Traded mine automation for tomorrow's defence technology: "I like big, unclear problems"
Advanced technology is not developed in a vacuum. It is shaped by people who thrive on solving problems that others barely know how to approach. Kristin Nielsen is one of them, with curiosity, technical rigour and a drive to make sense of complex systems, she is now helping build safer societies at Saab.
That Kristin Nielsen would end up in the defence industry was far from given. She grew up in Karlskoga, where Saab has had a presence since 2000, having acquired Alfred Nobel's Bofors.
"Saab has always been there in the background growing up. But I always felt I didn't want to work in the defence industry. Then the war in Ukraine happened, and I had to reconsider. I feel there is a need for a Swedish defence industry, and that I actually want to contribute to it," she says.
Kristin has a master’s in engineering physics and holds a PhD from WASP (Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program). During her PhD studies she worked in the mining sector, researching positioning and navigation solutions for underground environments where GPS signals can't reach.
"It wasn't really about a passion for the subject. I wanted to see how far I could push myself academically to test my limits."
A PhD meant a deep and narrow technical specialization. Eventually, Kristin found herself somewhere no one else had been before, and from there, she had to chart the course herself.
"What I really took away from my PhD was that you can't sit around waiting for someone else to solve things for you. If you want something to happen, you make it happen."
"We're working on tomorrow's technology"
Kristin is now a systems engineer at business area Dynamics, where she develops and tests future autonomy and navigation technologies through simulation and algorithm development.
"We're dealing with genuinely complex, future technology. An important part of my job is working with robust navigation systems for environments where GPS is jammed or nonfunctional. That's a pressing issue today, not just for the military, but for civilian life too. Saab is stepping up here, developing resilient systems not depending on a single source, but on multiple sensors with alternative ways of processing data.
She describes autonomy as the next generation of systems, ones where autonomous units can work together, interpret complex missions and act with real independence, rather than simply carrying out preset instructions.
"Missiles and other systems are already autonomous in many respects. What we're looking at now is the next step: systems that can collaborate and take on missions in a far more complex environment. The idea is to be able to hand an autonomous system a task much the way a commanding officer would brief a person," she explains.
A hub for collaboration between academia and industry
Saab is growing fast, and knowledge-sharing, both among colleagues and with academic partners, is central to that growth. It's a thread that runs through Kristin's everyday work too, where she among other things supervises student theses.
"There's a lot of collaborations with universities here. You can feel that this is a place operating at a genuinely advanced technical level. If that's the kind of work, you want to be doing and helping to shape – this is a great place to be."
For her, the appeal lies precisely in the complexity.
"I think some people would find an open-ended, undefined problem a nightmare. For me, that's exactly what makes the job fun. The best part of my work is taking on large, difficult, rather vague problems and breaking them down until they can actually be solved in code."
As mentioned before, advanced technology doesn't emerge from nowhere. It's shaped by the people building it. And that takes close, knowledge-rich collaboration.
"There's an extraordinary amount of expertise among the people who've been in this industry a long time. At Saab, we're building teams where that knowledge gets passed on to newer colleagues. I really believe in teamwork as a way of spreading expertise, letting the person whose second-best take on a task, supervised by the person who's best," Kristin concludes.
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