Pekka Nikander's web site
Pekka Ilmari Nikander is a former serial entrepreneour and university professor, working for the benefit of the society and Mother Earth, mostly on a voluntary pro bono bases. In 2021, he was awakened to the current state of the humankind, leading to a complete change in his lifestyle and pursuits, dismissing the western ideals and now aiming towards a harmonius spiritual lifestyle, building metaphysical and other bridges between the western science and spiritual lifestyle.
Before his awakening, he called himself simply Pekka Nikander. As a doctor of technology, he largely focused on further developing ICT technology, but also applying it to various areas. He gained over 30 years of software development expertise. In 1980 he wrote his first program while still in high school, five years later patching live UNIX kernel to fix bugs. He is still able to function as a multi-talented software generalist, with skills on all layers from hardware-software interface to human-computer interfaces.
In 1988 Pekka founded Nixu, today a leading computer and network security consultant company in Finland, driving it for over 10 years, followed by another 10 years at various leadership roles at Ericsson Research.
During the time at Ericsson he grew to be an internationally recognised expert in Internet architecture, with special attention to security, privacy, mobility, economic, and implementation aspects. He has a strong background in UNIX, all levels of programming from FPGAs and system programming to compiler design and graphical user interfaces, and computer and communications security. In early 1990s, he spend a few years focusing on user interface aspects, creating a user centric perspective that has remained active since then. From 1996 until 2006 he was active in Internet standardisation, and served at the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) from March 2005 to February 2006. From 2007 until 2010 his work focused on the future of the Internet architecture, with special attention to socio-economic, implementation, scalability, and high performance aspects.
In March 2011 he joined Senseg, a leading haptics startup, taking the responsibility for the software architecture. In 2013, Pekka founded the Ell-i open source co-operative with a dozen of other people. In 2014, Pekka was nominated a Research Fellow at Aalto University school of Science and Technology (the former Helsinki University of Technology). Furthermore, in 2014 Pekka co-founded Solu Machines together with Kristoffer Lawson and Javier Reyes, leaving it a year later due to internal disputes. From January 2016 to September 2016 he was the Chief Software Architect at PulseOn.
Today Pekka is a Professor (PoP) of Industrial Internet at Aalto University COMNET, CTO of Ll co-op, and one of the founding members of ValueCraft.
Pekka is first and foremost a generalist. He has more than 10 years of experience, both at personal and at group-leadership level, on architecting, designing, and implementing secure and scalable distributed and decentralised systems, including protocol stacks. He has written some half a million lines of code, mostly in C and Java but also in a dozen or so other languages, including Verilog, various assemblers, C++, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, SmallTalk, Scheme, and Common Lisp. The platforms range from the Stanford NetFPGA through microcontrollers, various Unix kernels and the iPhone, to the LLVM compiler toolkit and system dynamics modelling. Today he enjoys most working with microcontrollers solving demanding hardware-software co-design problems.
In addition to the technical skills, Pekka has had a leadership role for more than 20 years. While he has never enjoyed formal management positions, he tends to lead people with his own example and initiative. He enjoys solving technically “impossible” challenges in small groups, aiming for the marine corps maxim “the impossible we do at once, miracles take a bit longer!”
At the other end of the spectrum, Pekka has some experience in deep organisational development, using methods such as World Cafe, Openspace and Theory U, which aim at being able to reveal, understand and change the deep landscape of organisations.
Pekka has authored or co-authored about 100 refereed scientific articles, and is the inventor or a co-inventor in some 20 priority patents.
Pekka has first-hand experience on seven startup companies: Nixu, Senseg, Ell-i, Solu, PulseOn, Ll co-op, and ValueCraft. Additionally, during his Ericsson times he ran two startup ideas for a few months each, before finding out that the markets were not ready for the ideas.
Internationally recognised top level knowledge and skills, with more than 10 years of full-time working experience, in data communication architectures, Internet standardisation, computer and communications security, and computer programming. Good knowledge and skills, with 3 years or more of full-time working experience, in user interfaces and human-computer interaction. Good skills, with one year or more of full-time working experience, in compiler design and implementation, operating systems design and implementation, and high level hardware synthesis.
Finnish (mother tongue), English (C2 - fluent), Swedish (C1 - very good knowledge), German (A2 - basic).
Pekka Nikander, Vaddina Kameswar Rao, Petri Liuha, and Hannu Tenhunen, “ELL-i: An inexpensive platform for fixed things,” Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience 14, no. 3: 155-168, October 2013.
Pekka Nikander, Andrei Gurtov, and Thomas R. Henderson, “Host Identity Protocol (HIP): Connectivity, Mobility, Multi-Homing, Security, and Privacy over IPv4 and IPv6 Networks,” IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, Volume 12 Issue 2, pp. 186-204, April 2010.
Petri Jokela, Andras Zahemszky, Christian Esteve Rothernberg, Somaya Arianfar, and Pekka Nikander, “LIPSIN: Line Speed Publish/Subscribe Inter-Networking,” SIGCOMM 2009, Barcelona, August 17-21, 2009.
Tuomas Aura, Pekka Nikander, and Gonzalo Camarillo, “Effects of Mobility and Multihoming on Transport-Layer Security,” IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Berkeley/Oakland, California, May 9-12, 2004, IEEE Computer Society.
Pekka Nikander, Jukka Ylitalo, and Jorma Wall, “Integrating Security, Mobility, and Multi-Homing in a HIP Way,” Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium (NDSS’03), February 6-7, 2003, San Diego, CA, pp. 87-99, Internet Society.
Jari Arkko and Pekka Nikander, “How to Authenticate Unknown Principals without Trusted Parties,” Security Protocols, 10th International Workshop, Cambridge, UK, April 16-19, 2002.
Pekka Nikander, “An Operating System in Java for the Lego Mindstroms RCX Microcontroller,” USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 18-23, 2000, San Diego, USENIX Association, Lake Forest, CA. This paper received the Freenix Track Best Paper Award.
US8559434, Packet forwarding in a network, 2013.
EP1698197, Authentication in a communication network, 2003.
EP1629653, Secure traffic redirection in a mobile communication system, 2003.
EP0848361/EP0917327, Method and system for performing electronic money transactions, 1996.