Research projects

Any representative of the full-member organization can propose a new subject for R&D project. The main idea is that every FRUCT project should involve representatives from two or more member organizations. In the simplest case the project has the work group consisting of students and PhD students from one university, which are supervised by the local professor and industrial tutor. In the more advanced cases the team might consist of the students from a number of FRUCT universities, some industrial experts can also directly participate in the research team and more than one supervisor and tutor from different universities and companies can steer the team.

One of the key ideas behind such organization of the projects is to lower the commitment threshold that is needed for entering into the cooperation. In most cases, before entering into a serious cooperation it would be comfortable for the involved parties to get know each other without strong commitment. The FRUCT projects provide such a framework and give the additional time and required knowledge for fine tuning of the cooperation proposals. As a result the proposal can be presented in a form and under conditions which are most favorable for setting the full-scale cooperation.

Another idea is to promote project-based training that should help young specialist to be more creative and to understand how to balance high-risk research with real contribution to the concrete outcome. The eventual result of the project are not only particular deliverables like novel algorithms, signal structures, architectural solutions, etc., but what is even more important is creation of the "competence incubation" infrastructure and a set of well-prepared teams capable of continuing challenging research and design work on their own.

The new FRUCT projects can be initiated by a professor, industry expert or by student. Of course, depending on the initiating party there are some differences in the procedure: when a professor initiates a project, he/she takes an obligation to be a supervisor of the project team, when the project proposal comes from the industry expert, the expert should takes obligation to be team’s tutor, and when a student comes with idea of a new project he/she should ask for a supervisor and tutor from the FRUCT board. So a new FRUCT project can be created using one of the following two scenarios:

• "from top to bottom" scenario, when some challenging problem is defined by the industrial or academic experts involved in the program (the problem definition usually comes from a trusted expert, which guarantees that the problem is interesting and challenging);
• "from bottom to top" scenario, when a student (or a team) comes up with the problem proposal, which is then evaluated by the FRUCT experts. If the problem looks reasonable and challenging, the FRUCT committee could accept the project proposal and help to find the supervisor and tutor.

The main expected project deliverable is an article in a good journal or conference. However depending on the project scope some other deliverables are also possible and appreciated.

If you would like to submit a project for the FRUCT program you will need to complete the project proposal form and send it to info@fruct.org with subject "New project proposal".

List of current research projects