Nokia and Universities to Research Pervasive Communications

Nokia Research Center will work with the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology in Lausanne and Zurich on what the Finnish phone giant calls pervasive communications, or the "Internet of things."

Together on Tuesday they announced the establishment of a joint long-term research program.

Pervasive communications means that mobile phones, and other types of mobile devices, will in the future communicate with different systems in the environment around us, according to Nokia.

"It can, for example, be a system which measures air quality, and passes along results to your mobile phone," said James Waterworth, communications manager at Nokia.

Nokia is convinced pervasive communications has a lot of potential, and sees the fusing of the digital and physical worlds as a key objective in mobility.

Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich have a lot of expertise in the space.

"That's why we wanted to work with them," said Waterworth.

He doesn't want to go into specifics about how the resulting intellectual property will be handled, but it tends to be flexible. Sometimes it might make more sense for Nokia to own the intellectual property, and sometimes it's the other way around, said Waterworth.

Nokia Research Center works with technologies that might come to fruition in three to seven years, so don't expect products to be launched anytime soon.

"It has no product road map," said Waterworth.

Nokia already has similar programs with other academic institutions, including the University of Cambridge, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Nokia thinks it can get much better results working with universities than on its own, according to Waterworth.