Interview with Mischa Dohler

Professor Mischa Dohler was born in Jena, in Germany, in 1975.  His father was a professor in mathematics and information sciences. At the age of 65, his father decided to start his own company which influenced Mischa’s own entrepreneurial career.

He says: “My father is really somebody who is questioning all the time. He is a scientist by nature, trying to understand the world and I think I’ve gotten a lot from him actually. My mother is equally illustrious, she is a physicist and electrical engineer by education. She invented a few really important things, including a SQUID, a very small device you use to measure the magnetic brain waves, she was part of a team which has pioneered that field.”

Mischa’s younger brother, who was just sixteen months younger than him, died recently from brain cancer. His older sister is accomplished in electrical engineering. She works in telecommunications and co-invented Pay As You Go. She is currently the Chief Executive of NGMN, one of the largest alliances in the world of telecom, bringing together all the telco operators and vendors to define a vision for the next generation telecoms systems.

Mischa says that his mother was his main influence in his early life. He adds; “She wanted us really to succeed, she would spend 24/7 on our education. She got us the best teachers she could think of.  She engaged with a well-known physics professor to teach us physics ‘the proper way’. It was fascinating because we got a very different view on the sciences, and for me, specifically physics and maths, because I really loved it as a child already, but it also gave me that competitive edge and I started to see that I was advancing my peers in school.”

Mischa attended a school that specialised in sciences and maths where he participated in maths and physics Olympics in which he won. He adds: “It was a really great feeling, partly because I was very quick in doing things and partly because I understood really deeply in how to do things. I won quite a few Olympics, as a child in mathematics and physics at the regional level in Thuringia, where I grew up.  I had my good days back then in sciences.  I don’t talk too much about it because officially I have the label of an electrical engineer now, but I did physics to a depth which probably a lot of physics students even haven’t done. I’ve seen it all, done it all and I loved it, and I still love it and it really helped me to really bootstrap my current career.”

After school, Mischa did a year of civil service as required in Germany at that time. He spent the year in the construction industry, fixing roads and physically building buildings. He says of the time: “I loved that period.  It really taught me hands-on capabilities.”

When it came to selecting his university course and location, despite his love of maths and science, Mischa wanted to study his other passion of music. His father, grandfather and many generations, had been pianists and Mischa wanted to become a professional pianist. He chose to study in Moscow. However, after this mother highlighted the very slim chances of building a successful career as a pianist, Mischa chose to study physics in Moscow instead.

He spent two years in Moscow before moving to Dresden. He says: “I did my first two years in Moscow, studying physics, and then I moved back to Germany to Dresden and wanted to start physics there but they wouldn’t recognise any of the exams I had done, which was really bizarre because physics in Moscow is a bit like the Stanford of the East.” Depressed by this news, he was invited by a friend to go to the engineering department who did recognise his exams, except technical drawing. He adds: “Literally, I became an electrical engineer overnight and this is how I really started.” Having started in the department, Mischa was told he had to take a telecom exam by Professor Gerhard Fettweis. Having gained the top mark, Fettweis, then offered Mischa a stipend to work on telecoms, which led to Mischa becoming a telecom engineer, working on early 1½G, in 1995 which became 2G.

In 1998, having grown bored with Dresden, and having missed the application deadlines for Standford and Berkeley, he applied to King’s College, London, to study for a telecoms degree under Professor Hamid Aghvami. It was in London that Mischa met his wife, Gemma, and the pair stayed at King’s College to complete their PhDs. After his PhD, King’s College offered Mischa a permanent academic position which he took. Gemma, meanwhile was offered a position in France in the particle accelerator industry, and the pair spent a year apart until Mischa left King’s to move to France Telecom.

In 2005, Mischa accepted a position with France Telecom based in Grenoble.  He says: “The one thing we did technically is the breakthrough in the Internet of Things world. We realised that a lot of people talked about this as a future concept and we decided to start building a standard around it.  Our world works in standards and we wanted the Internet of Things world to be equal, so we needed a standard.

“I was one of the three kind of co-founding members, alongside Dominic from France Telecom and JP Vasseur from Cisco; the three of us really kicked it off what was back then called ETSI M2M, it is still there. It is one of the standard organisations, it has evolved into oneM2M and has really powered the thinking of a standardised IoT industry ecosystem over the years to come.  Back then, we didn’t realise but with hindsight, we realise we have really pioneered something really, really big, but at that point, it was just a normal 9 to 5 job doing the documentation, getting the ecosystem going and start writing the first standard spec that’s contributed to the first security specs of the IT.  When you look back now after 15 years and you realise that this was probably a pivotal point in the development of the Internet of Things.”

