Samsung Research America Expands Academic Collaboration Through the 2026 START Program

Samsung Research America (SRA) has selected eight research projects for its 2026 Strategic Alliance for Research and Technology (START) Program cohort, expanding collaboration with leading universities across North America to advance research in emerging technology areas.

The START Program reflects Samsung Electronics’ long-standing commitment to identify the best opportunities in the US and Canadian innovation ecosystems by blending Samsung’s R&D capabilities with the research expertise of leading academic institutions. Through the program, Samsung researchers collaborate with university research teams to explore new ideas, advance foundational research, and identify ground-breaking technologies with the potential to shape future products and user experiences. This program builds on a successful foundation from the previous year, when the cohort executed 12 research projects with nine universities across key domains, including AI, Robotics, and Digital Health.

As an indication of the high quality of research being pursued under this program, this year’s competition received over 400 proposal submissions from over 130 top universities across North America. The awardees for this cohort include Stanford University, CMU, University of Washington, Princeton University, University of Michigan, Purdue University and University of Victoria, among other leading universities.

Selected projects span a broad range of research areas, including Agentic AI, Physical AI, Advanced Communications, Multimedia, Digital Health, and AI Security. The selected awardees, after engaging as partners, will join the 27 university partners to work closely with SRA and drive innovations for the future.

“SRA is committed to promoting excellence at the frontier of innovation through collaboration with the world leading scientists in North America. Through the START Program, we provide a valuable opportunity for such collaborations to measurably translate into real-world impact. By combining profound academic insights with our robust engineering capabilities, we aim to accelerate the development of next-generation technologies. We look forward to pursuing the exciting ideas proposed by the awardees in this current cohort,” said Wonil Roh, President of SRA.

“The START Program has been a valuable catalyst for our research at the University of Washington. Our Year 1 collaboration with SRA’s AI Center developed a new multimodal reasoning approach using visual representations as working memory. SRA’s researchers brought thoughtful technical feedback and practical perspective to the project. I’m excited to build on this work in Year 2 as we advance toward robotic agents that visually reason to act. I strongly recommend the START Program to universities seeking high-impact research partnerships.” said Professor Ranjay Krishna, University of Washington.