Stevens Partners with Alcatel-Lucent in University Innovations Program

Relationship aims to spark advanced communications applications

HOBOKEN, N.J., Oct. 24 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Stevens Institute of Technology has partnered with Alcatel-Lucent in its creation of a program to team with leading American universities on the research, development and testing of new ultra-high bandwidth applications for fixed and mobile networks.

Alcatel-Lucent on Wednesday, at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment trade show in San Francisco, announced the creation of a program to team with leading American universities on the research, development and testing of new ultra-high bandwidth applications for fixed and mobile networks.

The Alcatel-Lucent University Innovations Program is intended to help build a vision of future advanced applications and services for consumers, educational and non-profit institutions, and businesses.

Alcatel-Lucent also announced today a relationship with Stevens to participate in a mobile networking course and engage students who will be able to propose applications for future cellular networks. In addition, Alcatel-Lucent and the Georgia Institute of Technology are planning to establish a Center of Excellence on ultra-high bandwidth applications.

"The relationship between Stevens and Alcatel-Lucent provides graduate students with direct exposure to industry planning for new technology, and provides a case for combining an understanding of the technology with an understanding of the business environment," said Dr. Audrey Curtis, Director of Graduate Programs in Telecommunications Management at Stevens.

Alcatel-Lucent is working with Stevens Professor Kevin Ryan to leverage the company's knowledge and experience within his graduate-level course on Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing. The company will provide guest speakers as part of the course. Students are working on a design project to develop new applications for next- generation wireless technologies. The project will examine the value chain required to successfully bring to market the services based on these applications.

The Alcatel-Lucent program will focus on creating innovative applications and services based on key emerging technologies and trends in the industry such as convergence for blended and personalized services based on the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and a carrier-grade service delivery environment. The program also will emphasize developments involving mobile ultra-high bandwidth applications including 4G and multimedia services; and the evolution in broadband enabling the "connected home," interactive TV, and hyper-speed optical technology.

"The Alcatel-Lucent University Innovations Program will connect Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs extensive research and development capability with their counterparts at universities across the country to bring great new ideas to market at an accelerated pace," said Jessica Stanley-Yurkovic, vice president, North America Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent.

"High-bandwidth applications generally include, in some way, multimedia services, video, virtual reality, games, or a gaming environment. Supporting these services is the concept of hyper-connectivity; everything can be connected with a quality user experience. The University Innovations Program can help define how this is achieved," said Stanley-Yurkovic.

Alcatel-Lucent is already in extensive conversations with several universities to establish more relationships under the program. The company expects to contribute funding, training, application development software (API's), technical support, researchers, access to network infrastructure prototypes and support for device prototypes.

About Alcatel-Lucent

Alcatel-Lucent's vision is to enrich people's lives by transforming the way the world communicates. Alcatel-Lucent provides solutions that enable service providers, enterprises and governments worldwide, to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users. As a leader in fixed, mobile and converged broadband access, carrier and enterprise IP technologies, applications, and services, Alcatel-Lucent offers the end-to-end solutions that enable compelling communications services for people at home, at work and on the move.

About Stevens Institute of Technology

Founded in 1870, Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross-disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis(R), involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value.

Stevens offers baccalaureates, master's and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 2,040 undergraduate and 3,085 graduate students, and a worldwide online enrollment of 2,250, with a full-time tenured/tenure-track faculty of 140 and more than 200 full-time special faculty. Stevens' graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America.

Additional information may be obtained from its web page at http://www.stevens.edu.

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