Alcatel-Lucent and the Institut TELECOM inaugurate their joint laboratory

The research performed by this laboratory will concern ubiquitous media

Paris — Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) and the Institut TELECOM are today inaugurating a joint research laboratory, the aim of which is to work on future applications for digital media sector. The ceremony took place in the presence of Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, secretary of state for strategic studies and the digital economy, Jeong Kim, President of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs and Pascal Faure, Chairman of the Institut TELECOM.

A shared strategic vision: the individual at the heart of the interconnected digital world

The digital society of today is characterised by a merging of communication means, data media and knowledge objects: the future will be one of the “ubimedia”, a digital environment in which the individual sends, receives and passes on information. There will thus be a need for an extremely high level of continuity between ubiquitous communication – exchange of data anywhere, any time – and the digital media used for these exchanges, in order to create a dense, cognitive and always interconnected information universe. This is the vision shared by the Institut TELECOM and Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs.

“The joint research program we are entering into with Institut Telecom is focused on taking innovative concepts and using them to enable new multimedia applications. It represents another important step forward for us in realizing our open innovation strategy”, stated Jeong Kim. “Thanks to the close partnership with a world leading communications equipment vendor, the Institut TELECOM leverages the scientific potential of its researchers to support the economic and social development based on technology and innovation. This initiative is our best way to remedy the crisis,” adds Pascal Faure.

A multidisciplinary team

This virtual laboratory comprises 64 researchers enjoying international recognition in the engineering sciences (networks, service architecture, security, semantics mining, etc.) and the social and human sciences, including one third of young researchers (doctoral research students, engineers and post-doctoral students), specifically hired for the project. The team is led by a scientific and operational joint management and has been set up for an initial 5-year period, with the aim of becoming one of the leaders in future applications and services. It is financed equally by the two partners.

4 research actions combining technology, uses and new business models

The laboratory’s activities are structured into interconnected “Research actions”. The first 4 actions chosen, to be followed by others, are:

* Developing a model of convergence for content/application/communities and proposing strategies of semantic and smart navigation in the digital world respectful of the security and confidentiality challenges.
* Increasing interactional bandwidth to allow more natural, more effective, more intuitive use of the mobile, for interacting with people, services and objects.
* Offering an infrastructure enabling the users to gain personalised access to multimedia services, making best use of their own resources (terminals, networks, communicating objects, etc.) and/or the resources around them.
* And finally, build new business models, by integrating the user and his environment into an innovative open process as part of the new ecosystems.

The originality of this Alcatel-Lucent / Institut TELECOM approach is to combine its research programs in order to invent the technologies of tomorrow, but also to enable them to find their place in society thanks to an approach combining technology and marketing.

About the Institut TELECOM
The Institut TELECOM is a higher education and research organisation working in the information and communication science and technology (ICST) field. It is a grouping of leading colleges: TELECOM ParisTech, TELECOM Bretagne, TELECOM SudParis and TELECOM Ecole de Management, as well as two subsidiaries TELECOM Lille1 and EURECOM, comprising 5000 students, 600 research professors and 800 PhD students, post-doctoral students and visiting professors. Since May 2008, the Institut TELECOM, a European benchmark in the ICST, has also had two associate schools: TELECOM Saint-Etienne and the ENSPS. external linkwww.institut-telecom.fr

About Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is the trusted partner of service providers, enterprises and governments worldwide, providing solutions that deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users. A leader in fixed, mobile and converged broadband networking, IP technologies, applications and services, Alcatel-Lucent leverages the unrivalled technical and scientific expertise of Bell Labs, one of the largest innovation powerhouses in the communications industry. With operations in more than 130 countries and the most experienced global services organization in the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with a global reach. Alcatel-Lucent achieved revenues of Euro 17.8 billion in 2007 and is incorporated in France, with executive offices located in Paris. For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on the Internet: http://www.alcatel-lucent.com