Head of the Institute, Professor
Tel: +49 2407 575 7032
Fax: +49 2407 575 7050
Email: pma-at-mobnets.rwth-aachen.de
Quick description
- Professor and the head of the department
- In Aachen since the end of 2002
- If you wonder my name, I am originally from Finland
- Answers to some questions
- Yes, I do like teaching...
- Yes, I like Germany and I am impressed by German grammar
- Yes, I still personally supervise some students
- Yes, I can do Linux, I was already using 0.x versions
- No, I never did punch cards. I am not that old, but I have programmed a PDP-11
- No, I can not play a bagpipe (der Dudelsack)
Curriculum Vitae
Coming soon, meanwhile you can read the following IEEE style description:
I am currently a full professor of wireless networks at the RWTH Aachen University. Before joining to RWTH Aachen in 2002, I was a professor and research director at the Centre for Wireless Communications, Finland. I have studied and worked in the United States, the United Kingdom and Scandinavia.
My living experience in different places has allowed an experimental optimization of scientific weather conditions. This personal experimentation has proved that Aachen, in fact, has rather perfect conditions. It is warmer than Scandinavia (good). There are true seasons, which is better than in California (great, although we do not have Napa Valley vineyards), and believe-it-or-not it rains less in Aachen than in my old hometown Oxford. As this seems to be a good local simulated annealing optimum, one can assume that a permanent position in Aachen is a nice solution.
My present research interests include cognitive wireless networks, embedded intelligence in wireless sensor networks, performance evaluation of complex networks, future network architectures, and more generally optimized and adaptive wireless communications. I am mostly working at OSI-layers 2-4 in practical aspects, but a considerable amount of work is more general methodology research which includes systems design, systems modeling and theoretical aspects. On the systems side, I have worked with my students quite much with multi-hop networks, WLANs (WiFi) and emergency communications solutions. I am still using some fancy optimization methods such as Genetic Algorithms, Simulated Annealing and Statistical Physics inspired analytical analysis methods. And, yes for curious ones, I can write C-code and once upon of time I did write things like protocol stacks both in academic and industrial context. In fact, I can even write FORTRAN and I did use it to program some simulators. I am still doing with my group a lot of practical experimentation and limited deployment tests.
In a more formal tone, I have published ca. 200 papers in the international journals and peer-reviewed conferences and delivered a number of research talks at many universities, companies and conferences. I am a senior member both in IEEE and ACM, and a fellow of RAS. I have been inventor or co-inventor for over 20 patents or patent applications, virtually all of them were done in or with industry. In 2006, I was awarded a Telenor research prize. I still have quite extensive industrial contacts and experience on consulting of or being a member of technical/scientific advisory boards of various international companies. I have been also active on the spin-off companies in various roles.
I am also participating as a principal investigator in the newly established Ultra High Speed Mobile Information and Communications (UMIC) research cluster (centre) at RWTH, which is one of German excellence clusters funded by Federal Government of Germany and states at the level of ca. 50M USD (35 MEuros). I am also a member of the steering board and a coordinator of Wireless Transport Research Area in the UMIC research research center.
However, for me the most satisfying results are my graduated students both Ph.D. and Dipl.-Ing. (M.Sc.). The have been able to literally span the globe, e.g. in North-to-South direction they are spread between Finland and New Zealand. This is somewhat understandable, since I have had students with some 20 different nationalities. Some of them are continuing in academia, the first one has already reached the level of professorship, others are busy in industry, some others are working in governmental or international organizations, and few of them are busily building their own companies.
