Erkki Oja: Aalto Distinguished Professor

Erkki Oja has been appointed as an Aalto Distinguished Professor from the 1st of August 2013. Professor Oja's successful research in the areas of pattern recognition, computer vision, neural networks and machine learning has been recognized widely. In the early 1980s, his PhD research on Subspace Methods of Pattern Recognition was widely adopted and one specific result of this work is called Oja's rule. With Aapo Hyvärinen and Juha Karhunen, Erkki Oja has co-authored a highly influential text book on Independent Component Analysis.

In addition to his scientific merits, Professor Oja is known for his excellent organizational skills. He has been the director of one of the Academy of Finland’s Centres of Excellence since 2000 and held numerous responsible positions in various scientific bodies serving, for instance, as a Founding Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition, the Chairman of the European Neural Network Society between 2000 and 2005, and the Chairman of the Academy of Finland’s Research Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering between 2007 and 2012.

Oja's appointment was today celebrated at the Department of information and computer science, Aalto University School of Science. The department has been ranked to be among the top research units in the world in the area of machine learning and pattern recognition.

Department head Pekka Orponen (on the right) congratulating Professor Erkki Oja