Corporate Affiliates Program

Corporate members are an integral part of Stanford Data Science SDS. Relationships between companies, faculty, and graduate students provide everyone with valuable insights on opportunities, problems, and solutions. Corporations are the most important path to commercialization at scale and achieving societal impact. SDS Affiliate Program works closely with diverse industries including information technology, communications, social networks, finance, insurance, health care, semiconductors, retail, manufacturing, utilities, oil and gas, and transportation. Corporate membership fees provide unrestricted support for SDS research and other activities where the emphasis is on two-way communication between researchers and companies.

Member Benefits

Corporate members provide valuable financial support and leadership, and receive substantial benefits. The SDS Affiliates Program offers two membership levels: Founding and Regular members. Both types of members have the opportunity for active engagement with faculty and students and extensive opportunities to learn about emerging research results at retreats, conferences, seminars, symposia, workshops, and informal interactions. Regular and Founding members also have opportunities for informal collaboration on research projects, hosted visits to Stanford, an opportunity to send visiting scholars, and student recruiting opportunities. Founding Members receive additional benefits including membership on the SDS Industry Advisory Council, opportunities to advise the research agenda, an office on campus, a faculty liaison, custom workshops at Stanford, and faculty and student visits to companies. The purpose of the visits are to give technical presentations and discuss with the member areas of mutual interest. All of the site presentations and all information, data and results arising from such visitation interactions will be shared with all members and the public. Additional information can be found in the Research Policy Handbook.

Contribution

Regular membership is $100,000 per year and Founding membership is $500,000 per year. Companies are encouraged to develop long-term multi-year relationships. These contributions are used to fund research projects, the SDS data and tools repository, and other programs and activities. Companies may provide additional funding above the membership fee to support an area of on-going research with faculty participating within the program. All research results arising from the use of the additional funding will be shared with all program members and the general public. An Affiliate Program member may request the additional funding be used to support a particular area of program research identified on the program’s website, or the program research of a named faculty member, as long as the faculty is identified on the program website as participating in the Affiliate Program.

The SDS Affiliates Program Participation document is considered executed and renewed on an annual basis upon receipt of the annual membership fee. This document may be downloaded here: Overview for Corporate Members

Industrial affiliates programs are subject to Stanford University policies for industry affiliates programs. Please see the Stanford University Policies Affecting Industrial Affiliates Program Membership

Open Source IP

Modern data science is revolutionizing research and changing society. Stanford Data Science focuses on the fundamental challenges of data, computation, information, and statistics. The goal is to conduct world-leading research in data science and its applications, in an open and collaborative environment. The ability to share ideas, tools, data, and results openly and without barriers is essential for collaboration with researchers at Stanford and elsewhere, and essential for having impact in the data science community.

SDS researchers will use and develop open-source software, and it is the intention of all SDS researchers that any software released will be released under an open-source model, such as the BSD open source license. SDS is open to all Stanford faculty who share this goal.