Henry Tirri
Executive Vice President, CTO, Dr., Dr.h.c.
I am currently the Chief Technology Officer of Nokia. The mandate of the CTO and the associated organization is to drive the current and future technological competitiveness of Nokia. CTO owns the forward-looking Future Technology part of the Nokia strategy. In addition my Nokia role I am also an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science (University of Helsinki), and an Adjunct Professor of Computational Engineering (Helsinki University of Technology).
Contact information:
henry.tirri at nokia.com
Professional Activities
I was an ISTAG Member 2007-2009. I was nominated to join the IEEE Computer Society Industry Advisory Board (IAB) for 2009-2011. Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Institute for Infocom Research and member of the International Advisory Committee of Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology. I am also on the Boards of SVForum, HIIT and Cicero. Nokia is also the sponsor of the Health Category of the Humanitarian Tech Awards (2009- ) - one of my passions as well as Nokia Sensing X Challenge (2012-2015) which I am the proud sponsor of.
I am currently in the Editorial Boards of IEEE Signal Processing, International Journal of Mobile Communications, Web Intelligence and Agent Systems, International Journal of Neural Systems
Research Interests
During my career my general research interests have been related to intelligence in machines. Reasoning under uncertainty is one central aspect of intelligent behavior, consequently the last 20 years I have been interested in fundamental questions related to building models from data, and performing (predictive) inference from such models (related to "data analysis"). After exploring many paradigms from rule-based deterministic models to semantic nets I have found the probabilistic and information-theoretic approaches to be the most interesting and powerful. Some of the results of the research (with my former CoSCo research group) have been implemented in B-Course data analysis service. Recent years I have been particularly interested in applying these modeling methods to information retrieval including Internet search engines and wireless sensor networks. What excites me currently is the possibility to develop applications and services that do not "scale-down" but allow millions of computing devices to interact and implement very large-scale services depending on contextual data. I am also fascinated by the role of energy in computing - I anticipate the energy dimension to be even more fundamental than memory and computing in the future.
Research Projects
Some past research activities I found cool to be part of working with some great colleagues:
Conferences
Recent and current Conference involvement (i.e., What I do to keep me posted on interesting research):
- ECUST'09, INSS2008, ECCBR'08, AWeSOME'08, UAI'08, VLDB'07, NGMAST'07, EmNets 2007, SenSys'06, WI 2006, ECML/PKDD'06, AWeSOMe'06, ICETE 2006, UAI'06, AAAI 2006, ASWN 2006, SAINT 2005, AISTATS 2005, ICCBR 2005, SME'05, ICETE 2005, AWeSOMe'05, MDM'06, WI'05.
- I was the Industrial Program Chair of WISE 2009 and Program Co-Chair of SAINT 2008
Other Information
Past Professional Activities
- Visiting scholar, University of Texas at Austin and consultant, Microelectronics and Technology Corporation MCC; database transaction processing, functional languages and parallel processing (1985-86)
- Visiting scientist, AT & T Bell Laboratories; neural networks stuff in machine vision (1988)
- Visiting Associate Professor, Purdue University; research on distributed, object-oriented databases, neural networks, probabilistic modeling (1990-92)
- Project manager, ESPRIT projects VITAL and TRANSCOOP; software engineering for knowledge bases, in particular representation transformations and transactional workflows (1992-1997)
- Visiting scientist, NASA Ames Research Center; Bayesian modeling (1998)
- Professor, University of Helsinki, Director of the Intelligent Systems Lab and CoSCo research group; Bayesian and information-theoretic modeling, intelligent learning environments (1998-2008)
- co-founder of Ekahau Inc.; award-winning technology for positioning - Ekahau in news (2000-)
- Visiting professor, Stanford University; positioning of mobile devices, ad hoc networks (2001-2003)
- Visiting scholar, University of California, Berkeley; information retrieval and search engines (2003-2004)
Publications
Recent publications
- H.Tirri, "Spotting": A Novel Application of Wireless Sensor Networks in the Home. Pp. 197-206n Technologies for Home Networking, edited by S. DIxit and R. Prasad, Wiley, 2008.
- Nokelainen, P., Silander, T., Ruohotie, P., & Tirri, H. (2007). Investigating the Number of Non-linear and Multi-modal Relationships between Observed Variables Measuring a Growth-oriented Atmosphere. Quality & Quantity, 41(6), 869-890 .
- J.Kurhila, M.Miettinen, P. Nokelainen, H.Tirri, EDUCO: Social Navigation and Group Formation in Student-Centred E-Learning. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, Vol. 18, No.1, 65-83.
- J. Perkio, V. Tuulos, M. Hermersdorf, H. Nyholm, J. Salminen and H. Tirri, Utilizing Rich Bluetooth Environments for Identity Prediction and Exploring Social Networks as Techniques for Ubiquitous Computing. Pp. 137-141 in Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, edited by T. Nishida, Z. Shi, U. Visser, X. Wu, J. Liu, B. Wah, W. Cheung and Y.-M. Cheung. IEEE Computer Society, 2006.
- P. Nokelainen, T. Silander, P. Ruohotie and H. Tirri, Investigating the Number of Non-linear and Multi-modal Relationships Between Observed Variables Measuring Growth-oriented Atmosphere. Quality and Quantity, 40 (2006)
- T. Roos, P. Grunwald, P. Myllymaki and H. Tirri, Generalization to Unseen Cases. Pp. 1129-1136 in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 18 (NIPS 05), edited by Y. Weiss, B.Scholkopf and J. Platt. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006.
