At a new facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are collaborating with Nokia scientists on next-generation communications software and hardware .

While Nokia has partnered with MIT on research efforts for some 20 years, officials said the Cambridge center will allow for the sort of daily interaction necessary to move development efforts forward rapidly and push some of those technologies into Nokia's products more quickly.

Information Ecosystem

Current research projects by the two groups -- each a leader in its respective area -- are seen as integral components of a larger strategy in which mobile devices will play a pivotal role in an information ecosystem.

Applications for the research fall into two basic areas, said James Hicks, director of the Nokia Research Center. The first is creating more user-friendly interfaces for accessing the growing number of rich features available on mobile devices, and the second is providing better connections among handhelds and other products, such as PCs and peripherals .

"One example is helping camera-phone users share their pictures across the network with a home computer or an electronic picture frame, and do that securely," Hicks said.

Focus Areas

Other projects will focus on developing better ways to interact with mobile devices using speech- and handwriting-recognition technology. In addition, the research center plans to develop technology for verifying the interoperability of new wireless Web services and create new designs for high-performance, power -conserving hardware.

Hicks said that, in terms of building more power-efficient mobile phones, the new fuel-cell technologies hold promise in improving battery life but do not address heat-dissipation issues effectively. "The idea is to investigate ways to conserve more energy so that the devices can handle the advanced applications users prefer," he said.

"Not only do we have the opportunity to work on compelling research with Nokia's 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 millions of people." said professor Rodney Brooks, director of MIT's CSAIL, in a statement.