Nokia, MIT Open Research Center

April 24, 2006

Advancing the vision of mobility while developing real-world applications, Nokia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) today announce the opening of the Nokia Research Center Cambridge. The joint research facility, a collaboration between Nokia Research Center and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), brings researchers and scientists from MIT and Nokia together to develop high-impact research to create the state-of-the-art in communications technologies.

NRC Cambridge is on the 2nd floor, tree-top level.

"Our mission is to explore and develop technologies that will be available in the marketplace in five to ten years - not just novelties, but technologies that will see mass market demand from consumers and enterprises," said Dr. Bob Iannucci, head of Nokia Research Center. "With MIT's academic and research expertise, Nokia's mobility and technology leadership, and the fusion of some of the world's brightest minds, the Nokia Research Center Cambridge will provide a platform for delivering compelling new innovations."

The center is currently focusing its research on several projects, each part of a larger vision where mobile devices become elements of an "ecosystem" of information, services, peripherals, sensors and other devices. These projects revolve around enhancing people's lives and productivity by enabling more intuitive interaction between individuals, machines and environments, and range from developing the underlying computer architecture to leveraging and extending the Semantic Web. Although not commercially available today, projects like those underway could likely become real-world applications within the next decade.

Specific projects include:
- Project Simone addresses new ways to interact with your mobile device primarily using speech.

- MobileStart provides a framework for task-oriented applications that interact via written language on the mobile device.

- MyNet/UIA develops a way for different users to easily and securely connect various devices to each other and across the Internet.

- Asbestos explores the use of new operating systems mechanisms for information flow control to prevent private information from being inadvertently shared or maliciously exposed.

- SwapMe develops a platform for Semantic Web applications that are policy, preference, and context aware.

- ComposeMe provides mechanisms for verifying interoperability of Web services.

- Armo explores new design methodologies and languages to enable the development of high-performance, energy-efficient hardware for mobile devices.


"Our collaboration with Nokia and the subsequent opening of the Nokia Research Center Cambridge is an exciting opportunity for all parties, including the CSAIL research team," said Professor Rodney Brooks, director of the MIT CSAIL Lab. "Not only do we have the opportunity to work on truly compelling research with Nokia's highest-caliber researchers, but - because of Nokia's leadership in the mobile communications market - we also have confidence that our joint research will likely be deployed throughout the world, ultimately having a positive impact on the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people."

Located five minutes from CSAIL's headquarters, the Nokia Research Center Cambridge will have approximately 20 researchers from MIT and 20 researchers from Nokia. Joint projects will be managed under the direction of a joint steering committee, and Dr. James Hicks from the Nokia Research Center has been named director of the Nokia Research Center Cambridge. Arvind, Johnson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, will be the program manager for MIT/CSAIL.

The MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) was formed on July 1st, 2003 by the merger of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab) and the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS). It is an interdepartmental laboratory that includes faculty from Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mathematics, Brain and Cognitive Science, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Ocean Engineering, Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, the Biological Engineering Division and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. CSAIL is also the home of the World Wide Web Consortium. With more than 90 Principal Investigators and 800 members, CSAIL is the largest laboratory on the MIT campus.

The primary mission of CSAIL is research in many aspects of computation and artificial intelligence. It is organized into four broad research directorates: 1) Architecture, systems, and networks, 2) Theory, 3) Language, learning, vision, and graphics, and 4) Physical, biological, and computational systems.

Over the past four decades, members of CSAIL and its predecessors have been responsible for many of the innovations in computer science and information technology, including time sharing, public key encryption, bit-mapped displays, TCP/IP, personal workstations, Web standards, computer vision, speech, and robotics. CSAIL members have distinguished themselves as members of the U.S. Academy of Sciences and Engineering (17), recipients of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award (6), Turing Award (4), Japan Prize (2), and Millennium Technology Award. Technology transfer from CSAIL is often accomplished through startups; some of them include Akamai, Cognex, iRobot, OpenMarket, RSA Data Security, Silicon Spice and SpeechWorks.