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TUCS Distinguished Lecture
Thursday, May 15, 2014 at 13.15
ICT Building, Auditorium Gamma
Coffee served from 12:45
Click here for the video on Youtube.
Teuvo Kohonen, Aalto University, Finland: "Data Management by Self-Organizing Maps"
Host: Barbro Back, Åbo Akademi University
Abstract: The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is an automatic data-mining and visualization method that has been used in many fields of science and technology, from bioinformatics to document analysis and linguistics, and from finance to industry. The number of scientific papers written on it is over 10,000, and 800 articles are being published yearly. In this presentation I am trying to explain its fundamental principles in nonmathematical terms, and to review some of the most important applications.
Biography: Professor Teuvo Kohonen, Academician since 2000, started as a physicist. After his appointment to Associate Professor in 1963 and Full Professor in 1965 in Helsinki University of Technology, he was the first in Finland to launch regular Computer Engineering curricula. His first book is on digital circuits and systems. However, he soon found his own area in big-data analysis. First he pursued studies of distributed and adaptive associative memories and pattern recognition, including speech recognition. Professor Kohonen played central roles in international scientific societies, and he published several books on his research. His breakthrough idea in 1981-82 was the Self-Organizing Map (SOM), which belongs to clustering and nonlinearly projecting methods, and on which over 10,000 full scientific publications and over 20 books have been written all over the world. The SOM has been used for data analysis in diverse scientific and engineering fields, and it has had applications, e.g., in the analysis of industrial processes and macroeconomic systems, and in finance, trading economics, text analysis, document search, linguistics, and criminology. Numerous SOM software packages have been developed in various laboratories and businesses. A series of international biannual SOM Workshops has been held on four continents and continues since 1997. Professor Kohonen is recipient of numerous prizes and he is a multiple Honorary Doctor, also from Åbo Akademi.
The TUCS Distinguished Lecture Series is a forum for public lectures by outstanding national and international researchers in all aspects of computing, coming both from academia and industry. All lectures are free and open to the public.
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