Rate My Professor Olav Tirkkonen

Olav Tirkkonen is Full Professor in communication theory at Aalto University's Department of Information and Communications Engineering, where he has held a faculty position since August 2006 and leads the communication theory group. He earned his M.Sc. degree in theoretical physics from Helsinki University of Technology in 1990 and his Ph.D. degree in 1994. From 1994 to 1999, he held post-doctoral positions at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, Denmark. Subsequently, from 1999 to 2010, he served as Research Fellow at Nokia Research Center in Helsinki, Finland. In 2016–2017, he was Visiting Associate Professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, USA. Tirkkonen's research focuses on wireless networks, physical layer processing, coding theory, and quantum information processing. Key areas include 6G large-scale and cell-free MIMO systems, massive and ultra-reliable machine-type communications, machine learning applications in wireless networks such as channel charting and CSI-based localization, coding on unitary group, Grassmann, and covariance matrix manifolds, as well as quantum communication and computation.

He has authored approximately 300 research papers, with highly cited publications including "Resource sharing optimization for device-to-device communication underlaying cellular networks" (IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2011), "Minimal non-orthogonality rate 1 space-time block code for 3+ Tx antennas" (2000), and "Square-matrix embeddable space-time block codes for complex signal constellations" (IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2002). Tirkkonen is coauthor of the book "Multiantenna transceiver techniques for 3G and beyond" and coinventor of about 85 families of patents and patent applications, including 1% of all patents declared essential for the first standardized version of 4G LTE. His contributions have significantly influenced physical layer baseband communications in multi-antenna environments for 4G, 5G, and 6G systems. Awards and honors include IEEE Fellow status since 2023 for contributions to problems in wireless environments, Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association, General Chair of the 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, and membership on the Executive Editorial Committee of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. He serves as Principal Investigator on projects such as CHASER (Channel Charting as a Service, 2023–2026) and UFQA (Universal Fault Tolerant Quantum Computer Assembly, 2023–2026).