Dr. Mohammad Khansari, head of the Research Institute for ICT, who spoke at the opening ceremony of the Seventh International Symposium on Telecommunications, explained the history of Iran Telecom Research Center and said, “with over 40 years of experience in various fields of communication and information technology, Iran Telecom Research Center has been actively involved in strategic basic research and policy development research, to meet the country's needs and expand the frontiers of human knowledge in the field of ICT.”

“At present, the Institute has more than 250 permanent and employed researchers, 65 of which are the honorable faculty members of universities,” continued Dr. Mohammad Khansari.

“Given the number of projects here, about 250 other leading researchers are currently engaged in activities on applied and fundamental research, in order to meet the country's needs in the Institute,” he said.

“The most important missions of the Institute are the research program and policy shifts towards a knowledge-based economy and resistance economy,” he stressed.

Khonsari said, “another task of the Institute is to meet the research needs of the Ministry of Communications, for which we have put on the agenda the necessary infrastructure to attract the elite, including faculty members and researchers in and out of the country. Hence, the monitoring of new technologies (such as 5G, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things) are the most important topics of research and localization programs in the center.”

"If we make targeted investments in the country and provide appropriate contexts for the participation of all educated youths and graduates in the country, we will get good results on technology development and job creation," he stressed.

“To this end, we launched the symposium, along with its permanent secretariat, which is held every two years and in which elites in and out of the country have an active participation in this important scientific event," said the President of the Seventh International Symposium on Telecommunications (IST2014).