Rod Walsh

Principal Researcher, Cloud Computing Systems
NRC Tampere

Rod Walsh is a Principal Researcher for Nokia Research Center in Tampere, Finland. He is working on human and machine interaction in cloud computing and smart spaces, along with distribution and virtualisation at several layers of the computer networking and interactions stack. His research interests also include small and diverse group collaboration, ubiquitous computing through autonomous formation and orchestration of multi-device environments, and taking games design patterns in everyday activities. His previous work on hybrid networks and broadband data access to homes has also delivered expertise and standardization contributions in IP Datacast, multi-access terminals, media guides and service discovery. As a respected coach, leader and individual contributor in research, design and venture teams, he has catalysed many industrial and scientific contributions. These include 15 patents to him, and many publications to scientific and engineering communities, as well as significant contributions to ratified Internet, telecommunications and broadcast standards.

With a strong track record in mobile broadcast and home research fields, Rod currently works with the high performance mobile platform topics within Nokia Research Center's Tampere Lab.

Professional Activities

Member of The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE), and the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM); as well as IEEE Consumer Electronics (CESoc) and Computer Societies.

Research Projects

Past Research Projects

Public

DelCo (Delivery and Control Techniques in Content Networking). The cross-over of P2P and datacast, for wired and mobile mass media. DelCo is a TUT university project sponsored by TEKES, Nokia and TeliaSonera running 2005-2006. (This is partly continued from the MAD project, 2003-2004)

InHoNets (Interconnected Broadband Home Networks). Seamless internetworking between several wireless broadband home networks ensuring reliable and secure end-to-end connectivity between peer devices within one home and between homes, and assuming consumer users with minimal or no ICT/admin expertise. Involves system architectures and internetworking developments, and business value system analysis. InHonets is a joint HUT and TUT university project sponsored by TEKES and several inductrial partners from Finland running 2006-2007.

EnComPAs (Enabling Community Communications – Platforms and Applications). The infrastructure for new consumer's experiences and new Telco operator's revenues by enabling the creation of a system and converged residential services suite. Support the communication needs of the many social communities in which each member of the household takes part (school, colleagues, hobbies, friends, family…), by distributing services throughout the home (fast and shared Internet access, multimedia content, remote control and access, home automation, and home security/safety). EnComPAs is an EU Celtics program involving many academic and industrial partnets including Nokia and UIAH (The University of Art and Design Helsinki), and runs 2004-2006.

Nokia

Digital Living. Strategic research program in for home/domestic/family use cases, applications, devices and services. Including sharing technologies & applications (media & experience), remote access, easy setup, usability of home access, and Media Window...

Digital Living Media Window. A work package (subprojects) of Digital Living exploring futures of ubiquitous large, high definition displays at home and their role in communications and other activities. Including user studies, hard and soft-ware and a whole host of other unbelievable things.

MyPlace. Exploritory/frontier research of several small use cases and technology topics for the home domain.

And some other interests and collaborations: Mobile Video, Mobile P2P, Sofia-SIP, MyNet/UIA, ...

Conferences

Member of the Technical Program Committee (TPC) for:

IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE)
IEEE International Consumer Electronics Society's Games Innovations Conference (ICE-GIC)

Chair (and TPC) of:

IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), Research Student Workshop (CCNC-RSW)

Several conference session chairmanships: from MUM2006 to ICCE2011

Personal Information

Education

Tampere University of Technology

Doctoral studies: Communications Systems and User Centered Technology

The University of Birmingham

MEng (Hons) in Electronic and Electrical Engineering with Management (1998)
Diploma in Industrial Studies (1996)

Other Information

Software

FLUTE and IETF-Reliable Multicast Transport

I highly recommend checking out the open source from the TUT (Tampere University of Technology) and INRIA projects which I have touched on my Mobile Multicast roller-coaster ride (see Research Interests and Publications for more):

TUT’s DelCo project and former MAD project
INRIA’s MCL project
(The University of Bremen also has an FTP'able implementation)

