CPU: Can you please tell us about your background?

HT: I’m now head of Nokia Research. I have a doctorate in computer science and have been a professor of computer science. I came to Nokia from academia four years ago. I’ve been in Silicon Valley, before this most recent time, for six years. I was a professor part time in Stanford and part of the time at UC Berkeley. I’m Finnish. I’ve also taught at the University of Helsinki. I’ve lived in the U.S. for more than eight years altogether. I have been very interested in the intelligence of machines. How can we get them to exhibit intelligent behavior? I am very interested in bringing together multiple disciplines to work on innovations in mobile technology. I’d like to see what happens when we tie search engines and wireless sensor networks together.

CPU: What interested you in this job?

HT: I came to Nokia as a research fellow. I headed a research lab, international teams, and migrated to ramping up this Palo Alto site. I became head of systems research, which was one of our laboratories. And now I became the head of all Nokia Research.

CPU: How many people are you in charge of?

HT: About 700 worldwide. We have teams in Beijing; Africa; Bangalore, India; Helsinki, Finland; Cambridge, England; Cambridge, Mass.; Palo Alto, Calif.; and our newest one in Hollywood.

CPU: What research is led from here?

HT: This isn’t where we do radios. This is social networking, context-based services, graphics for things such as augmented reality. We work closely with the experts at Berkeley, Stanford and other tech companies here. That’s what we do here. The transportation work is an example of how we collaborate with a government entity and a university, as well. We are working with UC Berkeley and CalTrans to come up with accurate real-time traffic, using car GPS signals, sensors in highways, and two-way communication with mobile phone users. It is an example of collaboration and openness.

CPU: So the mobile world is opening up. Nokia itself is becoming more open, and consequently your research is more open now. Is that right?

HT: I would say these openings are aligned. They are not causes of each other. Research on the top level has to have open components. I talked to Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research. We agreed that if you take any top research group and put it in a closed environment, it will not be a top research group within five years. Openness is a necessity for research. It’s also an impact of the ecosystem, or platform. To have an innovative platform, you need openness. Nokia has moved toward openness by acquiring Symbian (maker of cell phone operating systems) and making its work available as open source. We have moved the Series 60 platform to be more open. Our research is open to be aligned with the businesses.

CPU: Are there some big milestones in the history of the smartening of smartphones?

HT: For me, the phone should not itself be viewed as smart. The handset is doing more things. It is interconnected. Some people consider phones to be smartphones if they can access the Internet. To me, that’s straightforward. That’s not enough. Using a phone as a way to access the Internet is not by itself important. What you need in a phone is context. That context awareness can deliver useful information to you when you need it. To me, the smartphone can provide smart context and seamless access to the digital information that we have. That’s how I view smartness.

CPU: Is that replicating a computer on the phone?

HT: It’s going much beyond a computer in the phone. This is not only the way you see it in the growth markets. People have their first Internet experiences today with the phone. That’s the way it is in many countries. But they’re not getting a lot of context that can help them have better experiences. You can have a camera. You can type on it. You have a display, some Bluetooth connectivity. But when you think about context of a mobile device, it should know where you are. It should know what you’re interacting with. It should know your calendar and where you need to be. It should be able to sense the environment around you. That’s a computer on steroids. You will have a totally different experience with the device.

This is the evolution of computing. When we had mainframe computers, they evolved into minicomputers. Those evolved into PCs. The PCs have evolved into laptops. Additional things become possible. As those evolve into phones, more things become possible. As the phones become equipped with sensors, even more is possible. For me, something new comes out of a new form of computing device. If you look at nanoscience, you’ll see that you have to be serious about software, hardware, and the materials that you will use to make a device. We stopped using the smartphone term a couple of years ago. We’ve shipped more than 80 million Series 60 devices. They are multimedia-capable. The term served the era when you moved from voice to data. Smartphones referred to the data-capable phones.

CPU: Do you agree with this idea that mobile technology is driving Silicon Valley?

HT: In the time I have been here, it has changed. In the past, Europe drove it and the valley was behind. It was backward in cell phones in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. I remember talking to people here in 2005 who said that mobile search made no sense. We’ve got a project called Point and Find where you point your camera phone at an object and it identifies it for you and lets you engage in e-commerce. That shows that searching for something on the mobile phone makes perfect sense. It knows your location. It can deliver useful information to you.

