Photo: Erik Thor/SUA
Computers are everywhere today—at work, in our cars, in our living rooms, and in our pockets—and have changed the world beyond our wildest imagination. Yet these marvelous devices are, at the core, amazingly simple and stupid: all they can do is to mechanically shuffle zeros and ones around. What is the true potential of such automated computational devices? And what are the limits of what can be done by mechanical calculations? Understanding this kind of questions is ultimately what my research is about.
My research area, computational complexity theory, gives these deep and fascinating philosophical questions a crisp mathematical meaning. A computational problem is any task that is in principle amenable to being solved by a computer—i.e., it can be solved by mechanical application of mathematical steps. By constructing general, abstract models of computers we can study how to design efficient methods, or algorithms, for solving different tasks, but also prove mathematical theorems showing that some computational problems just cannot be solved efficiently for inherent reasons.
I am particularly interested in understanding different combinatorial optimization problems, which are of fundamental mathematical importance but also have wide-ranging applications in industry. My goal is, one the one hand, to prove formally that many such problems are beyond the reach of current algorithmic techniques, but also, on the other hand, to develop new algorithms that have the potential to go beyond the current state of the art.
Born: 1972
Family: Wife and three children (sons born in 2005 and 2008, and a daughter born in 2011).
Interests: I am curious about how the world works on a large scale and I am somewhat of a news junkie. Music is a big interest, especially choir and ensemble singing, although it is difficult to find time for it alongside work and family. I enjoy playing all kinds of ball sports, perhaps sometimes with more enthusiasm than skill…
Other: I have previously worked as an interpreter and translator between Russian and Swedish/English, and have provided interpretation services for, among others, H.M. the King and the Prime Minister. I also have a degree in choral conducting from the Tallinn Music High School in Estonia and led the vocal ensemble Collegium Vocale Stockholm from 1994 to 1999, performing mainly Renaissance and Baroque music.
I slipped into a research career because research was so fun, but I also think that it is an immensely important endeavour and therefore crucially needs good conditions. If we wish to have world-leading research in Sweden, we must make high demands on our researchers, but they also need to get the means to be able to meet these demands. University professors should have time for research included in the position as a matter of course. Researchers and teachers need to be able to focus on what they do best instead of being overwhelmed with an ever increasing administrative workload. Swedish universities need to become more autonomous to be able to set their own research agenda independent of short-term trends. For researchers, with the most enjoyable job in the world comes the responsibilty to explain why we are conducting our (sometimes seemingly strange) research, so that decision makers and taxpayers can understand why they should support us. Here I think there is ample room for improvement in the research community. All of these are issues that I want to try to influence as a member of the Young Academy of Sweden.
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