Meet our PhD‑student Teklay Gebremichael

Teklay Gebremichael has a bachelor degree in information technology from Mekelle Institute of Technology, Ethiopia and studied his Master's Degree at the University of Trento, Italy, in computer science with a specialization in Internet Technologies and security. After graduation, he worked at the same university for about two years in the department of security and privacy, during which he focused on mobile applications security. Today, Teklay is a PhD-student at STC and he is currently working in the research project SMART.

What are you working with in SMART right now?

My current research area is security of Internet of Things (IoT). Specifically, I focus on developing cryptographic (group) key establishment schemes in the context of IoT. The research challenge consists in designing efficient key establishment algorithms (with regard to computational complexity, memory footprint and power consumption) that are convenient for low computation-power and small storage capacity IoT devices. I'm at the early stages of my PhD studies and therefore my work so far has been mainly literature and theoretical study.

Do you have any role model in the technology industry?

Elon Musk (founder of SpaceX and co-founder of Zip2, Paypal and Tesla Motors) inspires me a lot. He engages in big problems - problems that face humanity in general- and proposes seemingly sci-fi looking solutions. He thinks outside the box and inspires many people, including myself. He's always at the frontier of R&D.

What is typical Swedish agreeing to you?

I must say "fika" and potatoes. Everywhere I go they serve potatoes! Another typical Swedish thing, and a good thing, is your work with gender equality. To you swedes, this may be something you take for granted, but it is a big lesson for some one coming from a clearly patriarchal society like me.

What smart thing that could improve the world is not yet developed?

Maybe some artificial intelligence that reliably makes decisions on big issues like climate change, moral judgement of what constitutes wrong and right. That would help us avoid the subjectivity inherent to humans that seem to hold us back sometimes. We would not have climate change deniers for example!

What are you doing in 10 years?

I like what I am doing now, so in ten years I think I'll still be doing research within network and information security.