Linux DVB

The founding parts of the Linux DVB API originated from my small team of 4 in Nokia Research Center, where we were premitted to share our Network and DeMux APIs. It was the very early days when Nokia Research Center “dared to share” and the remainder of our hefty work - including the full L2, L3 & control software - never went public. However, the excellent Convergence and then LinuxTV.org continued development, initially for the mostly forgotten MediaTerminal, and now these reside in the Linux Kernel. (The history of the MediaScreen, the Linux DVB API, the MediaTerminal, and all eventually involved is so complex and wild that I would be crazy to claim I invented the Linux DVB API – even though I did, well maybe just a little :-)

Publications

Book Chapters

Walsh, R., Vainio, A.-P. and Aaltonen, J. (2005) Multicast Content Delivery for Mobiles, in Content Networking in the Mobile Internet (eds S. Dixit and T. Wu), John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, USA. doi: 10.1002/047147827X.ch10.

Journal Articles

Belimpasakis, P., Walsh, R., A combined mixed reality and networked home approach to improving user interaction with consumer electronics, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, vol 57 Issue:1, pps 139 - 144, February 2011. doi: 10.1109/TCE.2011.5735494

Peltotalo, J., Peltotalo, S., Harju, J. and Walsh, R. (2007), Performance analysis of a file delivery system based on the FLUTE protocol. International Journal of Communication Systems, 20: 633–659. doi: 10.1002/dac.835.

Neumann, C., Roca, V. and Walsh, R. (2005), Large scale content distribution protocols. SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Rev. 35, 5 (October 2005), 85-92. DOI=10.1145/1096536.1096550

Conference Papers

R. Walsh, A. Hornsby, "Towards Off-the-Shelf Computer Vision for User Interaction in Consumer Homes," 29th IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE 2011), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, January 2011.

P. Belimpasakis, R. Walsh, "Fusing Mixed Reality and Networked Home Techniques to Improve User Control of Consumer Electronics," 29th IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE 2011), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, January 2011.

R. Walsh, M. Boberg, J. Arrasvuori, H. Korhonen, T. Walsh, "Introducing Game and Playful Experiences to other Application Domains through Personality and Motivation Models," IEEE International Consumer Electronics Society's Games Innovations Conference (ICE-GIC), 21-23 Dec. 2010, Hong Kong, China. (Best Paper Award)

A. Hornsby, T. Aaltonen, R. Walsh, "Chasers of the Lost Data: Turning Content Management Systems into Gaming Platforms," IEEE International Consumer Electronics Society's Games Innovations Conference (ICE-GIC), 21-23 Dec. 2010, Hong Kong, China.

R. Walsh, T. Walsh, "Family Roles, Activities and Values to Enhance Sharing and Enjoying Family Life through Gaming Elements," Connecting Families Workshop, Nov. 7, 2010, at the ACM 2010 International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP '10), Sanibel, USA.

R. Walsh, A. Hornsby, O. Dedehayir, "Infinity point : Multi-device pointing systems evolution and review," IEEE 14th International Symposium on Consumer Electronics (ISCE), 7-10 June 2010, Braunschweig, Germany. doi: 10.1109/ISCE.2010.5523735.

A. Hornsby, R. Walsh, "From instant messaging to cloud computing, an XMPP review," IEEE 14th International Symposium on Consumer Electronics (ISCE), 7-10 June 2010, Braunschweig, Germany. doi: 10.1109/ISCE.2010.5523293.

R. Walsh, A. Hornsby, "Improving the Value of Archived Personal Content with Aesthetic and Reflexive Qualities," 7th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), 9-12 Jan. 2010, Las Vegas, USA. doi: 10.1109/CCNC.2010.5421686.

A. Hornsby, R. Walsh, "Attaching the Value of Sensorial Experience to Pervasive Multimedia Applications," 7th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), 9-12 Jan. 2010, Las Vegas, USA. doi: 10.1109/CCNC.2010.5421685.

S. A. Awan, P. Belimpasakis, E. Berki, R. Walsh, "Automated Content Sharing in Extended Home through Mobile Devices - A quality solution for group communication," Proceedings of the 15th Software Quality Management Conference (SQM 2007), August 2007, Tampere, Finland.

