Teemu Roos

Professor of Computer Science

Coleader of the Complex Systems Computation (CoSCo) research group

Leader of the AI Education program in the Finnish Center for AI

Department of Computer Science and
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT
Exactum building, A322
PO Box 68
FI-00014 University of Helsinki
Finland


photo: Maarit Kytöharju
 
contact: teemu.roos@helsinki.fi CV (pdf)   troos   teemu-roos
My Profile on the University Research Portal (projects, awards, publications)

What's up?

Tiedeykkönen: "Tekoäly perustuu todennäköisyyslaskentaan ja muokkaa itse itseään" (in Finnish)

Listen on Yle Areena (49 min) Host: Mari Heikkilä

SAS Pondering AI Podcast: "AI Education for All"

Listen on Pondering AI Podcast (29 min) Host: Kimberly Nevala

OECD Podcast: "Why everyone in Finland's teaching themselves AI."

Listen on Soundcloud (14 min) Host: Clara Young

NEW: Want to understand AI? Join more than 1 200 000 other students in our free on-line courses created together with MinnaLearn. No maths or programming required. Start learning at Elements of AI.

"Tekoälyn lukutaito" ("AI Literacy"; in Finnish), pääkirjoitus, Tieteessä tapahtuu 36(1), 2018:

Tavoitteena ei ole kouluttaa koko kansasta tekoälykoodareita. Sen sijaan perusteiden avulla saavutetaan kyky osallistua tekoälyyn liittyvään yhteiskunnalliseen keskusteluun ja arvioida kriittisesti esitettyjä väitteitä – "tekoälyn lukutaito". (Teemu Roos)
The aim is not to train the entire population as AI developers. Instead, knowing the basics enables one to engage in the public discourse on AI and to critically evaluate arguments about it – "AI literacy". (Teemu Roos)

Selected conference and workshop involvement (program committee or equivalent):
AISTATS-2011/2014/2015/2022
ICML-2018/2019/2020/2021/2022/2024
IJCAI-2013/2015/2018
NeurIPS-2014/2015/2016/2017/2018/2019/2020/2021/2022/2023
UAI-2008/2009/2010/2011/2012/2013/2014/2015/2016/2017/2018/2019/2020/2021/2022/2023.

Teaching

I teach the following courses:

Past students:

  • Ville Hyvönen (PhD 2023)
  • Fanni Franssila (MSc 2023)
  • Daniel Holmberg (MSc 2021)
  • Janne Leppä-aho (PhD 2020)
  • Ioanna Bouri (MSc 2019)
  • Ilse Tse (MSc 2019)
  • Juho Lamminmäki (MSc 2019)
  • Biyun Huang (MSc 2018)
  • Carlos Santana Vega (MSc 2018)
  • Sean Lang (MSc 2018)
  • Sebastian Falk (MSc 2017)
  • Joe Niemi (MSc 2017)
  • Elias Jääsaari (MSc 2017)
  • Tommi Jalkanen (MSc 2017) co-supervised with Dr Jutta Jokiranta (Theology)
  • Laura Uusitalo (MSc 2017)
  • Elaine Zosa (MSc 2017)
  • Yuan Zou (PhD 2017)
  • Teemu Pitkänen (MSc 2016)
  • Jussi Määttä (PhD 2016)
  • Antti Takalahti (MSc 2016) co-supervised with Prof Edward Haeggström (Physics)
  • Risto Tuomainen (MSc 2016)
  • Simo Linkola (MSc 2016)
  • Kaj Sotala (MSc 2015)
  • Quan Nguyen (MSc 2015)
  • Peter Hedman (MSc 2015), co-supervised with Prof Jaakko Lehtinen (Aalto/NVIDIA)
    Acad. Assoc. for Maths and Natural Sciences (MAL) MSc Thesis Award
  • Arttu Modig (MSc 2014), co-supervised with Prof Jouko Lampinen (Aalto)
  • Janne Leppä-aho (MSc 2014), co-supervised with Prof Jukka Corander
  • Henning Lübbers (MSc 2012), co-supervised with Prof Jyrki Kivinen
  • Anupam Arohi (MSc 2011)
  • Yuan Zou (MSc 2011)
  • Teemu Pulkkinen (MSc 2011)
  • Toni Merivuori (MSc 2009)
  • Lari Latvala (MSc 2009), co-supervised with Prof Jouko Laasasenaho

Students interested in MSc/PhD thesis topics related to information theory, statistical modeling, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and digital humanities are welcome to contact me by e-mail (but see disclaimer below).

