Imagining the Future of Mobile Digital Life
By Teresa Hagen
As corporate vice president and chief technology officer of Core Networks at Nokia, Arthur Lin has a lot of responsibilities…and a lot of fun.
“There is plenty of excitement working with a small company, but you can have a lot of fun working for a large company, too,” Lin said in reference to his employer, a European-based company headquartered in Helsinki, Finland. “In the past, since I’m out of school, I’ve always been either one of the engineers working on the products or a general manager responsible for the business or company. Now, I don’t have the direct P and L (profit and loss) responsibilities, and that gives me the freedom to look at the business we are in (or not in yet) more generally and into the future. My job is to look at what the products and solutions are that Nokia should offer to our customers.”
Lin, who received both his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from USC, is highly qualified to be in that position. Prior to Nokia, Lin served as the co-founder, president and CEO of Tahoe Networks, which was acquired by Nokia in 2003. He also was the co-founder, CTO, and vice president of engineering and operations at Shasta Networks and later, the executive vice president and general manager for Nortel’s IP services and routers business unit. (Shasta Networks was acquired by Nortel Networks in early 1999.) For many years, Lin worked as the director of engineering and held various senior-level engineering and management positions at Cisco Systems.
He has developed an extensive list of breakthrough products for the networking industry, including the Tahoe Mobile Internet eXchange TMIX-5000, Shasta 5000 BSN (broadband service node/router), Cisco’s 120x0 and 7x00 series routers, the Cisco Catalyst 5x00/6x00 series multi-layer LAN switches and the Cisco LS-1010 multi-service ATM/IP (asynchronous transfer mode) switch. Lin has also received 16 patent awards and has published more than 100 technical papers. He is a leading authority on technologies such as very high speed packet switching systems, gigabit router architectures, high performance multicast algorithms, VoIP (voice over Internet protocols), traffic management, QoS (quality of service) control schemes, captive portals, network-based firewalls, NAT/PAT, (network address translation/port address translation) VPNs (virtual private networks) and high-performance, high-touch packet processing.
On a daily basis, Lin’s responsibilities focus on assuring Nokia’s highly competitive standing as a technological leader in mobile communication. “Our customers include both the service providers as well as the end subscribers, like you and I,” Lin explained. “I keep thinking about how we can actually enable people to be more connected, and not just professionally, but also in their social lives as well. I’m working on the services, the applications and also the next big thing for Nokia. We’re looking at products,software and hardware components, platforms, technology and solutions. What will be the future of the digital home and the digital life and the mobile digital life?”
So, what does the future look like? According to Lin, mobile phones have already become an essential part of our lives and will continue to dominate as a means of communication, but that is just the beginning. “In the next couple of years or so, we will all be 3G and WLAN connected so we’ll have a much higher bandwidth,” Lin commented. “Mobile phones today already include a high-quality digital camera with integrated flash, PDA, mobile messaging and e-mail functions. The mobile devices that we’re coming up can also play MP3 music and video; you can watch TV and play network games, so they are also mobile entertainment devices.
“I think the mobile device we know today will be almost everywhere, covering everything we do on a day-to-day basis, including serving as a remote control for our home security and appliances,” Lin continued. “I think also in the not so very distant future that device will also be our credit card, charging card, pre-paid card and ID card. That’s already happening in Europe and part of Asia.” Lin admits that security and battery life still offer challenges, but he believes that technology will eventually resolve those concerns.
Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Lin came to the U.S. specifically to study at USC. He remains in touch with his thesis advisor, John Silvester, professor of electrical engineering and vice provost for scholarly technology, and former engineering faculty member Deborah Estrin, who is now a professor of computer science at UCLA. Lin stays connected to his alma mater by serving on the Industry Advisory Board for electrical engineering - systems.
“When I was (at USC), I really enjoyed every single bit of it,” he said enthusiastically. “It was a nice campus, nice environment, with great professors and great classmates. Any success I’ve had I definitely attribute to my education at USC.”
