Nokia Research Center Cambridge

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 team is led by Jamey Hicks, NRCC's Director.

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.

NRC Cambridge has been established with a unique purpose for Nokia Research Center. The collaborative work of NRC Cambridge will center on a view of the future where small handheld devices such as mobile phones will become part of an "ecosystem" of information, services, peripherals, sensors, and other devices. Research here will address new user interfaces that incorporate speech and other modalities, new mobile computing platforms - including low power hardware platforms and wireless communication - and new software architectures. As well, researchers will consider new ways to manage information, using technologies such as Semantic Web - an extension of the current Web, developed in part at CSAIL and at the Nokia Research Center - which will enable devices to more intuitively and automatically understand interconnected terms, information and services.

There are currently 6 joint projects within the collaboration, involving nearly 60 faculty, students, and research staff from MIT CSAIL. The MIT and NRCC research leads are noted below:

* ARMO: Synthesizable modeling of mobile phones to facilitate architectural studies of performance and energy-efficiency - (MIT: Arvind, Krste Asanovic, Anantha Chandrakasan, and NRCC: Gopal Raghavan)
* MyNet/UIA: Secure, peer to peer, personal overlay networks - (MIT: Robert Morris, Frans Kaashoek, and NRCC: Franklin Reynolds)
* ConnectingMe: Relational data for managing relationships in the mobile ecosystem - (MIT: David Karger and NRCC: Ora Lassila )
* Start Mobile: Natural Language-Based Architecture for Connecting Mobile Devices to Active Resources - (MIT: Larry Rudolph, Boris Katz, and NRCC: Alex Ran)
* Simone: Spoken Interaction for Mobile Networked Ecosystems - (MIT: Jim Glass, and NRCC: Mark Adler)
* Mobile Medical Telepresence - (MIT: John Guttag and NRCC: John Ankcorn)

Mature projects:

* ComposeMe: Intelligent Composition of Heterogeneous Services: Integrating Web Services and Mobile Devices - (MIT: Mike Ernst, and NRCC: Raimondas Lencevicius)
* SWAPME: Semantic Web Application Platform for Mobile Ecosystems - (MIT: Tim Berners-Lee, Daniel Jackson, David Karger, and Daniel Weitzner and NRCC: Ora Lassila )

In addition to the collaboration with MIT, NRCC works with researchers from other NRC groups and with engineers from other Nokia business units, in order to transfer technology into Nokia products, following the co-development model of technology transfer.