Disclaimer: If you currently not enrolled at the University of Helsinki, please do not send me e-mail, but contact the Department of Computer Science for information about the application process. Unfortunately I cannot reply to all e-mail inquiries.

Research

I am a coleader of the Complex Systems Computation (CoSCo) research group together with Petri Myllymäki. I'm also affiliated with the Finnish Center for AI (FCAI).

My team consists of (see the research group pages for more info):

  • Fanni Franssila (doctoral resarcher; 1st year)
  • Daniel Holmberg (doctoral resarcher; 2nd year)
  • Ioanna Bouri (doctoral resarcher; 5th year)
  • Tarja Pietarinen (postdoc)

Topics of my interest include

  • machine learning
  • probabilistic graphical models
  • information theory
  • applications in physics, neuroscience, medicine, and humanities
  • AI education

Recent and ongoing work:

  1. V. Hyvönen, E. Jääsaari, T. Roos (2024). A multilabel classification framework for approximate nearest neighbor search, JMLR 25(46):1–51

  2. E. Roos, S. Heikkinen; K. Seppä, O. Pietiläinen, H. Ryynänen, M. Laaksonen, T. Roos, P. Knekt, S. Männistö, T. Härkönen, P. Jousilahti, S. Koskinen, J.G. Eriksson, N. Malila, O. Rahkonen, J. Pitkäniemi (2024). Pairwise association of key lifestyle factors and risk of solid cancers – A prospective pooled multi-cohort register study, Preventive Medicine Reports 2024 Jan 12;38:102607.

  3. I. Bouri, F. Franssila, M.J. Alho, G. Cozzani, I. Zaitsev, M. Palmroth, and T. Roos (2023). Graph representation of the magnetic field topology in high-fidelity plasma simulations for machine learning applications, 2nd ICML Workshop on Machine Learning for Astrophysics

Selected publications (full list, Google Scholar):

  1. V. Hyvönen, E. Jääsaari, T. Roos (2022). A multilabel classification framework for approximate nearest neighbor search, NeurIPS-2022

  2. P. Grünwald and T. Roos (2019). Minimum description length revisited, Int. J. Mathematics for Industry 11(1):19300001

  3. E. Jääsaari, J. Leppä-aho, T. Silander and T. Roos (2018). Minimax optimal Bayes mixtures for memoryless sources over large alphabets, in Proc. Int. Conf. on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT 2018)

  4. A. Barron, T. Roos, and K. Watanabe, (2014). Bayesian properties of normalized maximum likelihood and its fast computation, in Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT-2014), IEEE Press, pp. 1667–1671.

Past Events

I have held visiting positions at CWI Amsterdam (2003 & 2005), UC Berkeley (2008, 2015), MIT (2010), University of Cambridge (2012), and the Finnish Institute in Rome (2013).

My traveling/conference schedule in 2020:

  1. 🇧🇪 European Parliament, Elements of AI Exhibition, Brussels, February 4–5, 2020
  2. 🇺🇸 AAAS Annual Meeting, Seattle, February 10–15, 2020
  3. 🇬🇧(online) Embedding AI into Teaching Curriculums, All Party Parliamentary Group on AI, London, March 23, 2020

My traveling/conference schedule in 2019:

  1. 🇸🇪 AI Innovation of Sweden, Official Opening, Gothenburg, Sweden, February 6, 2019.
  2. 🇳🇴 ICDE-2019 Lifelong Learning Summit, Keynote on "AI Education for All: the Finnish Way", Lillehammer, Norway, February 11–13, 2019
  3. 🇫🇷 Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Development, Keynote at the Policy Forum, UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, March 5, 2019
  4. 🇬🇧 Studia Stemmatologica VIII, University of Cambridge, April 4–5, 2019
  5. 🇬🇧 CogX, London, June 10–12, 2019
  6. 🇳🇴 Big Challenge, Trondheim, Norway, June 16–19, 2019
  7. 🇳🇱 World Summit AI, Amsterdam, October 9–10, 2019
  8. 🇪🇸 Club de Madrid: Digital Transformation and the Future of Democracy, Madrid, October 21–22, 2019
  9. 🇬🇧 Think Talks, the Finnish Institute in London, October 23–24, 2019
  10. 🇩🇪 The Finnish Institute in Germany, Berlin, October 31–November 1, 2019
  11. 🇫🇮 Slush, November 21–22, 2019
  12. 🇫🇮 EU High-Level Conference on Data Economy, November 25–26, 2019
  13. 🇺🇸 Fantastic Futures, Stanford, December 4–6, 2019

I hosted the Machine Learning Coffee Seminar together with Sami Kaski and H. Afrabandpey in 2017–2018.

Janne Leppä-aho received the best student paper honorable mention at PGM-2018 with the paper 'Learning non-parametric Markov networks with mutual information'.

Our joint proposal with M-Brain was accepted by Business Finland and we joined the NSF Industry–University Cooperative Research Center on Visual & Decision Informatics in 2018.

My traveling/conference schedule in 2018:

6/2017: The Academy of Finland has awarded two new grants to our research group. TensorML project (4 years) will study non-standard machine learning problems with applications in drug design, and MachQu project (2 years) will apply probabilistic machine learning to quantum-mechanics based material design.

4/2017: Our joint proposal with Prof. Pulkit Grover (CMU) on ''Efficient and Robust Cognitive IoT Systems using Unreliable Sensors'' is funded by the Academy of Finland and NSF.

My traveling/conference schedule in 2017:

We are organized the 10th Workshop on Information Theoretic Methods in Science and Engineering in Paris, September 11–13, 2017. WITMSE-2017

As of 1/2017, I've been appointed as an Associate Professor (tenure-track) at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki.

The 9th Workshop on Information Theoretic Methods in Science and Engineering (WITMSE) was held in Helsinki on 19–21 September 2016. web page.

My traveling/conference schedule in 2016:

Between September 21–November 30, 2015, I was a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley, USC and UCSD.

Workshop on Advances in High Dimensional Big Data in association with the IEEE Big Data 2015 conference; co-chairs Tasoulis, Roos & Corander. call for papers (due August 30)

The 8th Workshop on Information Theoretic Methods in Science and Engineering (WITMSE) was held in Copenhagen on 24–26 June 2015; co-chairs Harremoës, Forchhammer, Roos & Myllymäki. web page.

My traveling/conference schedule in 2015:

I was a member of the organizing committee of the 11th Conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (ESTS-2014). The conference was held in Helsinki on Oct 30-Nov 1, 2014.

We organized the 7th Workshop on Information Theoretic Methods in Science and Engineering (WITMSE) in Hawaii on July 5-8, 2014, right after the ISIT symposium. website

In October–December 2013, I was a Fellow at the Finnish Institute in Rome (Villa Lante).

Associated with our CHI-2013 paper, we are lauching a web server for computing the information capacity from your own motion capture data: infocapacity.hiit.fi. Please ask for a beta testing account.

I have been appointed from 4/2013 onwards as an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki.

My traveling/conference schedule in 2014:

I was a co-chair of WITMSE-2013 in Tokyo, Japan, August 26–29.

My traveling/conference schedule in 2013:

Our paper "Information capacity of full-body movements" gets a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at CHI-2013. If you are planning to attend the conference, please visit our fun interactive Kinect-based demo!

Special issue on selected papers from PGM-2010 in the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning (editors Roos, Myllymäki, Jaakkola): link to editorial and articles.