In 2008, Gemma, Mischa’s wife, was offered a job in Barcelona as part of a team building a particle accelerator. Mischa decided to leave France Telecom to follow his wife and took a role at CTTC, a telecoms research centre in Spain. He says: “This is where we co-founded Worldsensing. I remember Ignasi Vilajosana, Jordi Llosa, and Xavier Vilajosana walking through the doors of CTTC, they were three small kids and saying, “Hey, Mischa, let’s do about-something about IoT”, and I said, guys, let’s do it. They knew that I had been very active in the IoT world in France Telecom.”

Worldsensing started in 2009 with Mischa as one of the four core founders and CTO, defining strategy, international projection, etc. He says that the four become like brothers, they stuck together and created a strong ethical group. He adds: “It is very difficult to find people who are truly ethical until the end of the day.  Nobody screwed anybody over, everybody helped each other to grow Worldsensing.  We have become a powerhouse in IoT, one of the biggest companies and specifically in industrial IoT.  We also had a smart cities initiative. Worldsensing started as a small thing, tinkering on the table and now employs more than 100 people around the world, a solid engineering company.”

Of the four founders, Ignasi Vilajosana is still involved, Mischa stepped down when he started at Ericsson, he adds: “The journey has been absolutely fascinating, fantastic, and I think is an inspirational story to all European entrepreneurs that you can really make it if you want to.”

Mischa describes some of the work that he and his co-founders of Worldsensing did developing smart-cities. He explains: “We were talking to Barcelona because we started tinkering around with the sensors and we were trying to find an application for that. Ignasi and I, Jordi and Xavier came up with this idea of putting sensors into parking places in the streets of Barcelona to measure whether a parking place is occupied or not.  It had a dual purpose; it’s very difficult to find parking in Barcelona, presumably, like London or in Milan, so the first purpose was to do a smartphone app for people to see in real-time where there is parking space and route them to it. The other use is that the city hall would know if somebody has paid or not paid. If somebody parks and doesn’t pay then the city would know immediately and essentially be able to find the people. We called it smart parking back then, so, we pioneered that whole notion of smart parking … so, the whole notion of smart cities came out of this.” As a result of the success of the project, Barcelona, which already hosted the Mobile World Congress, decided to organise a Smart Cities Congress. Mischa and his co-founders helped set it up and it has grown into a global brand for the city.

Despite it’s success, Mischa describes the difficulties involved with developing a scalable business around smart-cities, he explains: “It’s a difficult market in general. It’s probably a little bit over-hyped because smart cities is mainly used by marketing departments, but the operational departments in the cities, the ones who are responsible for parking machines, traffic lights etc, are interested in making their business more efficient and effective.  What we realised is that every city is different, they have character, they have a different history.  Milan is different from Barcelona, from London, from, San Francisco, so, therefore, to build a truly global scalable business like we know in IT and software is just not possible with smart cities business.  Therefore Ignasi decided to sell our smart city business in the end and we now focus purely on industry.”

In 2012, Mischa received a call from Hamid Aghvami, asking if he would be interested in returning to London to take over the Centre for Telecom Research. He says: “I thought about this for a very long time, precisely 10 seconds. … I was offered the position of Chair Professor in Telecommunications and I took over the Centre for Telecom Research.” At that point the centre employed 100 people. Mischa’s vision was to grow the centre. He explains: “I wanted to really deal with a gender imbalance we had and increase neurodiversity. I wanted to make use out of London to put us onto the map. I wanted a very, very big, and global impact in telecoms and in society in general.

“With hindsight, looking back now over those eight years, I have to say we have achieved that. The centre grew under my leadership to almost two hundred people who were involved in various aspects of telecom.  I have achieved almost a gender balance of something like 45/55 of which I am very proud. I’ve always argued that this gives us a very kind of natural diversity, which indeed has proved to be very, very good for a lot of very difficult projects we had in the industry.

“I’ve also leveraged London. London is great in the media arts, it’s really the bubbling thing; there are two powerhouses in the world, London and Los Angeles, and I also leveraged on our connections to health.  King’s College London owns four hospitals, some of the biggest hospitals in the country, and I was always thinking how can we combine health in technology, having this health firepower in-house and that played out really well, we’ve done that really well.”

The Centre also looked at transport, engaging with Transport for London, Heathrow, and Network Rail.