J. Peltotalo, S. Peltotalo, A. Jantunen, L. Väätämöinen, J. Harju, R. Lehtonen, and R. Walsh, "A Massively Scalable Persistent Content Distribution System," Proceedings of Communications, Internet, and Information Technology 2007 (CIIT2007), July 2-4, 2007, Banff, Canada.

P. Belimpasakis, A. Saaranen and R. Walsh, "Home DNS: Experiences with Seamless Remote Access to Home Services," Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM 2007), June 2007, Helsinki, Finland. doi: 10.1109/WOWMOM.2007.4351726.

P. Belimpasakis and R. Walsh, "User Created Content in the Extended Home," Proceedings of the 15th IST Mobile & Wireless Communication Summit, June 2006, Myconos, Greece.

P. Belimpasakis, R. Walsh, "A Resource Efficient Mobile Blogging System," Proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Workshop on Applications and Services in Wireless Networks (ASWN2006), May 29-31 2006, Berlin. Germany.

G. Balasubramanyam, R. Walsh, M. Lepisto, “Towards a Platform Independent Architecture for Multi-access Mobiles,” EUNICE2004: Advances in Fixed and Mobile Networks, June 14-16 2004, Tampere, Finland.

R. Walsh, L. Xu, T. Paila, "Hybrid Networks – A Step Beyond 3G,” Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications, WPMC2000, November 12-15 2000, Bangkok, Thailand.

Technical White Papers and Reports

R. Walsh, "IP Datacast Technical Architecture", (Initial Proposal), The IP Datacast Forum, 2001.

R. Walsh, “Distributed Fieldbus for Remote Condition Monitoring in Railways”, October 1998, MEng Thesis, The University of Birmingham.

Standards Contributions

3GPP TS 26.346, Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS); Protocols and codecs, 3GPP Release 6 Technical Specification, June 2006 (v6.5.0). (Contributed system material and review, and the majority of multicast file delivery and associated specification)

RFC 4473, Requirements for Internet Media Guides (IMGs), Y. Nomura, R. Walsh, J-P. Luoma, J. Ott, H. Schulzrinne, IETF Informational RFC, May 2006.

RFC 4435, A Framework for the Usage of Internet Media Guides (IMGs), Y. Nomura, R. Walsh, J-P. Luoma, H. Asaeda, H. Schulzrinne, IETF Informational RFC, April 2006.

3GPP TR 26.946, Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS) user service guidelines, 3GPP Release 6 Technical Report, March 2006 (v6.0.1). (Systems, architecture and procedure contributions)

ETSI EN 301 192 v 1.4.1, Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB); DVB specification for data broadcasting, November 2004. (Contributions related to IP encapsulation and IPv6).

RFC 3926, FLUTE: File Delivery over Unidirectional Transport, T. Paila, M. Luby, R. Lehtonen, V. Roca, R. Walsh, IETF Experimental RFC, October 2004.

ATVEF Integration with DVB Using IP/MPE, S. Gillich, N. Pintaux, J. Beveridge, K. Loytana, R. Walsh, J. Lang, Jae-Soo-Yoon, Supplemental Binding, The Advanced Television Enhancement Forum, December 1999.

Several work-in-progress IETF Internet Drafts: draft-mehta-rmt-flute-sdp, draft-ietf-rmt-flute-revised, draft-walsh-mmusic-img-envelope, draft-mehta-rmt-flute-iop. Expired Internet drafts which remain intersting: draft-luoma-mmusic-img-muppet, draft-neumann-rmt-flute-file-aggregation.

Presentations

Invited Presentations

R. Walsh, “Nokia WorldMap2010: Key Technology, Consumer, Design and Economic Trends for the Future of Mobile and Internet Business,” Workshop on Opportunities for Research Leadership from Nokia Partnership with Tampere’s Academic Community, Oct. 13 2010, Tampere, Finland.

R. Walsh, “The Role of Strategy in Research,” Invited Speaker, The 6th International Conference on Wired/Wireless Internet Communications (WWIC 2008), 28-30 May 28-30, 2008, Tampere, Finland.

