Polaris Wireless takes pride in being an innovator in location technology and also in establishing strategic partnerships to get our technology in the hands of people who can best benefit from it. One of the ways we are doing this is to partner with leading universities to share findings, develop new technology, and promote the use of high-accuracy, software-based 3D location in new environments. We have worked with several schools, including Stanford, Columbia, Virginia Tech, and McMaster, who are conducting leading-edge research in mobile location, positioning and navigation, and other related fields. Our most recent partnership is with Carnegie Mellon University, which maintains the CyLab Mobility Research Center based at the NASA Ames Research Center here in Silicon Valley, right down the street from our office. The Center’s leader is Bob Iannucci, who is also a Technical Advisor to Polaris Wireless on advanced IoT applications and emergency communications systems.
Professor Iannucci is known for leading both software and systems research in scalable and mobile computing, and boasts an impressive background:
- Chief Technology Officer of Nokia and Head of Nokia Research Center (NRC), where under his leadership, NRC delivered fundamental contributions to the worldwide Long Term Evolution for 3G (LTE) standard
- Created and promulgated what is now the MIPI UniPro interface for high-speed, in-phone interconnectivity
- Created and commercialized Bluetooth Low Energy
- Delivered new technology initiatives including TrafficWorks (using mobile phones to crowd source traffic patterns) and the Morph Concept (opening new directions for using nanotechnology to significantly improve mobile phone functionality and usability).
With that impressive background, Professor Iannucci is uniquely qualified to assist the Polaris Wireless Research team as we continue exploring additional possibilities for 3D location outside the lab and test environments.
As Professor Iannucci has stated, “it’s important for technology companies developing high-accuracy location methods to work within the broader industry to identify and help advance trends that ultimately will benefit us all.” University partners also benefit from working with Polaris Wireless by getting a front row seat for the latest in commercial deployments of real-world applications, allowing them to understand the world of location technology outside the lab setting.
Polaris Wireless values this type collaboration and have leveraged it to advance several developments in our own business. Indeed, the groundbreaking achievement of demonstrating floor-level vertical location was made with assistance from past university partner research efforts. In addition to fostering leading-edge research, Polaris Wireless is also able to widen our technology knowledge and experience beyond the footprint of our in-house team, which contains many graduates of these partner university programs. We intend to expand our presence with additional partners and look forward to profiling these university collaborations in the future.
