Simo Hostikka
Professor at Aalto University
Helsinki, Finland
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolSimo Hostikka is a Professor of Fire Safety Engineering at Aalto University with 19 years of experience developing computational methods for numerical fire simulation and quantitative fire risk analysis. He combines deep expertise in CFD, radiative heat transfer, pyrolysis modeling and probabilistic simulation—having developed the Probabilistic Fire Simulator—for both deterministic and stochastic analyses. His work spans academia and applied research, including leadership roles at VTT and a guest researcher stint at NIST contributing to FDS development. On GitHub he contributes backend improvements to widely used fire-modeling repositories, optimizing performance and extending pyrolysis and radiation models. Recently he has broadened his focus to material flame retardancy and human reliability in evacuation dynamics, reflecting an interdisciplinary turn toward psychology-informed safety. Based in Helsinki, he also brings an unusual side interest in sound, light and rhythms exemplified by his work for the Majakka church.
19 years of coding experience
28 years of employment as a software developer
DSc (Tech), Engineering Physics and Mathematics, DSc (Tech), Engineering Physics and Mathematics at Teknillinen korkeakoulu-Tekniska högskolan
Github Skills (13)
simulations10
simulation10
computational-fluid-dynamics10
fluid-dynamics10
fortran10
optimization9
performance-optimization9
optmization9
optimisation9
debug9
computational-physics9
debugging9
thermodynamics9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
firemodels/exp
May 2007 - Jun 2022
Fire Research Division Experimental Database
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:508 commits, 3 PRs, 1 push in 15 years 3 months
Contributions summary:The user, Simo, primarily focused on implementing and modifying features related to the pyrolysis model within the Fire Research Division Experimental Database. His contributions included adding functionalities for calculating boiling temperatures and heats of reaction for liquid fuels. He also refactored existing code, updating surface and material properties to align with the new pyrolysis calculations. Furthermore, he was responsible for cleaning up code and fixing bugs related to these features.
divisionfiredatabase
firemodels/out
Jun 2007 - Jun 2022
Model Validation Output
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:509 commits, 16 PRs, 9 pushes in 15 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Simo appears to be primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and performance of the fire model software. Their contributions include adding new features, such as the "SOLID_PHASE_ONLY" feature for faster simulations, and addressing bug fixes, such as improving the accuracy of the "SURFACE DENSITY" output. The user also made modifications to the code related to the radiation model, including updates to the formulas. The user seems to be involved in optimizing code for faster execution times.
model-validationvalidation
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