MIT and Nokia duo on Semantic Web

The world’s leading manufacturer of handsets is picking some of the world’s best brains to figure out how it can tame the Semantic Web and bring its advantages onto the mobile handset

Bellheads at Nokia have teamed up with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to launch a communications research centre where their combined IQs will examine such lofty goals as improved speech recognition on handsets and next generation security.

The Semantic Web is an ongoing project from the Web’s creator, Tim Berners-Lee, that intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by giving computer-understandable meaning, or semantics, to the content of documents on the World Wide Web.

The Nokia Research Center Cambridge is based in Massachusetts and represents a collaboration with MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The team has stated that it is working on and intends to make available within the next ten years, next-generation communication technologies. Nokia and MIT have 20 staff each working on the projects.

“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,” said Dr. Bob Iannucci, head of Nokia Research Center (sic).

According to Nokia, there are several projects today that form part of a “larger vision where mobile devices become elements of an ecosystem of information, services, peripherals, sensors and other devices”.

In a company statement, Nokia gave details on several specific projects including:

* Project Simone which addresses new ways to interact with a mobile – primarily using speech.
* MobileStart which is described as a “framework” for task-oriented applications that interact via written language on mobiles.
* Asbestos which is looking at new operating system mechanisms for information flow control, specifically around security.

Professor Rodney Brooks, director of the MIT CSAIL Lab said: “Because of Nokia’s leadership in the mobile communications market… We have confidence that our joint research will likely be deployed throughout the world, ultimately having a positive impact on the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people.”

Tags: Nokia

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