FedEx Starts Their Own Research Institute

Surprises

from the can-you-get-a-degree-from-FedEx-U? dept

Apparently, the innovative work coming out of various universities wasn’t enough to keep the shipping business up to speed. If you’ve ever seen or heard about the backend technology operations that keep UPS or FedEx running, you already know how incredibly complex and sophisticated they are. And, no one is slowing down. FedEx has now launched their own FedEx Institute of Technology to do more bleeding edge research on things that might someday impact how they get a package from point A to point B. They’re looking at ways to improve the basic shipping process as well as any number of related areas – such as making airplanes more efficient or creating artificially intelligent customer service agents. The Institute, which is being set up in association with University of Memphis, isn’t just supposed to help FedEx, either, but other corporations are encouraged to take part as well. It sounds like the next extension of the issue we were just talking about where some feel that Universities are too close to the tech companies that support them. Now, they’re even building research institutes specifically to deal with their problems.