Henry Tirri

Research Fellow
Head of NRC System Research
Nokia Research Center

I am currently responsible for the research at the NRC Systems Research laboratories worldwide striving for disruptive systems research with open innovation collaboration globally. NRC SR laboratories thrive to enable new business opportunities for Nokia by extending the traditional Nokia realm of research, with strong relations to and a strong presence in world leading innovation ecosystems such as Silicon Valley, Beijing, Cambridge(MA), Bangalore and Cambridge (UK). I am also a Professor of Computer Science (University of Helsinki), and an Adjunct Professor of Computational Engineering (Helsinki University of Technology).

Contact information:
Nokia Research Center, P.O. Box 407,
Nokia Group, FIN-00045, Finland

Recent cool advances from NRC Systems Research Laboratories

• Traffic experiment (NRC Palo Alto) - see also Physorg.com, CNET News.com
• Morph (NRC Cambridge (UK)) - or see Utube video

Research interests (i.e., what makes me tick)

My general research interests are related to intelligence in machines. As reasoning under uncertainty is one central aspect of intelligent behavior, 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"). In this broad area my main focus is on probabilistic and information-theoretic approaches, both the theoretical properties and multidisciplinary applications. Some of the results of the research (with CoSCo research group) have been implemented in B-Course data analysis service. For some time I have been particularly interested in applying these modeling methods in information retrieval including Internet search engines and wireless sensor networks. In general I am interested in adaptive systems, and related notions of the above topics, such as context-awareness, community-based computing and data analysis for future networks in general. Some of my recent research activities are reflected in Sensorplanet. I am particularly excited in developing applications and services that do not "scale-down" but allow millions of computing devices to interact and implement very large-scale applications.

Recent and current Conference involvement (i.e., What I do to keep me posted on interesting research):

• 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 am the Program Co-Chair of SAINT 2008

Current Editorial Board involvement:

• International Journal of Mobile Communications, Web Intelligence and Agent Systems, International Journal of Neural Systems

What's new? (last updated May 1, 2008)

• 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 .
• Keynote tak "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
• 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.
• 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
• 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.
• Keynote talk "Challenges of Urban Sensing" at ECML'06
• J.Veijalainen, V.Terziyan, H.Tirri, Transaction management for m-commerce at mobile terminal. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Vol. 5 (2005), 229-245.
• 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
• J. Perkiö, V. 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.Floréen, 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
• Keynote talk "Challenges of large-scale high power wireless sensor networks" at EMNETS II
• T.Roos, H.Wettig, P.Grünwald, P.Myllymäki, H.Tirri, On Discriminative Bayesian Network Classifiers and Logistic Regression. To appear in Machine Learning.
• 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.Myllymäki, 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, S. 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.
• Keynote talk "Fundamental Challenges of Next Generation Information Retrieval" at ICETE 2004
• Keynote talk "Networked: the new science of collaborative giftedness" at ECHA 2004
• 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.Agustí. 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. Grünwald, I.J. Myung and M. Pitt. The MIT Press, 2004.
• ALVIS project (2004-2006)

Some past 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-)
• 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)

Personal

Some recent pictures of my personal life can be found at the Tirri World image blog.