Nokia and Inria extend research partnership

PARIS – Nokia and Inria today announced the renewal of their common research lab for the next four years. The new phase was launched at an event in Paris on 14 November in the presence of Thierry Klein, President, Nokia Bell Labs Solutions Research, and Bruno Sportisse, Inria CEO.

Launched in 2008, the joint research lab brings together permanent scientists from the two partners with a newly created pool of PhD and post-doctoral scientists, with the strategic aim to solve the key scientific challenges linked to the evolution of networks and network applications. The focus of the joint research is on the benefits of network and distributed resources for contextual and personalized experiences in the digital connected world.

Future networks will have to connect digital, physical and human worlds to unleash the innate potential of human beings in the metaverse era. Networks will need to have the ability to optimize for a very wide range of customer-specific needs, for example, in industrial applications. The network will develop heightened sensing capabilities, and increased context-awareness in terms of user status and intent, dynamically and automatically adapting connectivity to meet user needs.

The networks will be 100% cloud-native, supporting a distributed architecture. Efficiency, resilience, and agility are critical attributes, with zero-touch management and orchestration achieved though artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) -driven autonomy. Devices may not be able to meet all compute needs and will rely on a combination of edge cloud and local near-device computing, resulting in a massively distributed computing architecture. Diversified applications and services will need stringent quality of service requirements, enabled by data/AI-native networks in a highly distributed computing and data environment.

The Nokia Bell Labs-Inria collaboration will contribute to solving these challenges by addressing three aspects:

Read the full press release here.

Nokia