Principal Investigator Jamey E Hicks, Jr
Co-investigator Arvind
Project Start Date January 2006
Advancing the vision of mobility while developing real-world applications, MIT and Nokia have opened 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.
The mission is to explore and develop technologies that will be available in the marketplace in five to 10 years -- not just novelties, but technologies that will see mass market demand from consumers and enterprises. 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 in which 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 under way could likely become real-world applications within the next decade.
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 James Hicks from the Nokia Research Center has been named director of the Nokia Research Center Cambridge. Arvind, the Johnson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, will be the program manager for MIT/CSAIL.
NRCC Purpose & Research for the Cambridge Group
NRCC (Nokia Research Center Cambridge) is a cross-disciplinary research organization whose charter is to bring new ideas into Nokia products. NRCC consists of approximately 20 Nokia researchers, investigating all aspects of mobile phones, from computer and network architecture to user interfaces.
The primary activity of Nokia Research Center Cambridge is the Nokia-MIT Collaboration. The Nokia-MIT Collaboration builds on past cooperation with MIT, including W3C, Project Oxygen, Things That Think, and the Communications Futures Program. One of the goals of the collaboration is to increase the level of interaction between Nokia and MIT researchers compared to previous initiatives. For this reason, NRCC has been situated close to MIT CSAIL with spare offices for external researchers.
There are currently 6 joint projects within the collaboration, involving nearly 60 faculty, students, and research staff from MIT CSAIL.