Technology Transfer in Theory and Practice Prof Joe Armstrong, Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Expert in Compilers and Operating system at Ericsson AB For the last few years I have worked at Ericsson in the "Systems and Technology" group. This is a small group which is responsible for Ericsson's software strategy and reports directly to senior technical management. In this group we try to identify the software that Ericsson will need for it's future projects and start projects that will enable technology transfer. We work closely with a hardware group that does the same thing for hardware. In this talk I'll outline the following: - The mechanisms for change - Why I think projects fail - How some projects succeed - How projects get financed - The Academic/Industry interface Having looked at this I'll talk about the key areas that are the focus of current research in Ericsson, and where we wish to encourage participation. I also have a private research agenda and have been battling away with the same old problems for the last 30 years, so I'll say a little about some unsolved problems that interest me (who knows, maybe somebody in the audience will have solved these). *Bio*: Joe Armstrong is the inventor of the programming language Erlang. He has written several books on Erlang and has a PhD from KTH (thesis title: "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors"). He has founded a successful software company and initiated a number of research projects.