FRUCT Initiative - General Description

Attempts to somehow raise the authority of programmer university education are being made now by many. But in order for serious specialists to hatch from the institute, it is not at all necessary to turn mountains, but only:

• do content diplomas
• update educational programs
• to involve in the teaching of practice - programmers from real companies, and to the teaching of theory - the academic staff
• enable students to participate in this software development

The FRUCT program initiated by the Nokia Research center is responsible for solving some of these tasks.

Many have heard of research centers of large corporations. The guys who work there, experience a relatively greater freedom than they gather in the department of production of the product. In addition to the development of fundamentally new types of devices or software, the staff of research centers are often engaged in solving the company's strategic tasks, namely, the search for new ideas and cooperation with universities. These are Intel Education, centers at Microsoft and Nokia.
On the initiative of the latter and will be discussed

General view on FRUCT

Background - what is being done

The following people are participating in the FRUCT (Finnish-Russian University Co-operation Priogram in Telecommunications) project:

• students of specialties related to computer science, who are interested in their specialty and can not wait to try themselves in
• employees of universities that are engaged in scientific work and, as a rule, combine it with software development
• technical experts of software companies who act as consultants
• FRUCT observers who can select the most interesting ideas and projects for development in research centers, or people to be invited to work

The interaction scheme between all of them can be of two main types:

• The student, together with the teacher, selects the topic of interest and offers FRUCT to support the project. On the development side, novelty and perspectivity are important.
• Some themes of the projects can be proposed by the organizers of FRUCT. If they are interested in teachers and university students, they take up the job.

Important note these activities are carried out in Russia and in Finland. Projects can also apply to both countries.

Foreground - what is shown

The results of the projects are exposed to the public - software products or devices, reports at seminars and conferences. The periodically held FRUCT workshop was created to summarize subtotals and project reports. Within the framework of this seminar thematic trainings are often held.

Benefits and benefits

For student and teacher

• First of all, it is participation in real software projects under good leadership. If necessary, FRUCT identifies experts who help solve technical issues.
• The same with paid standards, rare and expensive devices, software, contributions to the conference. If necessary, these things can and should be asked
• Networking and creating workable development teams
• Academic benefit - writing diplomas and scientific works based on material projects,

For organizers (guesses)

• initiating sustainable software development teams that you can collaborate with and from where you can recruit
• networking with universities for research support

Actually projects

Main activities: Open Source development (mainly for Symbian and Maemo platforms), Smart Spaces (smart houses and cities, Semantic web ...), wireless networks, mobile devices. Descriptions of projects can be found here .

Everyone is welcome!

The closest FRUCT seminar will be held in St. Petersburg on April 29-30. Programming training is also planned for the Maemo platform.