I served as a member of the Senior Program Committee of UAI-2012 and an Area Chair at ECML-PKDD 2012.

In January–April 2012, I was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

I was an external evaluator at the PhD thesis defense of Thomas Toftkjær at Aarhus University on January 10, 2012.

My traveling/conference schedule in 2012:

The Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence COIN starts in 1/2012.

We organized the 4th Workshop on Information Theoretic Methods in Science and Engineering in Helsinki, on August 7–10, 2011, right after ISIT 2011. web pages

The 5th Brazilian Conference on Statistical Modelling in Insurance and Finance was held in Maresias, Brazil, on April 10–15, 2011. I gave a two-day short course on MDL. lecture notes | slides (day1) | slides (day2)

Tuomas Heikkilä, Petri Myllymäki and I organize a series of stemmatology workshops in Helsinki and elsewhere in 2010–2012. web pages

Cambridge, UK, March 2011.
My traveling/conference schedule in 2011:

4/2011: I was conferred the title Adjunct Professor (in Finnish, dosentti) by the Faculty of Science, and appointed as a senior reseacher at HIIT.

I was invited to the senior program committee of UAI-2011.

The Academy of Finland has graciously decided to fund me under a postdoctoral researcher's project.

Petri Myllymäki, Tommi Jaakkola, and I were the program committee co-chairs of the 5th European Workshop on Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGM-2010) in Helsinki, September 13–15, 2010. web pages

In February–April 2010, I visited Prof. Tommi Jaakkola's group at MIT, Boston.

My traveling schedule in 2010:

I got the ERCIM (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics) 2009 Cor Baayen Award.

Pisa, November 2009.
My traveling schedule in 2009 (a lot of ITs!):

In Fall 2009, I lectured the new course Information-Theoretic Modeling (4 cr) and Information-Theoretic Modeling Project (2 cr).

The University of Helsinki has granted funding to project STAM (Algorithmic Methods in Stemmatology) for the years 2009–2011. project website | "Computer programs can do wonders"

The Finnish Cultural Foundation has awarded a Science Workshop grant (EUR 200,000) on stemmatology for the years 2009–2010. announcement (w/ fanfares) (in Finnish)

As of August 2008, I have been appointed as post-doctoral researcher at HIIT for three years.

Berkeley, April 2008.
In January–April 2008, I visited UC Berkeley (Prof. Bin Yu's group) and ICSI.

During the Fall term 2007 I lectured the Three Concepts: Information course.

I defended my Ph.D. thesis "Statistical and Information-Theoretic Methods for Data Analysis" on June 9, 2007. The opponent was Prof. Alon Orlitsky (UCSD). Pre-examiners were Prof. Ioan Tabus (Tampere UT) and Prof. Tommi Jaakkola (MIT). electronic version (summary part).

I received a Ph.D. degree (in Computer Science) from the University of Helsinki in 2007. I was supported by HeCSE (Helsinki Graduate School in Computer Science and Engineering). My supervisors were Prof. Henry Tirri (on industrial leave), and Prof. Petri Myllymäki. In addition to computer science I have minors in mathematics and philosophy (see a list of finished courses).

Earlier, I have done some work on mobile device positioning. For scientific publications, see list of publications. For working products, go to Ekahau.

Reason

I am married to the loveliest girl in the world, the light of my life. ''You are the reason I am. You are all my reasons.''

Since July 31st 2003, the universe revolves around a boy. Since March 1st 2007, we have two boys!

Other

Play a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors: rock beats scissors, paper beats rock, and scissors beat paper. Even such a simple game offers some theoretically interesting problems: Can one predict the other player's choice? What is the best strategy against a good opponent? (Yes, the computer could cheat, but I promise it doesn't.) Such questions were considered by Claude Shannon in the 1950s; see a modern variation of his 'Mind-Reading Machine' based on data-compression (CTW).

Choose one: Your choice: My choice: You Me Draw

Last updated on February 17, 2024