Mischa says of his role: “As well as making a personal professional contribution, I wanted to do something from the Centre’s and from the King’s College point of view at a global scale. At the same time, I became a manager, not only a leader in the field but also a manager of people. Managing 200 people taught me a lot of things. That was a really fascinating journey for me personally because I really felt I have grown as a person and as a personality whilst doing this leadership in management.”

Since 2016, Mischa has been on the Spectrum Board of Ofcom. Mischa says: “The Board helps Ofcom to understand what is currently happening and will happen in the future on all things related to spectrum, related to technology. We have a lot of influence on how Ofcom runs internally, what type of procedures it does etc. I personally was pushing Ofcom all the time to make sure that we look into this aggregated future in the spectrum world and consider how can we manage this better. We talked about this a lot, what technologies are available, what are the risks, what are the benefits, who profits, who loses, etc. We’ve also been discussing the internal operations of Ofcom. Ofcom has a huge influence on the innovation ecosystem. In essence, their regulatory output influences innovation, but the big question I always ask is, who is innovating Ofcom, because the institution which impacts innovation also needs to be innovated.  There were some big structural changes within Ofcom, which really made sure that they’re more innovative proposals made it into the  production pipeline of Ofcom.”

Mischa is continuing his relationship with Ofcom after moving to Silicon Valley. He adds: “I think that is a really important role and I hope I can make further contributions to the wellbeing of the UK and globally, because Ofcom is really visible.  I would argue it’s number 2, number 1 is the FCC, the US equivalent.  Ofcom has been doing things which FCC hasn’t been doing and the other way around, so, it is a very innovative, forward-thinking body, which we need to understand is  constrained by a lot of legal things. They are doing the best they can do to really outreach and absorb intellectual firepower from the community.”

As an entrepreneur, Mischa has launched five companies, mostly business to business (B2B) companies, however, his first business direct to consumer (B2C) company is Moving Beans. He says: “The consumer side always fascinated me and I wanted to get this experience.”

The idea for Moving Beans came when Mischa, his wife Gemma, and a friend, Dan, were drinking Nespresso coffee in the garden one day and realised the scale of the environmental impact of disposing of the aluminium and/or plastic coffee pods.

He adds: “When we looked at the numbers, we were horrified. In the UK alone, every year, at that point, there were more than a billion aluminium capsules thrown into the landfill. They decompose over 500 hundred years.”

The three combined their expertise to find a solution. He adds: “We started to test the waters with the market. First we imported some stuff from Italy to see if there is a product-market fit, if people actually would buy this compostable or biodegradable material. We realised there is. Then we started to develop our own material. We are currently in the process of that, we’ve patented this, we’ve got investment. Gemma, is the Chief Executive, Dan is the CTO.  It’s really growing very quickly and we hope we are really going to make a huge environmental impact.”

The company aims to deliver top quality coffee delivered in pods that are environmentally friendly, at affordable prices.  Mischa adds: “That was our company mission and I think we have achieved that. We are a very economically competitive solution which works really well.  We’ve expanded into Australia and Hong Kong and now we are expanding into Germany and Europe. Once we’ve settled in and we get all the permissions, we’re looking to expand to the United States nationally. Gemma will hopefully be taking over that ambition, it will make a really big change hopefully.”

SiriusInsight.AI is another company which Mischa co-founded with Malcolm Glaister, the current CEO, in 2017. Prior to stepping down due to his position with Ericsson, Mischa was CTO. The company provides AI solutions for marine surveillance. The parent company is Sirius Constellation Ltd.

Mischa says; “We realised there is a real opportunity to use artificial intelligence plus situational awareness to give a real-time situational advantage to industry and government. That is where I got really fascinated because I’ve done B2B and at that point, I was starting B2C, but I hadn’t done business to government (B2G). It is a very different sale cycle and sales approach.  We co-founded the company with David Willetts, who was our science minister for a number of years. He helped us a lot to formulate the government proposition.

“The idea was to take commoditised satellite images, which would come from Airbus and all these satellite constellations, fuse that with on the ground radar and other visual images, run AI on top and start building situational awareness, which could be very good for national security for maritime wellbeing to check essentially whether any sanctions have been broken in the waters around the world.”

The company also sells its services to maritime insurance companies.

In 2021, Mischa was appointed Chief Architect at Ericsson in Silicon Valley. He says of his role: “I’m trying to contribute to Ericsson by helping on the internet architecture; how do you put things together so the different constituents in which we are world-class work all together so that we can maintain our market leadership position and grow even further.”

