9th FRUCT conference: general information

The 9th conference of the Open Innovations Framework Program FRUCT will be held in Petrozavodsk, Russia, on 26-29 April 2011. This project is co-funded by the European Union, the Russian Federation and the Republic of Finland.

Overview

FRUCT is the largest regional cooperation framework between academia and industry in form of open innovations. FRUCT conferences are attended by the representatives of 20 FRUCT member universities from Russia, Finland, Denmark, Italy, Ukraine and industrial experts from Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks and Symbian Foundation, a number of guests from other companies and universities.

The conference is an R&D forum for the most active students, academic experts, industrial researchers and influential representatives of business and government. The conference invites the world-class academic and industrial researcher to give lectures on the most relevant topics, provides an opportunity for student teams to present progress and results of their R&D projects and meet new interesting people and form new R&D teams. The conference program consists of 3 to 5 intensive (½ or full day) training on the most promising technologies, plus 3 days of the main conference.

We warmly welcome all university research teams to participate in the conference, present your research and join the FRUCT Program. Thanks to our sponsors, all participants can enjoy free of charge registration to the event, but the online registration must be done by everyone before the conference. This call for participation is also available in PDF format.

Background and motivation

The distinctive feature of modern IT and Telecommunications industries is in dramatic shortening of the period when technology remains commercially viable. On the one hand, this is due to the competition between key market players that are pushing all manufacturers to accelerate innovations; on the other hand, this is due to technological progress speed up caused by the growing expansion of intellectual resource invested into R&D and design activities. This trend is an important call and challenge for the leading educational and research institutions around the globe. In the FRUCT we believe that it is crucial to combine forces of EU and Russia to follow up the competition in adopting university education to the new industrial trends. The first step is to strength a bridge between Russian and Finnish academic worlds, increase visibility of involved research teams and set direct personal contacts between academic and industrial experts.

Call for papers and presentations

We welcome you to submit full papers (paper templates: TEX, MS Word); and “presentation only” publications and poster/demo proposals (have to be submitted as an abstract of min 150 words and max 2 pages) by February 25, 2011 March 13, 2011. The list of the conference focus topics is provided below (we welcome you to propose new challenging R&D topics):