R. Walsh, “Research Choices - Adjusting the mode of research for commercial impact,” Invited Keynote Speaker, The 7th ITC&IEEE International Conference on Next Generation Teletraffic and Wired/Wireless Advanced Networking (NEW2AN 2007), 10-14 September 2007, Saint-Petersburg, Russia.

P. Belimpasakis, R. Walsh, "User Created Content in the Extended Home," 15th IST Mobile & Wireless Communication Summit (proceedings), June 4-8 2006, Myconos, Greece.

R. Walsh, “Advances in Mass Media Delivery to Mobiles,” Invited Speaker, Multimedia Interactive Protocols and Systems Workshop, MIPS2004, November 16-19 2004, Grenoble, France.

R. Walsh, “Multicast Applications and Implications for Wireless Networks,” Invited Speaker to “Advanced Topics in Broadband Networks: Multicast Networks and Applications” (83390), November 2002, Tampere University of Technology, Finland.

Patents

Granted Patents

Methods to deliver compound data objects which preserve datamodels, R. Walsh, November 20, 2008, US Patent 0945218 first granted February 24, 2010. (Also AU2004321838, Transfer of data objects).

Mapping of MBNS session id field, I. Bouazizi, R. Walsh, I. Curcio, March 24, 2005, KR Patent 0943935 first granted February 17, 2010. (Also WO2006100616, Notification of a receiving device about a forthcoming transmission session).

Synchronized streaming and data in broadcast. T. Paila, R. Walsh, November 9, 2004, KR Patent 0939030 first granted January 20, 2010. (Also GB0424724, Auxiliary content handling over digital communication systems).

Procedure of initiating data transfer and RAB establishment for UMTS multicast service, L. Xu, J-P. Luoma, S. Sarkkinen, R. Walsh, September 20, 2002, US Patent 7606587 first granted October 20, 2009. (Also WO2004028179, Multicast transmission in a cellular network).

Method and system for header compression, R. Walsh, J-P. Luoma, A. Saaranen, December 19, 2003, US Patent 7430617 first granted September 30, 2008.

Point-to-point repair response mechanism for point-to-multipoint transmission systems, R. Vedantham, D. Leon, I. Curcio, R. Walsh, July 30, 2004, US Patent 7376150 first granted May 20, 2008.

SDP parameters for broadcast multicast sessions, I. Curcio, E. Aksu, R. Walsh, H. Mehta, D. Leon, March 22, 2004, KR Patent 809654 first granted February 26, 2008.

A method for identifying and retransmitting missing parts of an object within or outside of a FLUTE session, R. Walsh, H. Mehta, I. Curcio, T. Paila, February 13, 2004, KR Patent 855386 first granted August 25, 2008.

A method for data repair in a system capable of handling multicast and broadcast transmissions, I. Curcio, R. Walsh, G. Balasubramanyam, J-P. Luoma, February 18, 2004, US Patent 7296205 first granted November 13, 2007.

Point-to-point repair request mechanism for point-to-multipoint transmission systems, R. Vedantham, D. Leon, I. Curcio, R. Walsh, July 30, 2004, TW Patent 280757 first granted May 1, 2007.

Method and apparatus for accessing data, J, Aaltonen, J. Salo, R. Walsh, February 15, 2001, EP Patent 1233576 first granted September 6, 2006.

Methods to improve perceived access speed to internet content using a multicast channel and local cache (webbooster), R. Walsh, M. Grundstrom, H. Hakulinen, December 21, 2001, KR Patent 623275 first granted September 5, 2006.

Data delivery over a cellular radio network, J. Salo, J. Aaltonen, R. Walsh, S. Wasko, K. Reponen, June 30, 2000 US Patent 7103311 first granted September 5, 2006.

Service change-over in multiple-address transmission session, T. Paila, J. Poikela, L. Xu, J-P. Luoma, R. Walsh, November 19, 2001, RU Patent 2273096 first granted March 27, 2006.

Dynamic content delivery responsive to user requests, R. Walsh, J. Häkkinen, M. Hämäläinen, M. Väänänen, A. Tähti, K. Nevakivi, September 13, 2001, US Patent 6965770 first granted November 15, 2005.

And several published patents pending - esp@cenet