InterDigital Recognizes Heritage of Innovation and Collaboration at London Office

This month, InterDigital celebrated more than ten years of research and innovation in Europe and our commitment to its continuation through the opening of our new office in London. The event welcomed InterDigital engineers, executives, and long-standing academic and industry partners to experience InterDigital's research expertise and engage with the brain trust that drives InterDigital's innovation.

About our London Office

Established in 2013, InterDigital's London office is home to our Wireless Lab Europe (WLE). The WLE leads standards-driven research and innovation and contributes to the development of global wireless standards and InterDigital's robust patent portfolio. The office reflects the great diversity of London, and more than 75% of London employees have PhDs and more than 95% have engineering or master's degrees.

In addition to researching foundational technologies, our London office has a strong track record for earning leadership and fostering consensus in future wireless standards, and facilitating collaborative tech development in the UK and European innovation ecosystems. InterDigital's WLE actively holds more than 25 leadership positions in ETSI, IETF, WWRF and related standards bodies, and in the past decade, WLE has been awarded more than 20 EU and UK-funded projects on 5G and 6G, collaborated with more than 100 partners across Europe, and leveraged cumulative funding exceeding $150M.

Our Research and Innovation

InterDigital's London office is also home to talent from across our Wireless, Video, and AI Labs, and at the event, our engineers demonstrated next-gen technologies including integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), integrated AI, and codecs enabling immersive and haptic-enhanced video.

Wireless: Spotlighting InterDigital's research on ISAC, the convergence of telecoms and sensing data to deliver better communications, services, and experiences, engineers presented a connected factory environment that leverages ISAC to integrate communications between the network and various sensors around a factory environment to remotely detect objects and seamlessly navigate an autonomous vehicle.

AI: Our engineers also innovate on end device solutions that leverage AI, particularly for collaborative use cases that depend on shared end-to-end resources and require innovative approaches to address uplink bandwidth, uplink/downlink latency, and radio resource management. Leveraging AI to enhance current 5G networks and improve user experience under radio link degradation, our engineers demonstrated the use of AI to predict future failures of the wireless link, triggering 6G systems to pre-emptively handover from the affected terminal before the link becomes too weak to ensure the consistent quality of service.

Video: InterDigital remains a consistent contributor to video standards, including those enabling the delivery of immersive content with haptic feedback across broad audiences. Highlighting the critical role of standards, this demo showcased InterDigital's implementation of MPEG immersive standards to deliver immersive and haptic-enhanced gaming content over VR headsets and mobile devices.

Our Collaborations

InterDigital's depth of research expertise is fostered by partnerships and strategic collaborations with research leaders and industry experts across the innovation ecosystem. In fact, InterDigital's London office has supported more than 15 projects funded by the UK Research and Innovation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UKRI EPSRC) and directly sponsors more than 40 researchers esteemed institutions and universities across the UK and Europe, including University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, University of Oulu Finland, University of Stuttgart, and UC3M.

At the event, InterDigital's Head of Wireless Lab Europe Alain Mourad moderated a discussion with esteemed guests to explore what's ahead for Research, Innovation, and IP in the UK. The discussion featured expert perspectives from Adam Williams, CEO of the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO), Professor Izzat Darwazeh, founding Director of University College of London's Institute of Communications and Connected Systems (ICCS), Professor Lajos Hanzo from the University of Southampton who leads research focused on wireless multimedia communications, and Professor Rahim Tafazolli, the Regius Professor of Electronic Engineering at the University of Surrey and founder and director of the 5G and 6G Innovation Centres (5GIC and 6GIC). Together, these experts reflected on their years of collaboration with InterDigital, the current landscape for research and innovation in Europe, and what's ahead for IP in the UK.

In all, our new London office reiterates InterDigital's commitment to research and collaboration in the UK and Europe, and we are eager to continue building upon this strong foundation for the future.