University Collaborations

Some problems need a lab, not a forum thread: real-time scheduling analysis, edge-AI optimisation, security research, formal methods. Universities have the researchers, the students, and the time horizons for this work. The University Collaborations programme exists to connect that academic capacity with the EmbeddedOS platform through formal research partnerships — publishing jointly and contributing results back into the platform.

The arrangement is deliberately two-way. Academic groups get a real, open embedded stack to experiment on — MIT-licensed, auditable, with real hardware targets — instead of a toy simulator. The Foundation gets rigorous research results that flow back into the codebase: better schedulers, verified components, published analysis. Open publication is non-negotiable: research done under this programme is published openly.

The programme will establish formal partnerships with academic research groups: defined research questions, shared supervision of student work, and joint publications. The Foundation will provide platform access, engineering support, and real hardware targets; the academic group provides the research programme and the publication pipeline.

Results will be contributed back into the platform under the project's MIT licensing — code into the relevant repositories (eos, eAI, eBoot, and the rest of the embeddedos-org organisation), and papers and data published openly. The programme will maintain a public record of active collaborations, their research questions, and their outputs, so the community can see what is being worked on and build on it.

Publication norms will follow academic conventions with an open-access requirement: papers are published openly, preprints are encouraged, and datasets and artefacts needed to reproduce the results are released alongside the code. Research that cannot be reproduced is a press release, not a result, and the programme will treat it accordingly.

For academic research groups — faculty, postdocs, and graduate students — working on real-time systems, embedded security, edge AI, operating systems, or formal methods, who want a real open platform for their work rather than a closed vendor stack or a from-scratch prototype.

For students: collaborations will create supervised project and thesis opportunities on a codebase that is actually used, with mentorship from both the academic supervisor and Foundation engineers. For the community: every collaboration's outputs are public, so anyone can read, audit, and extend the results.

The University Collaborations programme is planned and has not started. There are no active partnerships and no application process today. Academic groups interested in a research partnership can email contact@embeddedos.org describing their research area and what they would want to work on — the Foundation will respond as the programme takes shape.

The programme's design — partnership models, IP and licensing terms, how student work is supervised — will be published openly before the first partnership is signed. Researchers who want to influence that design can use the same email to start the conversation now.

A realistic first step for most groups is small: a master's project on a defined component, a reading group working through the kernel's scheduling code, a summer of benchmarking. The programme will welcome small starts — they are how both sides learn whether a deeper partnership makes sense, without anyone signing a memorandum first.