Archive

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.

The upstairs of Grand Café in the center of Barcelona offered a warm atmosphere for Mobile Monday’s gathering. Very untypical for the Mobile World Congress glamorous experiences, this networking dinner was low key, more like a traditional southern wedding. Participants, obvious for Barcelona during the MWC, came from all around the world and the bunch consisted of MoMo chamber members, start ups, large corporations, industry analysts, VCs as well as officials, all having one thing in common – passion and appreciation for social networks between peers.

Dr. Juha Vesanto from Xtract held a guest lecture at Helsinki University of Technology about the data analytics process and how to turn data into solutions to business problems. Other guest lectures were Jyrki Alakuijala from Google.