New PhD Simone Leggio is into practical research

In 2001, Simone Leggio won an Erasmus scholarship, and asked a professor in his home institution University of Catania , Sicily , about a good place to write his Master's thesis. Simone was recommended to contact Kimmo Raatikainen, and so in October he arrived to Helsinki . He had to return to Italy after his MSc, but he agreed with Kimmo to come back for PhD.

- I have always been working on area of Internet data communication, although my Master's thesis was about a completely different subject, says Simone who defended his doctoral thesis “A Decentralized Session Management Framework for Heterogeneous Ad-Hoc and Fixed Networks” on 17 th November.

To put it extremely short, Simone's thesis is about telephony over Internet. The use of the Internet for voice communication is currently becoming mainstream, with the so called Voice over IP (VoIP) applications. Skype is probably the most well-known application. Efforts for mobilizing the Internet are ongoing both in the industrial and in the academic worlds, but several bricks are still needed to build the wall of mobile Internet. This dissertation provides one of these bricks, describing a solution that allows the deployment of multimedia applications (chat, VoIP, gaming) in mobile environments.

Career in research was not a clear choice from the very beginning for our new doctor.

-  I became interested in research when I worked on my MSc thesis in the Computer Science Department. I wanted to work with some new possible solutions which could contribute to the society – at least, I would have done my part.

Simone tells he believes in practical research, not just doing research for the sake of it.

- I wanted to put in to practice the things I had learned. At the moment it is easier to work in business and pursue for academic career. The thesis gave me a lot of knowledge and I think it will open doors.

Recently, Simone has been working on his thesis and having a day job at the same time. Although he has left to Nokia, he says he spent wonderful years at our department. It was not too crowded here and there were enough computing resources also for students.

-  The last two years have been tough. You need to have good support and will for writing a thesis in your free time. But when I believe in something, I am not afraid of difficulties. And I have had support from my family, work, and girlfriend.

- Next I will relax for while. Just come home and think about nothing after work. I will continue working in Nokia, but after a while I might go to the academic world.

Sanna Kettunen