Evimaria Terzi will be our first PhD on 2007

Evimaria Terzi defended her doctoral thesis, Problems and Algorithms for Sequence Segmentations, on 18 December, but she will not officially graduate until after the New Year.

Evimaria comes from Greece , but she made her Master of Science degree in Purdue University in the USA . She has worked on CS department from September 2002.

-I knew the data mining group here was good, and I knew Heikki Mannila by reputation.

Initially Evimaria chose computer science pretty much by chance.

-I dont think I was born to become a computer scientist. I think I have more of a sociologist's or a psychologist's temperament. It is quite a random choice when you are 18.

- Computer science is quite a good fit for me though.

Also the choice of subject of her PhD thesis was pretty much based on coincidence. At the CS Department, many people were dealing with sequential data, and Evimaria's subject was a variation of a much looked at problem. "Problems and Algorithms for Sequence Segmentations" provided her nice problems.

A sequence segmentation is a partition of the sequence into a number of non-overlapping segments that cover all data points, such that each segment is as homogeneous as possible. This problem can be solved optimally using a standard dynamic programming algorithm. Evimaria's thesis presents a new approximation algorithm for the sequence segmentation problem, and it studies alternative segmentation models that are devised to better fit the data. Also, there is discussion on the problem of aggregating results of segmentation algorithms on the same set of data points.

Thesis writing process was a really pleasing experience for Evimaria -- she tells it was the best time of her life so far. She had time to think about things and there was not too much responsibility.

- Even if you mess up, it's not really your fault, Evimaria laughs.

And next...

Evimaria will work at the Department of Computer Science until May 2007. Then she will move to California to join the Data Mining and Data Analysis group of the IBM, but she does not yet know exactly what she will do there.

To me it sounds like Silicon Valley is pretty popular at the Department currently, doesn't it?

- The plan is to be neighbours with Panayiotis and Taneli, Evimaria tells with a smile.

Sanna Kettunen