Timo Untamo Honkela (August 4, 1962 – May 9, 2020) was a computer scientist at the

University of Helsinki The University of Helsinki ( fi, Helsingin yliopisto, sv, Helsingfors universitet, abbreviated UH) is a public research university located in Helsinki, Finland since 1829, but founded in the city of Turku (in Swedish ''Åbo'') in 1640 as the ...

Aalto University Aalto University ( fi, Aalto-yliopisto; sv, Aalto-universitetet) is a public research university located in Espoo, Finland. It was established in 2010 as a merger of three major Finnish universities: the Helsinki University of Technology, the H ...

School of Science The Medway School of Science is one of the schools of the University of Greenwich in South East England. The School of Science is based on the university's Medway campus in Chatham Maritime in the county of Kent. The School of Science has acti ...

and Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture. He holds a PhD from

Helsinki University of Technology Helsinki University of Technology (TKK; fi, Teknillinen korkeakoulu; sv, Tekniska högskolan) was a technical university in Finland. It was located in Otaniemi, Espoo in the metropolitan area of Greater Helsinki. The university was founded in ...

. From 2014 until 2018 he held a fixed-term professorship at the University of Helsinki. Before joining the University of Helsinki he worked as a non-tenured professor in two Schools of the

, The School of Art, Design and Architecture and the

. He has presented his thoughts on his studies and work in the joint blog ''375 Humanists''. Timo Honkela conducted research on several areas related to

knowledge engineering Knowledge engineering (KE) refers to all technical, scientific and social aspects involved in building, maintaining and using knowledge-based systems. Background Expert systems One of the first examples of an expert system was MYCIN, an appl ...

cognitive model A cognitive model is an approximation of one or more cognitive processes in humans or other animals for the purposes of comprehension and prediction. There are many types of cognitive models, and they can range from box-and-arrow diagrams to a set ...

ing and

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...

. Honkela was born in

Kalajoki Kalajoki (; literally translated the "fish river") is a coastal town and municipality of Finland. It is located in the immediate vicinity of the Gulf of Bothnia in the province of Oulu and is part of the Northern Ostrobothnia region. The town ha ...

. From 1998 to 2000 he worked as a professor in the

Aalto Media Lab Aalto Media Lab is a transdisciplinary laboratory focusing on digital art and design and its impact to culture and society. The Lab is part of the Department of Art and Media at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University in Fin ...

. To the media Lab Honkela brought his expertise in Kohonen

self-organising map A self-organizing map (SOM) or self-organizing feature map (SOFM) is an unsupervised machine learning technique used to produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional) representation of a higher dimensional data set while preserving the ...

(SOM) and worked closely with artist and designers around the topic. In 2001 Honkela collaborated with

George Legrady George Legrady (''Légrády György, Tamás, Antal, Tivadar'', born January 8, 1950) is a multidisciplinary digital media artist and university professor in photography and computational media arts. Early life and education Legrady was born in Bu ...

to produce an interactive museum installation, ''Pockets Full of Memories'' to the

Centre Georges Pompidou The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou ( en, National Georges Pompidou Centre of Art and Culture), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English, is a complex building in the Beaubourg area of ...

, National Museum of Modern Art in Paris. The concept, created by Legrady, provided for visitors a possibility to scan their own objects to a database and then organise them by Kohonen Self-Organizing Map algorithm. In 2017 Honkela published a book in Finnish. The book ''Rauhankone'' (English: ''Peace Machine'') presents his idea of designing artificial intelligence and machine learning to serve humanity, in practice to help people to live in peace with each other. He died in

Helsinki Helsinki ( or ; ; sv, Helsingfors, ) is the Capital city, capital, primate city, primate, and List of cities and towns in Finland, most populous city of Finland. Located on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, it is the seat of the region of U ...

Publications

* Timo Honkela, Wlodzislaw Duch, Mark Girolami and Samuel Kaski (editors): Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning, Springer, 2011. * Jorma Laaksonen and Timo Honkela (editors): Advances in Self-Organizing Maps, Springer, 2011. * Timo Honkela: Rauhankone. Gaudeamus, 2017.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Honkela, Timo 1962 births 2020 deaths Finnish computer scientists Artificial intelligence researchers Natural language processing researchers