Mischa is also hoping to help Ericsson convey the benefits of technology to society. He adds: “As engineers, we are very good at talking about features; megabytes per second, 10 milliseconds latency, edge cloud, slicing, etc.  So, for us to learn, we need to go into the shoes of the customer and start to speak their language and really convey our world-class portfolio and leadership through a different messaging; that is what I’m hoping to really help to contribute here in Silicon Valley.”

Having always been fascinated by the internet and been witness to, and involved with, its evolution, in 2014/15, Mischa began to wonder what is the next internet.

He says: “I realised that we haven’t done enough for us humans. I thought let’s build an internet which would democratise skills the very same way as the previous internet has democratised information.” Mischa’s thinking led him to wondering how we could use the internet to allow us to remotely touch things, to perhaps play the piano or move things etc.

He continues: “It sounds like a completely crazy idea but if you told a person in 2010 that they wouldn’t need a DVD anymore, and would watch Netflix on their mobile phone, they would have said, you are crazy, but it has happened and we have predicted that.

“So, I went on the quest to build an internet which allows us to transmit touch and muscle movement through the internet and 5G, but we needed more, we needed robotics, haptic devices, and gloves.  We needed standards, very important, we needed the Mpegs for touch and for muscle. We had it for music and video but we don’t have it for these ones, so, I co-founded a standards initiative to do exactly this.

“Then we needed artificial intelligence to do a lot of prediction to make sure we are able to beat the speed of light, putting pieces of puzzles together.” In addition, Mischa spoke with a pioneer in robotic surgery to ask if how they could apply the notion of the Internet of Skills to his world so that they could operate remotely on patients on the opposite side of the world, for example.

Mischa adds: “We pioneered this whole notion of 5G robotics and started to give the industry an inspiration of what could be done with this technology.” Mischa’s ambition is that by 2030, individuals will be able to teach anyone in the world a new through touch and muscle movement rather than just video.

In 2020, Mischa gave an interview in which he said that 5G is both boring as well as super-exciting. He says of 6G: “It’s probably the same.  Our industry is both boring as well as very exciting. If you look at how 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, and 6G will develop and has been developing, it always follows a fairly linear trend in logarithmic scale, we are always improving something by a factor of 10 or by a factor of 100.  That is what I mean with the boring thing because we know what will be there, we still don’t know why, we don’t know how, but we know it will be there.

“The exciting thing is what you can do with that. 5G had two very exciting developments, one is an internal development in that in 4G everything was done in boxes, and we called this monolithic code. … In 5G, everything works in small software functions, so it’s much more nimble.  We have essentially enabled innovation within 5G which will be consolidated in 6G. We will be seeing many more smaller companies appearing and larger companies accelerating innovation. This is really exciting within the 5G moment.

“The other thing we included with 5G is lower latency which provides that feeling of immediacy. It is important because our human brain is really geared to a very low latency engagement. We get emotional stimulus from people in the room. The reason is because anything that arrives in our cortex within 10 to 20 milliseconds, stimulates that feeling of immediacy.  If you bundle this with full immersion, maybe with some AR or VR, and suddenly you can reproduce physical environments.  I call this synchronised realities, we are literally synchronising our own realities. It doesn’t happen with Zoom and Teams and that was one of the shortfalls of the pandemic, whilst the IT world has provided productivity around the world, we were able to continue working, we lost that emotional bond. 5G allows us to do that.

“Every generation, we consolidate what we have done before, so 6G will do things better than 5G, it will also allow us to design completely new services.  People talk about augmented reality, we can’t really do this in 5G really well, we can only do that in 6G.  My personal opinion is that 6G will probably also empower a lot of machines, AI etc and we will have a lot of new traffic from machines going through the networks.”

To demonstrate the power of 5G, as a pianist and composer Mischa, together with his daughter, Noa, performed the first 5G distributed concert on the 22^nd of June 2018. Mischa flew to Berlin to play a piano under the Brandenburger Tor while his daughter sang at the Guild Hall in London.  The idea was to not only demonstrate 5G but also give technology a soul. He continues: “As engineers, we need to learn more on how to give technology a soul and literally embed it into something which society understands.  This event was really the brainchild of Ali Hossaini, a world well-known artist himself.”

He adds: “Ericsson was really very instrumental in this and this is probably also the reason I’m here because we started to develop a very close relationship at that time.  My team built all the wrap-around this; the software, the new codecs.

