Portrait of assistant professor Mirko Presser

1.       Why did you choose to work at the Department of Business Development and Technology?

Coming from an engineering background your biggest tool is a hammer and everything looks like a nail. It is great to work in a cross-disciplinary environment where you apply your tools and methods in collaboration to solve problems and understand the world better. The Department of Business Development and Technology offers exactly that. I am excited to join Aarhus BSS and collaborate in cross-disciplinary environment to understand the influence which technology, specifically the internet of things, has on business model innovation.

2.       What is your area of expertise and what will you be doing here?
I have been working in the field of the Internet of Things since its conception. Generally, the IoT is a concept that, as Kevin Ashton put it, “Turns the world into data.” meaning that solutions to problems can be found using data analytics and optimisation strategies in general are tangible. My first projects on the topic focused mainly on the foundational technologies for wireless sensor networks and how to combine them with telecommunication systems to build mobile internet of things capabilities. This work has led to many interesting outcomes such as a context broker for IMS, sematic discovery mechanisms and COAP (the constrained application protocol), the semantic equivalent of HTTTP for environments of low computing power, energy and memory. Since 2009, my focus has shifted more to the applied side of IoT where I spent most of my time in the Smart City context of IoT. This has taught me the value of collaborating across many disciplines – as the topic smart city is much more than an engineering problem.

3.       What is your educational background?
I have a Master’s degree in Physics with Astrophysics and a Master’s degree in Telecommunications and Signal Processing from the University of Bristol in the UK, and I received my PhD on the Mobile Internet of Things form the University of Surrey in the UK in 2009.

4.       What have you done before?
I was a part-time PhD student while working at the Center for Communication Systems Research at the University of Surrey a Research Fellow. During that time, I worked on several large scale EU projects in FP6 and FP7, most notably the e-SENSE and SENSEI projects for which I was the technical manager. Both projects pioneered IoT work and accelerated the interest and adoption of a more formal research strategy at the European Commission, leading to a role as EU/China expert on IoT and Sherpa for the CAF (Connect Advisory Forum). Since moving to Denmark, I have been working at the Alexandra Institute, mainly in the role of head of research and innovation in the Smart City Lab. In the lab, I lead a cross-disciplinary team of researchers working on many European and national projects including Gatesense, Virk, Hitachi City Data Exchange, ODAA, H2020 OrganiCity, FP7 Citypulse, FP7 IoT Lab, FP7 URB-Grade, etc. I also co-founded the Smart Aarhus initiative and launched the International IoT Forum, where today I am still the Vice-President. I am also part of the founding and organising committee of the IoT Week (iot-week.eu) and part of the team that created and organises the IEEE IoT World Forum as well as may other conferences and committees. I am also the author of the IoT comic book, most likely the most read IoT publication in the world with over 20k downloads and 10k hard copies given out since 2010; iotcomicbook.org.

5.       Please tell us a bit about yourself, your family and your leisure activities.
I come from the south of Germany, but moved to France and subsequently to the UK once I completed my formal schooling in Germany. Since 2009, I have lived in Hadsten with my family. My wife is Danish, and we have three boys (1, 5 and 8 years old). I enjoy learning and working in a research environment and in my spare time, I enjoy spending time with family and friends. I am also an avid board game player and have co-founded the Board Game Challenge in Aarhus, a group of 5 IT organizations (AU, Alexandra, Aarhus municipality, eBay and Baeumer Group) playing board games and talking about IT strategy, IoT and big data. tL5H?V??g?