The mobile communication market is outstanding in its rigorous demands for new services while at the same time, highly intensive market competition continues to increase. Driven by such high demands, we explore technology borders and solve scientific challenges to support the creation and provisioning of highly smart mobile services.

In our work, we combine core research activities with pre-sales prototyping to allow for the early commercial adoption of research results. Service areas that we address include Personal & Rich Communication, Context-aware and Ubiquitous applications as well as advanced Multimedia services. In addition to innovative mobile applications in those domains, we aim at the creation and the support of a sustainable network of service enablers to allow NTT DOCOMO to flexibly adjust to market trends as well as to pioneer new service frontiers.

Network Value-added Services
Value-added services build on core services in the operator networks to deliver a divers and enhanced service experience to the user. Examples for such value-added services include Multimedia personal messaging as well as unique mobile mash-ups with popular Web services. The general expectation is that, complementary to application stores, Value-added Services will be massively spurring subscribers to use their phones more often, thus driving up network and data use. Endorsing and supporting novel value-added services is a major driving force of our work.

Ubiquitous Services
Our research on ubiquitous services and applications focuses on user guidance and contextual intelligence in mobile systems to keep up with continuously changing and augmenting demands of mobile communication environments. Core research targets are semantically well-founded personalization and service concepts with a universal serviceability. This includes context management, ontology-based reasoning as well as selected service platform aspects.

Smart Multimedia Processing
Mobile users will highly benefit from enhanced Multimedia services in many ways. On the one hand, established services can be improved through added Multimedia technology while, on the other hand, completely new services can be created. We are challenging the domains of Computer Vision, Computer Graphics and Image Processing, to create novel Multimedia enablers that will allow for a vastly improved communication experience. Examples include the evolution of video services towards newly augmented messaging with personal attributes like personal voice and handwriting. Furthermore, we aim at reducing the overall burden of service adoption for users for existing services like picture or video sharing by integrating new concepts of content recognition and smart content processing.

Mobile HCI and Enhanced Service Experience
The evolution of mobile phones is leading to smart devices with highly advanced Multimedia as well as interfacing capabilities. In our work on mobile user interaction, we target at novel user interfaces for mobile phones to support a truly enhanced service experience. For instance, we aim at improving existing methods for tracking and graphical overlays in augmented reality applications that typically cannot provide an adequate combination of all required features such as processing speed, overlay accuracy, and seamless graphical integration. In addition, we address interaction technologies that only recently surfaced with mobile phones, such as integrated NFC reader/writers or pico projectors, for which advanced services have not yet been provided.

Service Enabler Network and Platform Support
Our goal is to support key enabling technologies that allow to add essential value to established services and to accelerate the introduction of completely new services to the mobile user. To this end, we are conducting research on enabling technologies in different vertical service domains as well as on their horizontal integration with existing service delivery platforms such as IMS or Web services.

Ultimately, we aim at building and sustaining a network of service enablers, which is open and flexible to rapidly adjust to market trends. Research on platform aspects, such as specific Multimedia capabilities or selected security issues, is an integral part of our work. For instance, we investigate in Browser-based mobile services, Thin Client technologies, Privacy and ID management solutions as well as advanced access control to make future services and solutions easy to use and at the same time highly trustworthy.


EU Projects

SUNSET: Sustainable Social Network Services for Transport
www.sunset-project.eu