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Moroccan PhD Who Sorted Out panOulu |
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By Jasmina Schreck
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Monday, 18 January 2010 |
Ever used panOulu? 65DN interviews the Moroccan who made it work.
The university’s Aula Ravintola is crammed full of people on a Wednesday at 11:30am. Perhaps not the perfect place to meet up with someone you have never met before, I start to think, but before I can even look lost a man with dark curly hair swiftly comes up the stairs and looks at me with an asking expression on his face. That’s when I know it’s him, Mehdi Bennis.
Originally from Casablanca, Morocco, Mehdi completed his PhD last November at the Centre for Wireless Communications at Faculty of Technology. Ending up in Oulu was more of a coincidence, he tells me.
“Before I came to Finland I was working for a Japanese company in France. In a seminar a professor that happened to be from the University of Oulu came up to me and offered me this PhD possibility. So I thought, let’s go there.”
The 31-year-old, who has been living in Oulu for five years, admits that he needed some time to adjust to the somewhat different climate up north.
“It was hard in the beginning of course, especially because I’m from the south. Well, I just had to adjust. It was an experience in the beginning but I’m getting used to the darkness and cold weather. Now I know to appreciate the sun more”, he laughs.
Also the research work didn’t turn out to be as easy as he first thought. After some time, the professor left and Mehdi had to change his topic and start again from scratch. In the end he wrote his thesis about “spectrum sharing for future wireless systems”. The topic was suggested to him by his former supervisor in 2006, and one of the techniques used in his PhD thesis to solve the spectrum sharing problem was Game Theory in which the concept of hierarchy was proposed. As a result, users enjoy better data rates on their mobiles in a seamless way. The obtained results in his thesis are applicable to any wireless system, such as the city’s wireless network, panOulu.
“When I first started my PhD, spectrum scarcity attracted a lot of attention from regulators, mobile operaters, academics and regulators. My research topic was timely and in the limelight. We are in the midst of an ever-increasing number of demanding users while the spectrum is a scarce resource. I tried to find a way to share those resources more efficiently as opposed to the conventional way with no sharing in order to serve more users in the city. In practise that means finding solutions for optimising the access to panOulu for many users at the same time that I came up with solutions, for for example”, Mehdi explains.
The next 5 or 6 years he plans to stay in Oulu because his girlfriend -who is from Spain and whom he met in Oulu through common friends- is doing her PhD in molecular physiology at the university at the moment. Mehdi would like to remain involved in cutting-edge technologies during that time, but what will come after that he doesn’t know yet.
“The market changes so fast. I will see what opportunities there are after those five years. Now that I’m project manager at the Centre for Wireless Communication (CWC) there are more options for me in the future.”
For his PhD Mehdi got financial support from both Infotech graduate school and Tekes, a Finnish funding agency.
Plans to introduce tuition fees for students from non-EU countries in Finland are met with scepticism from his side.
"The fact that Finland wants to sell its educational system comes as no surprise to me. However, it is worh pointing out that if I were from India or any other European country and had the choice between pursuing my studies in Finland or the US, I would most probably choose the latter because of its high university stnadards and worldwide reputation".
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