- J.Veijalainen, V.Terziyan, H.Tirri, Transaction management for m-commerce at mobile terminal. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Vol. 5 (2005), 229-245.
- J. Perkiö, Tuulos, W. Buntine, H. Tirri, Multi-Faceted Information Retrieval System for Large Scale Email Archives. To appear in Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM Conference on Web Intelligence (WI 2005)
- P.Nokelainen, M.Miettinen, J.Kurhila, P.Floreen, H.Tirri, A Shared Document-Based Annotation Tool to Support Learner-Centered Collaborative Learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, Vol. 36, No. 5, 757-770.
- M. Miettinen, J. Kurhila, P. Nokelainen and H. Tirri, Supporting Open-Ended Discourse with Transparent Groupware. International Journal of Web Based Communities, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 17-30.
- M.Miettinen, P.Nokelainen, J.Kurhila, T.Silander, H.Tirri, EDUFORM - A Tool for Creating Adaptive Questionnaires. International Journal on E-Learning, Vol. 4 (2005), No. 3, 365-373.
- M. Miettinen, J. Kurhila, H. Tirri, On the Prospects of Intelligent Collaborative E-learning Systems. Pp. 483-490 in the Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education. IOS Press
- T.Roos, H.Wettig, P.Grunwald, P.Myllymaki, H.Tirri, On Discriminative Bayesian Network Classifiers and Logistic Regression. Machine Learning 59:3, pp. 267-296..
- M.Miettinen, J.Kurhila, P.Nokelainen, H.Tirri, OurWeb - Transparent Groupware for Online Communities. Pp. 53-61 in the Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference on Web-Based Communities 2005. Algarve, Portugal, February 2005.
- T.Roos, P.Myllymaki, H.Tirri, On the Behavior of MDL Denoising. In Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS). Barbados, January 2005.
- N. Zhong, H. Tirri, Y. Yao, L. Zhou (eds.), Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (Beijing, China, September 2004). IEEE, 2004.
- V. Tuulos, H. Tirri, Combining Topic Models and Social Networks for Chat Data Mining. Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM Conference on Web Intelligence (WI'04) (Beijing, China, September 2004), 206-213.
- W. Buntine, J. Löfström, J. Perkiö. Perttu, V. Poroshin, T. Silander, H. Tirri, A. Tuominen, V. Tuulos, A Scalable Topic-Based Open Source Search Engine. Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM Conference on Web Intelligence (WI'04) (Beijing, China, September 2004), 228-234.
- P.Kontkanen, P.Myllymäki, T.Roos, H.Tirri, K.Valtonen, H.Wettig, Topics in Probabilistic Location Estimation in Wireless Networks. Invited talk at the 15th IEEE Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications, Barcelona, Spain. IEEE Press, 2004.
- P.Kontkanen, P.Myllymäki, T.Roos, H.Tirri, K.Valtonen, H.Wettig, Probabilistic Methods for Location Estimation in Wireless Networks. Chapter 11 in Emerging Location Aware Broadband Wireless Adhoc Networks, edited by R.Ganesh, S.Kota, K.Pahlavan and R.Agust, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004.
- P.Kontkanen, P.Myllymäki, W.Buntine, J.Rissanen, H.Tirri, An MDL Framework for Data Clustering. In Advances in Minimum Description Length: Theory and Applications, edited by P. Grunwald, I.J. Myung and M. Pitt. The MIT Press, 2004.
Presentations
- Keynote talk at PIMRC 2011
- Keynote talk "Making sense of a Zettabyte World" at ICASSP 2011
- Keynote talk "Pervasive Technology that Changed the World" at Pervasive 2010
- Keynote talk "Signal Processing Implementation Challenhes in Mobile Terminals" at SIPS 2009.
- Keynote talk "Poor man's Ubicomp" at UBICOM 2009.
- Keynote talk "Mobile Sensing for the Society - Future of Context-based Services" at IWSCS'09.
- Keynote talk "Mobile Computing 2015 - Law of Large Numbers" at NGMAST'08.
- Keynote talk "Emerging Global Networks" at Consumer Communications & networking conference (CCNC'08)
- Invited talk "Very large-scale pervasive applications" at UCLA Engineering Technology Forum 2007
- Keynote talk "Mobile world in 2015 and beyond" at MOSO 2007
- Keynote talk "Very Large-Scale Pervasiveness Does Not Scale Down" at IEEE PerCom 2007
- Invited talk "Sensor Networks and Machine Intelligence" at Sensor Network in Automation and Manufacturing 2007
- Invited talk "Grounding the Digital World: Mobile Sensing" at IEEE workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HOTMOBILE 2007)
- Keynote talk "Sensorplanet" at RFID/USN Korea 2006
- Keynote talk "Challenges of Urban Sensing" at ECML'06
- Keynote talk "Quest for True Ubicomp: large-scale wireless sensor networks with high-power mobile nodes" at SenSys'05
- Keynote talk "Challenges of large-scale heterogeneous wireless sensor networks" at DMSN'05
- Keynote talk "What Do People Really Do - on the power of Reality Mining for e-learning" at EDEN 2005 Annual Conference
- Keynote talk "Fundamental Challenges of Next Generation Information Retrieval" at ICETE 2004
- Keynote talk "Networked: the new science of collaborative giftedness" at ECHA 2004
- Keynote talk "Challenges of large-scale high power wireless sensor networks" at EMNETS II
