Nokia, MIT Open Comm Research Lab

Nokia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology celebrated on Friday the opening of the cell phone maker's new research center near the Cambridge, Mass., campus.

The new research center, a partnership with the university's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), will study new communications technologies. Researchers from both MIT and Nokia will work together to jointly develop these projects.

Nokia says much of the work done by the new research center will center around making handheld wireless devices part of an "ecosystem" of information and services. Work will also be done on interfaces and platforms, and to make devices more intuitive.

Some of the projects the team is working on include Project Simone, developing ways to interact with phones through speech; MyNet/UIA to research ways to easily and securely connect devices to each other and the Internet; SwapMe, a platform for semantic web applications; and ComposeMe, a mechanism for verifying the interoperability of Web services.

While none of these projects are currently commercially available in any device, Nokia says they could be included in future devices over the next decade.

"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," head of Nokia Research Center Dr. Bob Iannucci said in the announcement.

The new facility will be located about five minutes from CSAIL's headquarters, and employ 20 researchers from MIT, with another 20 from Nokia. Joint projects would be managed by a steering committee.

The partnership is not the first time the two groups have worked together. Nokia and MIT also joined up for the Oxygen Alliance, a project aimed at creating new types of computers.