Nokia, MIT hook up for research purposes

Nokia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Friday opened the doors to a new research lab that has a distinct software flavour.

Nokia executives said the Nokia Research Center Cambridge has begun seven projects in collaboration with MIT's Center for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The research focuses on simplifying user interactions with handsets. Although Nokia is a giant in handset manufacturing, many of the advances in mobile usage will increasingly come from software, said Bob Iannucci, senior vice president and head of Nokia's research operations worldwide.

Iannucci said: "We see value in mobility moving from the devices to the software that runs on top of them."

He said that an important goal of the research centre is to make programming software for mobile devices, which can include sensors and varying wireless networks, as simple as writing applications for a single PC. Better applications will make it easier to do more sophisticated tasks with phones, he said.

A project called Swamp/Me calls for Nokia and MIT researchers to use concepts from the Semantic Web - the World Wide Web Consortium's growing collection of protocols designed to make a wealth of new information accessible and reusable through the web - to let people use their phones to make queries over the web. A person could, for example, send a text message, "Where am I?" and get a map with a location in return.

Company executives also demonstrated a prototype program to use voice commands to manage a phone's calendar.

Another project will investigate how to securely and easily transmit multimedia content. Researchers are also working on designs to make phones more energy-efficient.

Iannucci said the goal of collaborating with MIT, and potentially other companies, is to speed up innovations. The fruits of the research will eventually make their way into Nokia products.

He added: "We're seeing a general trend to have much more open innovation, at least on this pre-competitive side of things."

Martin LaMonica writes for CNET News.com