kari_systa | Nokia Research Center

Home > People > kari_systa

Kari Systä
Distinguished Research Leader
Contact

Background

Form the beginning of 2009 I have been leading a "System SW" team of Advanced System Engineering (ASE) organization of Nokia Research Center.

I'm also involved and represent Nokia in couple of European research initiatives and I'm a steering group member of ITEA2 and in 2008 I was also member of the core group that wrote version 3 of the research agenda that we call Roadmap3

Education: PhD in Computer Science, Tampere University of Technology, 1995. Title of my thesis was "Specification of Interactive Systems".

About my career in Nokia

I joined Nokia in 1995 after several years with Tampere University of Technology. In the Nokia Research Center the main theme of my research has been in "End-user application platforms", i.e., making end-user devices programmable platforms. The concrete devices have been set-top boxes for digital TV and, of course, mobile phones. Already in the early phases of this work I run into Java and I have been helping Nokia in many Java-related activities. One of my most well-known activities has been contributions to MIDP 1.0. It has been very exciting to see all the twists and turns from the first discussions to the current use of Java in phones. However, my interests were not limited to Java.

My responsibilities and organization grew along the ears and at end of 2006 I was a senior research manager in the Software and Application Technology laboratory of Nokia Research Center. I have a research group that was distributed in three locations: Tampere and Helsinki in Finland, and Budapest in Hungary. The research area of my group was Software Architecture and Run-times.

Then in a reorganization of Nokia Research Center my research focus changed, size of the team reduced, and what is more important I was able to spend more time on content and less on admin. So, for 2007-2008 I was research leader of a team called "Service Software Platforms". Interesting topics for us were service interfaces (we believed on RESTful paradigm) and how develop and use these interfaces.

Research Projects

One way to describe my professional thinking research interest is to list a few influential tasks and technologies along my career.

Around 1982 one of my friends showed we a strange-looking but cool program. It was implemented in a programming language he C. I immediately acquired the Kernighan-Ritchie book and started learning. C programming language looked like a major improvement compared to Fortran, Basic and assembler I new before. Later I did quite a lot teaching of C. Later I realized that all the ideas in C-language were not that cool and I started to develop critisism towards the language. However, I never learned to like C++. Or maybe I just never learned it?
The next language I became excited about was Lisp. Although the language did not look intuitive it had some elegance. As a hobby project I ported one Lisp interpreter from PDP11 to VAX, and started making one interpreter for Motorola 6809 processor.
In early 80's I worked for introduction of Unix in our department. I had to investigate the kernel-level code and make some modifications, too. The learnings on how operating systems work have been very useful for me in the future.
I learned many thinks in hard way :-)
For a few years I was working on Ada language and tool support for Ada. In addition to making my MSc thesis of Ada-version of Yacc, I learned a lot of programming language design and about the fact that C is not state of the art in programming language design. This was also a start of a learning path on compiler technologies and on how high-level languages are executed in practice. That has been useful for example in understanding of the Java virtual machines.
I did not write any military applications.
Next I spent a few years with visualization, animations, and graphical user interfaces. The interests ranged from technologies to usability aspects. As a technological anecdote I should mention Network extensible Window System (NeWS) that was cool but now forgotten system. Some of cool ideas of NeWS are now visible in Java.
At that time I was wierd enough to program in PostScript.
My university had research group on formal methods and I spent a few years with formal methods, too. I was a member of DisCo project (disco.cs.tut.fi) and worked on animation tools, specification of timing behaviors and specification of interactive systems. That research taught me the importance if rigid thinking and that like in any engineering, the solutions should be based on "laws of nature".
When Java game, I got immediately excited. As a programming language it had great advantages over C++ (IMHO it should be even more different), and it supports dynamically moving code and late binding.
At the end of 2006 I got a change to think what is new and exciting in software, and concluded that Internet services, Internet as a software platform are among those. I spent 2007 and 2008 working on technologies for Internet Services. Among other things we worked on RESTful service APIs and Web runtimes (HTML+CSS+JavaScript).

Personal Information

Hobbies

This job and family, can one have hobbies? I hope it is possible :-)
Photography has been my hobby for more than 30 years, now mostly digital.

I also like many sorts of out-door activities: cross-country skiing, mushroom picking, kayaking, just walking. etc.

Publications

Journal articles

International

Kurki-Suonio, R., Systä, K., Vain. J., Real-time specification and modeling with joint actions. Science of Computer Programming 20, 1993, 113-140.