“The challenge was to get the words and music in synchronicity, this immediacy was so important and if you look at the video is on YouTube the synchronicity is phenomenal; we are 1,000 kilometres apart, different geographies and we are connected as if we are in the same room.  Noa is adapting in real-time to the pitch of the piano, and me to her singing speed.  My head is down because tears of emotion were coming out whilst I was playing with my own daughter there. It was fascinating, we wanted to show the world the power of 5G. 5G now is in many countries, we can do this today, musicians can practice around the world without needing to hire very specific fibre.  We really started this low latency music distributed technology concept.”

In his efforts to “breach the sciences and technology with art”, as he describes it, Mischa has also appeared in a number of films, including Macallan Distil your World London.

He explains: “I’m really bringing this together, in a way, which isn’t just let’s use one for the other, I’m really pushing the boundary of both. We worked with the National Theatre or the Young Vic, with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. The question I pose is how can we use this 5G technology to revolutionise the medium where art is being created?  I argue that the arts industry is very, very creative but not very innovative and the tech industry is very innovative but not very creative. The renaissance movement I started is an attempt to bring them together, to challenge them.”

The challenge that Mischa gave the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Young Vic with the National Theatre was to innovate on the medium which is their stage, such as to connect two or three stages in low latency. He adds: “We did it, we did a trial in the Young Vic and we used Shakespeare’s Midsomer Night Dream and it was horrible; the best actors, best directors in the world couldn’t make it work, because Shakespeare wrote it for a single stage.” After the trial, they hired a talented writer to create a specific piece which could be adapted to the new environment facilitated by technology. The play worked and pushed the boundaries of the technologies.

Mischa was also introduced to Robert Del Naja and Andrew Melcher of Massive Attack after they saw the work on low latency immediacy and 5G capabilities. Mischa and Andrew, who is CTO of Massive Attack, and an artist, have formed a good friendship and have since experimented with the concept of how to advance art in general. Mischa explains: “We looked at the notion of using robots to help him co-paint using artificial intelligence.”

At the end of every year, Mischa says that he asks himself if he has grown and made a substantial contribution. If not, he changes things. He says: “I really would like to be a positive impact on our community globally, that is something I really learned to do over these years. The other thing I learned or picked up on the way is to be kind.  Everybody is busy, everybody has an endless amount of problems, whether this is somebody cleaning the premises, or somebody doing research, somebody being the chief executive. They have 24 hours, it’s full of troubleshooting, firefighting, and problems, so therefore being kind to each other is very important. I’ve tried really to stick to this for all these years, no matter what. That kindness is something I think we need to see more in this fairly difficult world that we are in at the moment.  These are two things which shape me and shape me most.”

“My proudest achievements are probably my daughters and being so happily married to my wife for so many years.”

From a tech point of view, Mischa explains about a landmark concert/keynote he gave in front of 4,000 people in Los Angeles to launch his fifth album and demonstrate a haptic glove, all despite having had very bad stage fright since a young age. To add to his pressure, he only received the haptic glove the day before and realised that it did not fit between the black notes on the piano and had to recompose the piece on his plane trip down to LA.

He says: “It was  a really pivotal moment in my life and I am very proud of this moment because not only did I do this brilliant tech keynote which showed the world what the Internet of Skills can do, but I jumped out of my own comfort zone and performed in front of 4,000 people. That is my proudest moment by far.”

I would probably redo everything I’ve done, to be honest. … I have literally no regrets. I’m a person that always looks forward and I am quite, quite happy with how we are and I’m very happy and proud that we managed to make it into Silicon Valley and be now in an environment where things really scale.”

Offering career advice, Mischa says: “I don’t like to give advice on a specific subject area. What we need to learn more is the ability to adapt because we are getting into an era where we are changing jobs and identity very quickly.”

Mischa points to the changing nature of careers from the days where people worked in the same company for years before retiring, to the modern day, where it is accepted that people change roles on a regular basis. He adds: “The ability to change and adapt is very important and we should teach more of that at school and university so that soft skill is so important. Flexibility is very important too, so that you can accept that changes will always be there and to be able to upskill yourself.

“The other thing I tell people is that every time you grow, you change job or get a promotion, make sure that two things happen.  The first thing is, of course, more financial remuneration, but you should also work less.  It sounds very counterintuitive, but it is very important. It doesn’t mean that you have less responsibility, you may have more responsibility and more accountability, but you should work less. Otherwise, if you look in the future where people will change jobs every few months, you’re going to end up in the grave at the age of 40 because you have overworked yourself. Therefore, pay attention to this.  If you get a promotion, more money, less work, you want to humanise your work, make time for your life.”

Interviewed by Elisabetta Mori

Transcribed by TP Transcription

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley