A Conversation with Henry Tirri
I recently sat down with Dr. Henry Tirri, (shown left) Senior Vice President and Head of Nokia Research Center, for the first of what will likely be a series of discussions.
Q: Henry, in your words, what is Nokia Research 
Center or “NRC”?
NRC is a cradle of new far-reaching ideas for Nokia… While Nokia does a brisk business of ideating and innovating many products and services in the name of going to market, NRC seeks to generate alternatives outside of the scope of typical product development. We operate on a longer time scale, we represent the Big “R” [Research], and our motives are less directed.
Our charter is an exploratory one, and as a result we also take larger risks and often fail. From my perspective, if we had a 100% success rate, or even 75% success rate, we would be doing Nokia a disservice because we obviously would not be not reaching far enough.
Q: What is your role at Nokia? Particularly in light of the recent announcement of Rich Green as CTO?
I am the head of all things NRC, which as I mentioned before means I am the owner of Nokia’s long-term research and development. I enable NRC to give Nokia alternatives to ensure our competitive future. Rich as CTO is my “brother of the present” working to secure our technological competitiveness today. We will work in tandem and yet independently.
Q: Since this is for Nokia’s Silicon Valley blog, what does NRC do at its Palo Alto and Berkeley locations?
The way we are organized, we treat Palo Alto and Berkeley as one location under one Lab Director, John Shen. They are associated with two schools, Stanford and UC Berkeley, on opposite sides of San Francisco Bay. Both world-class in their educational and research activities. Why are we here? The same reason we are at any of our 12 locations worldwide, to be a proactive member of the local ecosystem. In this case the ecosystem of Silicon Valley. Obviously the Valley is a critical part of the world where computer innovation (defined by me as a range of hardware, software and networking/cloud technologies) has always been explosive. And, as we all know, mobile phones are becoming ever more like computers, and we need access to partners and talent in the computing space to innovate and compete effectively.
Q: What Bay Area NRC projects are getting to a point where you think they will be of interest to the public?
Naturally we are a large organization so we have a lot going on at any one moment that is attention-getting, but a couple from the Bay Area would be projects we call Family Story Play and Terminal Mode.
Family Story Play is all about collaborative user experiences and while some of the innovation is in the technology, a lot of it is in how people use the technology and how the system facilitates new types of rich interaction.
Terminal Mode is about your mobile device becoming the computing hub of your car for navigation, entertainment, environmental, and other purposes. It is your mobile phone “jacking” into your car so you can interact with it via in-car controls such as the in-dash touch screen, accessing applications designed to enrich your driving experience. We are very excited to be on the forefront by proposing an industry specification around this and look forward to seeing developers engage to create applications specifically designed for in-car use. The car is about to become an extension of mobile computing, and therefore mobile developers will already be well versed in those platforms. And, drivers can now “upgrade” their car simply by downloading new applications or purchasing a new phone.
Q: For the sake of those who don’t know you, what is your background?
I like to say that I am in my 38th year of hacking… A computer scientist with extremely broad interests ranging from theoretical physics to social sciences. I also like to say I am a “wanna-be biologist” since I almost studied molecular biology early on in my career. While I went the computer science route, biology remains fascinating and inspiring to me. I was so interested in research early on that academia became a life.
I went into private industry because I saw that there were many new things to learn there, and I’m been extremely satisfied with that choice, especially in light of my current work [at NRC]. I think it was the right thing for me, because I believe that after a period of time in each place, in each competency you reach a plateau of learning…at least the speed of learning.
In academia at a certain seniority point you reach a type of saturation with the things you do…you have all your labs, you are sitting in all the possible program committees, you are giving keynotes, you have a lot of projects, you have graduated a lot of Ph.D students, and so on. So you have to decide where you go: you can go further in the university administration, or you can try to take your research to new levels, or you can look outside for ways to grow.
Nokia gave me this opportunity to make a new kind of impact, and we all want to make an impact, and I feel like I have an ability to do so on a global scale. Across growth economies in particular, mobile technology is changing peoples lives for the better in a very concrete way on a scale that is nearly impossible to implement from a university setting, and being part of this I find to be extremely gratifying.
Posted by Brett Murray, June 7, 2010
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