Kari Systä, Specifying User Interfaces in DisCo, SIGCHI Bulletin 26, 2, ACM Press April 1994, pp 53-58

Finnish

Hannu-Matti Järvinen, Kari Systä & Pertti Lehtinen. Unix Tampereen Teknillisessä Korkeakoulussa (in English "Unix in Tampere University of Technology") . Korkeakoulujen ATK-uutiset 2/91 (magazine for computing centers of Finnish Universities).

Kari Systä, Tekniikoita aina läsnäolevaan tietojenkäsittelyyn (In English: Techniques for Ubiquitous Computing), Tietojenkäsittelytiede (Magazine of Finnish Computer Association) June 2001.

Conference and workshop presentations

ADA-YACC, A meeting of APSE builders working group, SigAda conference, Pittsburgh, USA, July, 1986.

Systä K., A visualization and animation environment for executable spesifications. Proc. First Finnish-Hungarian Workshop on Programming Languages and Tools (ed. T. Gyimathy), Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1989, 83-93.

Järvinen H.-M., Kurki-Suonio R., Sakkinen M., Systä K., Object oriented specifications of reactive systems. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference of Software Engineering, Nice, France, March 26-30, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1990, 63-71.

A Visualization and animation environment for executable specifications. Nordic Workshop on Programming Environment Research, Trondheim, Norway, June 11-12, 1990.

Systä K., A graphical tool for specification of reactive systems, Euromicro'91 workshop on real-time systems. Paris, France, 12-14 June 1991.

Trends and standards of windowing systems in UNIX. Summer School of Tallin Institute of Cubernetics, June 1991, Hiiumaa, Estonia.

Reino Kurki-Suonio, Kari Systä & Jyri Vain, Real-time specification and modeling with joint actions., Proc. 6th international workshop on software specification and design, Como, Italy, October 1991.

Reino Kurki-Suonio, Kari Systä & Jyri Vain, Scheduling in real-time models. Symposium on formal techniques in real-time and fault-tolerant systems, Nijmegen, January 1992. LNCS 571, Springer-Verlag 1991, 327 - 339.

Kari Systä & Reino Kurki-Suonio, Modelling of Distributed Real-Time Systems in DisCo., Euromicro'92 workshop on real-time systems. Athens, 3-5 June 1992.

Kari Systä. Experiences in designing a joint action-based tool DisCo. International Summerschool on real-time, fault tolerance and artificial intelligence. Neeruti, Estonia, June 30 - July 2, 1992.

Kari Systä. DisCo-tool. In session Tools Presentations in FME'93: Industrial-Strength Formal Methods, Odense, Denmark, April 1993.

Kari Systä, Specifying User Interfaces in DisCo. Workshop on Formal Methods for the Design of Interactive Systems, York, UK, 23 July. 1993.

Kari Systä, Specifying User Interface as Joint Action Systems. Third workshop on Programming Languages and Software Systems, Kääriku, Estonia, 22-23 August 1993.

Hannu-Matti Järvinen, Reino Kurki-Suonio, Kari Systä, Experiences in Object-Oriented Modeling with Muilti-Object Actions, OOPSLA 1993 Workshop on Specification of Behavioral Semantics in Object Oriented Information Modeling, September 26, 1993.

Kari Systä, Experiences in using a GUI C++ library, Conceptual Modelling and Object-Oriented Programming, November 5, 1993, Tampere, Finland. Publications of the Finnish Artificial Intelligence Society - no 11 (eds Aarno Lehtola and Jari Jokiniemi).

Kari Systä, Adding User Interface to a behavioral specification, EHCI95 Working Conference on Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction. Grand Targhee Resort, Wyoming, U.S.A., August 14-18, 1995.

Roger Riggs, Kari Systä, Mark VandenBrink, The JavaTM 2 Platform, Micro Edition Mobile Information Device Profile, JavaOne2000, San Francisco, 5-9.6, 2000

Kari Systä, Mobile Information Device Profile - Java Programs in the Phone, Java for mobile devices event by Swiss Java User Group, Zurich, September 20, 2000.

Antero Taivalsaari, Paul Su, Kari Systä, The JavaTM 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2METM) Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC), JavaOne2002, San Francisco, March 2002.

Kari Systä, Requirements and Issues of VXEs for Mobile Terminals, Invitational Workshop on the Future of Virtual Execution Environments, IBM Learning Center, Armonk, New York, September 15-17, 2004

Book chapters

Java in the Mobile Domain, J. Reilly, K. Systä, pp 235-242, Mobile Internet Technical Architecture, Technologies and Standardization, IT Press, 2002, ISBN 951-826-668-9.