Olav Tirkkonen is associate professor in communication theory at the Department of Communications and Networking in Aalto University, Finland, where he has held a faculty position since August 2006. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in theoretical physics from Helsinki University of Technology in 1990 and 1994, respectively. Between 1994 and 1999 he held post-doctoral positions at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, and the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, Copenhagen, Denmark. From 1999 to 2010 he was with Nokia Research Center (NRC), Helsinki, Finland, most recently acting as Research Fellow. In 2016-2017 he was Visiting Associate Professor at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. He has published some 200 papers, is the coinventor of some 80 families of patents and patent applications and is coauthor of the book "Multiantenna transceiver techniques for 3G and beyond".

The current research interests of the communication theory group, a research group led by Professor Tirkkonen, are in wireless networks, physical layer processing, coding theory and quantum information processing. The development of wireless systems keeps opening up new frontiers and enabling the use of methods of increasing sophistication to optimize system performance on all layers in Radio Access Networks (RANs).

Current topics include

• 5G wireless networks: spectrum and interference management, large scale MIMO, ultra-reliable low-latency communication
• Network-level interference cancelation and coordination
• Collaborative caching in wireless networks
• Machine learning for wireless networks: Unsupervised learning of wireless channel geography
• Coding on unitary group, Grassmann and covariance matrix manifolds
• Quantum communication