The FRUCT Association focuses on arranging an international group of students supervised by creditable experts which would push forward R&D work related to advanced information technologies. In other words, the idea is promoted of the project-based training, within whose framework students are to be oriented towards real creativity and contributing to the final concrete outcome.

Clearly, the success of this initiative is the more likely the more potentially attractive is the specific topic of the abovementioned project. In this light among other telecommunication-related problems, the one of outlining philosophy of 4G interface looks both appealing and encouraging project domain.

As the eventual result of the program, not only particular results like novel algorithms, signal structures, architectural solutions, etc. are expected but, what is of no less importance, the creative team will be brought into existence well-prepared to continue research and design work independently.

Every year FRUCT association organizes two conferences that consists of lectures and presentations given by leading researches and industry experts as well as student works and progress reports of FRUCT research teams. The conference papers are published in the regular issues of FRUCT Proceedings ISSN 2305-7254 following principles and categories defined in the Publication Ethics and Publication Malpactice Statement.

FRUCT is also engaged in several other activities. Read more about FRUCT administrative structure and working groups.

Key principles

The FRUCT program is based on two modes of cooperation - cooperation of R&D team through the mechanism of joint projects and regular face-to-face meeting (i.e. seminars, trainings, etc.) for gathering together all members of the FRUCT community.

The R&D projects cooperation is targeted at familiarizing the involved teams with each other capabilities, building thus basic trust and understanding of each other. This approach focuses on creating the international groups of students supervised by creditable experts which help to direct the R&D work of the students in the advanced information technologies. In other words, the program consists of the project-based training, where students are oriented towards real creativity and contributing to the final concrete outcome. Generally it is hard for industry and academy people to find the right partner for cooperation, but this small joint R&D projects provide the required basic interface and a forum for setting direct contacts.

The key enabler of the success of strategic cooperation is development of the solid and well established niches where the given partners have unique complimentary competences. The FRUCT program creates an environment to identify and highlight the existing relevant R&D niches in the member organizations, and what is even more important is that through joint work of industrial and university experts the program creates the new R&D niches around recently emerging technologies. The FRUCT also helps universities to incubate new competences demanded by the industry.

The FRUCT program promotes telecommunication and mobile device oriented research and technologies. The directions of research within the FRUCT program include (but are not limited to) open source solutions and MAEMO systems, smart spaces, physical air interface, embedded networks, mobile devices software and services solutions and so on.

It is also well known problem that universities experience difficulties in keeping the best students at the departments, but close partnering with industry provides association with a strong brand, challenging and very concrete research tasks and additional resources, which attracts students and helps to solve the resource problem. On the other hand, the industry companies are interested to have long-term and high-risk research done by the universities, and benefit from getting closer to the edge of science, so that adoption of new key finding could be done even faster. Also the early industrial feedback is in mutual benefit as it allows right tuning and presentation of the new technologies. So driving into a stronger cooperation between the academic and industrial research, being more open and involved in joint activities, getting stronger visibility by making joint publications and so on, these all are also in the strong mutual benefit.

The main face-to-face meetings of the FRUCT program are the seminars that are organized twice a year, one seminar in Finland and one in Russia. These seminars have dual role of an educational and information sharing events. The seminar program contains of the modules representing the FRUCT focus areas. Every seminar module (session) starts by a lecture given by one of the top experts in the field and followed by presentation of projects done within the frame of FRUCT program. Also the program contains a number of invited talks given by the university professors and industrial experts on the subjects that are relevant nowadays and should be seriously considered by the FRUCT program. The seminars are free of charge and are open for all interested students, PhD students and young scientists as well as developers. Even if a participant is not a FRUCT member, he/she can submit a proposal to make report about his/her research activities, or/and join already existing work groups. In average the representatives of more than ten universities from Russia and Finland, plus experts from companies Nokia, Symbian and Nokia Siemens Networks take active part in the seminars program.