This doesn't seem so uncommon for big projects at that department. I'm thinking for example about all the various tools developed by Noah Snavely and colleagues

This doesn't seem so uncommon for big projects at that department. I'm thinking for example about all the various tools developed by Noah Snavely and colleagues for the Photo Tourism project http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/ http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/ , that were later acquired by Microsoft for their Photosynth branded tools.