one or more Meta researchers committed to the collaboration.
Requirements
- At least one faculty Principal Investigator (PI) who assigns academic researchers to the project
- A Meta sponsor that agrees to work with the faculty PI to lead the research effort
- A clear project outline, with timeline for completion and proposed outcomes
- A written agreement between Meta and the university, covering such items as Intellectual Property (IP) and expectations regarding publication
Meta collaboration agreements range from Master Agreements (MA) encompassing focused projects designed to make it easier and faster for Meta groups to rapidly engage with university collaborators on specific work, to Sponsored Research Agreements (SRA) for collaborative research that may be project specific, leading more to scientific results.
In forming agreements, Meta understands that universities have a level of overhead and administration that needs to be reflected in sponsored collaborative agreements and will pay ~40% overhead on the costs for a university hosted researcher. Note that in the case of unrestricted gift funding, Meta pays up to 5% overhead to the university.