Member Benefits

• Creating intelligence through collective wisdom and resources from academia, industry, and governments.
• Realizing a 20:1 return on investment. Leveraging support from NSF and universities, one membership of $50K can access research projects and resources supported by over $1M funds.
• Enjoying royalty-free non-exclusive licensing of the center intellectual property of all academic sites.
• Exploring intelligent platforms and services developed by the center.
• Leveraging the world-class talents (professors and graduate students) in the era of big learning, big data, and big systems.
• Accessing excellent students.
• Joining peer members from high-profile companies and research labs.
• Engaging in pre-competitive innovation with market leaders and competitors

Membership

• The center membership fees are pooled to fund competitive research projects based on feedback from members.
• Members enjoy royalty-free non-exclusive licensing for the intellectual property of all sites.
• Members have access to the entire center research portfolio, papers, software, and architectures.
• Members vote to select projects and set their funding levels.
• Semi-annual meetings are held in spring/fall for project selection and reporting.
• Full Member: $50,000 annual contribution (50 votes). Associate (half member): $25,000 (25 votes).
• Advanced Member: $200,000 annual contribution (100 votes).

Membership Structure

• The membership structure of the CBL center is elaborated in the following table. The standard membership fee is $50K for one unit of membership with 50 IAB votes. The advanced membership fee is $200K with additional benefits (such as in-residence training, short courses, and others). To encourage small business organization (with less than 200 employees) to participate in the cutting-edge projects, we offer them the associate membership at the discounted rate of half membership fee ($25K) with 25 IAB votes.
• The role of the CBL member company is to designate one representative for the CBL industrial advisory board (IAB), to attend two semi-annual IAB meetings and contribute to the online Level of Interest Feedback and Evaluation (LIFE) forms, and to provide guidance and feedback to the center faculty on project proposals of mutual interest through one-on-one interactions. The benefits include enormous leveraging (more than 10:1 ROI) of their membership fees based on $2M total membership fees in CBL divided by the average membership contribution of $50K as well as voting power to select research projects, access to pre-publication research by 80+ world-class experts, royalty-free non-exclusive licensing for all center IP, significantly reduced overhead (10% on industry membership fees), recruiting of talented CBL center students, and relationships with fellow CBL member company representatives, faculty, and students.