About FOKUS

Fraunhofer FOKUS – Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems

Institute

The Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems, Fraunhofer FOKUS for short, is a Berlin-based research facility devoted to studying and developing communication and information technologies. In particular, it specializes in multi-domain networks and interoperable, user-centered solutions.

With more than 20 years experience, Fraunhofer FOKUS is an important IT research partner for the telecommunications sector, the automobile industry, media services, and public administrations. It frequently cooperates with governmental agencies and software companies to create need-oriented eGovernment solutions and is a leading collaborator in projects funded by the European Union as well as by national-level sponsors such as BMBF and BMWi.

International Coperations

In fiscal year 2009, the operating budget for FOKUS  totaled 17 million euros, 65 percent of which was generated from contract research. Its most important partners are Microsoft, NTT Corporation Tokyo, IBM, Huwai und Samsung. As of the beginning of 2009, FOKUS employed 259 individuals from 22 countries.

Fraunhofer FOKUS works closely together with research facilities nationwide, teams up with partner from industry and academia in projects funded by the European Union, and cooperates with universities in Germany and Europe, such as Technische Universtität Berlin, Waterford Institute of Technology in Dublin, Universitatea Politehnica Din Bucuresti or Univesitat Politecnica De Catalunya in Barcelona.

The Competence Center Future Applications and Media researches and develops methods for a cooperative, but autonomic behaviour of system elements. A special emphasis is put on converged media services and applications in standardized NGN and non-NGN IPTV environments (ETSI TISPAN, OPEN IPTV Forum). The knowledge about those environments, preferences, and situation is taken into account to offer a suitable added-value to the user in simplifying and improving the interaction with computer systems. The main research focus is on the design and implementation of open service infrastructures. These include features as Human-Centric Applications, Service Personalization, Media Profiling, Telco Service Control and IPTV integration, Convergence, Electronic Content Guides as well as Rich Communication and interactive content approaches for IPTV. Furthermore, FOKUS examines approaches for automatic development of services and systems for example with regard to evolutionary-based strategies. The long-term research and development activities cover a number of related work areas such as context-awareness, loosely-coupled service provisioning, and semantic-based knowledge systems.

FOKUS has participated in multiple national and international research projects addressing the aforementioned research challenges in media technology, interactive and personalized TV services as well as IPTV applications and infrastructures.