I shall start with a question: “Is there still snow in Oulu?”. To this one I happen to know the answer.
Most of my last year was spent in studying methods for finding communities in social networks. Although interesting, writing the thesis was quite a job, since I wasn’t familiar with the area of study.
This is why I was flattered to receive an award for “The Best Pattern Recognition Master’s Thesis in Finland in 2007″ by the Pattern Recognition Society of Finland. The only challenge was that to get the award, I had to travel to Oulu, a city up north where I had never been before.
Despite my prejudices, the people I met in Oulu were friendly and it was fascinating to hear about the research they do on pattern recognition, machine learning and robotics. They had a lot of co-operation with industry partners, such as Nokia, in implementing intelligent mobile solutions and building robot cars.
The presentations by the other award receivers provided a wide scope into the different disciplines combining intelligence with data analysis. The other award receivers were Esa Rahtu (Doctoral thesis), Mathias Creutz (Doctoral thesis), and Kimmo Palander (Master’s thesis).
Rahtu spoke about methods for aligning images and Creutz gave an presentation on methods for finding the structure in written text automatically. Palander spoke about methods for aligning microscope images for 3d modeling. Quite exciting, indeed!
Finally, to answer the question, no, sadly there wasn’t any snow left in Oulu! Oh well, maybe next time.