I’ve talked with a bunch of CEOs here. Every single venture capitalist I’ve talked to has discovered that every one of their companies needs to come up with some kind of mobile solution. This is relatively recent. Think of the possibilities when you can distribute your software across a billion devices, rather than just hundreds of millions of computers. If you sell your software to 10 million PC users, that’s great. For that many handsets, that is a tiny market share. I would argue we haven’t even seen how much Silicon Valley will be driven by mobility.

CPU: How much of the innovation comes from little things like $2 accelerometers, like those that detect which way an iPhone is facing?

HT: The innovation is a combination of enabling technology and its interplay with systems, whether that’s a handset application or a traffic model. A GPS chip enables location services. That’s a base technology. Then you combine that with innovation that gets you much better traffic navigation in real time. You can find out which way to go because the device tells you where the congestion is. Traffic is just one thing. Weather is another thing that is enabled by a $2 sensor. It becomes useful if you have millions of devices out there which are sensing what the weather is like in a lot of different locations. You get more accurate details. If you have 100 million sensors out there, you learn a lot more about what’s going on.

CPU: There are also high-end technologies. Sandbridge Technologies has a chip that they say can do software-defined radio. That’s also driving you forward, right?

HT: The community of researchers is working on things like this, which can get you phones that work in any country and can handle any wireless protocol. The term SDR itself isn’t that good. SDR means that you can switch from one radio to another in the same chip. The real interesting part is that we can do that at some point in nanoscale. You can look at what part of the wireless spectrum has the least interference and the chip will go there to take advantage of it. The most complex sensors will have radios. You can have sensors that are biosensors, detecting hazards and things like that.

CPU: Are you optimistic these technologies will work and transform cell phones?

HT: I’m not just optimistic. It is inevitable. Location-based services were touted in the late 1990s. We are now living it. It is here now because many of the economic systems are in place. If you take a Nokia handset from 2002, it will have the technology on it. But the wireless carriers turned it off because they saw no value in it. The same was true for camera phones. The technology is ahead of the applications. Now, they all have them. Once you see GPS traffic navigation, there is no going back. You have to have them. The time scales are hard to predict for ecosystems. We are doing research with UCLA to determine what someone’s energy footprint is like and how we can reduce that. Energy, sustainable technologies, and rich interaction will force us into the direction of developing better and better technologies. We have to do it.

CPU: What are lessons of Apple’s success in mobile phones?

HT: Apple has evangelized this new kind of data-driven phone. Remember what I said about search in 2005. Before the iPhone, people didn’t understand that you could have software running on a mobile device. People didn’t get it. Also, Apple has impacted the ecosystem of developers. A start-up has a chance to take anything that runs on the Internet and [move] it to the mobile space. They can launch it and get $1. That’s not so great on the PC. But on the handset, the numbers look very attractive. Apple has done tremendous ecosystem work that will benefit the whole industry.

CPU: How does the smartphone technology spread to all phones?

HT: You always get some things at the high end first. Then you push it to become cheaper and more of a commodity. There can be disruption points. If you have something heavily visual, you have to come up with something to display it properly. Craig’s List is a challenge here. That’s a voice-based Craig’s List. You make a call. You have a natural language understanding of your voice. That makes sense in Africa, where it makes sense to be able to find out more about the object that is being advertised. You don’t want to travel a long distance, only to find it’s not what you want. Cameras started at high-end phones and now they’re on cheap handsets. Color displays, same thing.

CPU: Is there a time when you expect mobile payments to work worldwide?

HT: It’s a reality in Japan. We have near-field communications, which let you purchase something that is inches away from the phone. We can use them to pay tolls in transportation systems. It’s just a different type of sensor.

CPU: You’ve talked about augmented reality, which blends real camera data with information on the phone. What’s your favorite example of that?

HT: It would have to do with travel or tourism. You point your camera at something and then you can get information about what you're pointing at. Also, games would be very fun. You can have special glasses maybe and you can see aliens coming at you from a particular landmark. You see the world differently. It would be fun to walk through San Francisco and look at places and then see what it used to look like before the famous earthquake. You point at something and the display shows you the old photos. Another application would have to do with advertising that allows you to purchase something and get more information about the object you're looking at.