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 1 400 000 other students in our free on-line courses created together with MinnaLearn. No maths or programming required. Start learning at Elements of AI.

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-2014/2015/2016/2017/2018/2019/2020/2021/2022/2023/2024
UAI-2008/2009/2010/2011/2012/2013/2014/2015/2016/2017/2018/2019/2020/2021/2022/2023/2024.

Teaching

I teach the following courses:

• DATA11001 Introduction to Data Science in period I

Past students:

• Matti McGill (MSc 2024)
• Sathianpong Trangcasanchai (MSc 2024)
• 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 research group:

• Elias Jääsaari (doctoral researcher; 1st year)
• Fanni Franssila (doctoral resarcher; 2nd year)
• Daniel Holmberg (doctoral resarcher; 3rd year)
• Ioanna Bouri (doctoral resarcher; 6th 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. N. Pope, J. Kahila, H. Vartiainen, M. Saqr, S. López-Pernas, T. Roos, J. Laru, M. Tedre (2025). An XAI Social Media Platform for Teaching K-12 Students AI-Driven Profiling, Clustering, and Engagement-Based Recommending, EAAI-2025
   
   
2. E. Jääsaari, V. Hyvönen, T. Roos (2024). LoRANN: Low-rank matrix factorization for approximate nearest neighbor search, NeurIPS-2024 → github
   
   
3. D. Holmberg, E. Clementi, T. Roos (2024), Regional ocean forecasting with hierarchical graph neural networks, NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning
   
   
4. N. Pope, J. Kahila, J. Laru, H. Vartiainen, T. Roos, M. Tedre (2024). An educational tool for learning about social media tracking, profiling, and recommendation, ICALT-2024
   
   
5. D. Holmberg, M. Airaksinen, V. Marchi, A. Guzzetta, A. Kivi, L. Haataja, S. Vanhatalo, T. Roos (2024). Modeling 3D infant kinetics using adaptive graph convolutional networks, preprint
   
   
6. V. Hyvönen, E. Jääsaari, T. Roos (2024). A multilabel classification framework for approximate nearest neighbor search, JMLR 25(46):1–51
   

Other selected publications (full list, Google Scholar):

1. P. Grünwald and T. Roos (2019). Minimum description length revisited, Int. J. Mathematics for Industry 11(1):19300001
   
   
2. R.M. Ballardini, K. He, and T. Roos (2018), Digital distribution of AI-generated content: Authorship and inventorship in the age of artificial intelligence, in T. Pihlajarinne, J. Vesala, and O. Honkkila (editors), Online Distribution of Content in the EU, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.
   
   
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:

• ITA-2018, San Diego, February 11–16
• UCSD, February 1–21
• UC Berkeley, February 26–March 22
• Apple, Cupertino, March 21
• Targeted Discovery in Brain Data Workshop, Simons Institute, Berkeley, March 19–22
• Princeton, March 23
• CMU, Pittsburgh, March 26–30
• Google AI, Pittsburgh, March 26
• ALT 2018, Lanzarote, April 7–9
• AISTATS 2018, Lanzarote, April 9–11
• WiFiUS Meeting and Summer School, Boston, June 11–16
• UCSC Milano, Milan, October 24–November 14

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:

• Workshop on Evolutionary Networks, Banff Intl. Research Station, Canada, February 13–17.
• 21st CIMO Winter School, Tvärminne Zoological Station, Finland, March 6–11.
• Studia Stemmatologica VII, Rome, Italy, May 17–19.
• Digital Classics/Medieval Studies Workshop, Rome, Italy, May 31–June 1.
• Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK, August 23–25.
• WITMSE-2017, Paris, France, September 11–13.

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:

• HD Big Data Workshop, Cambridge, UK, January 22.
• Martin Luther University, Halle, Germany, April 25–28.
• Finnish Institute in Rome, Italy, May 6–10.
• Purdue, USA, May 15–20.
• WITMSE-2016, Helsinki, September 19–21.
• University of Melbourne, Australia, October 4–18.
• Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, December 6.

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:

• Finnish Institute in Rome, December 27, 2014–January 4, 2015.
• E-Philology Lectures, Sorbonne University, Paris, January 12.
• ITA-2015, San Diego, February 1–6.
• COST Training School, Rome, 23–25 March.
• VU Amsterdam, May 13.
• University of Lancaster, University of Cambridge, May 18–22.
• COIN day, Stockholm, Sweden, June 15.
• WITMSE-2015, Copenhagen, June 24–26.
• AlCoB-2015, Mexico City, August 4–6.
• UC Berkeley, USC, UCSD, September 21–November 30.
• IEEE Big Data 2015, Santa Clara, CA, USA, October 29–November 1.

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:

• Finnish Institute in Rome, March 28–April 8.
• ISIT-2014 and WITMSE-2014, Hawaii, June 29–July 7.
• ESTS-2014, Helsinki, October 30–November 1.
• Royal Society meeting: Evolutionary analysis beyond the gene, Chicheley Hall, UK, 17–18 November.

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

My traveling/conference schedule in 2013:

• University of Cambridge, UK, January 10–12.
• ITA-2013, San Diego, February 10–15.
• CHI-2013, Paris, April 27–May 2.
• WITMSE-2013, Tokyo, August 26–29.
• Finnish Institute in Rome, October 18–December 28.

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:

• University of Aarhus, Denmark, January 10.
• University of Cambridge, UK, January 16–April 30.
• ITA-2012, San Diego, February 6–10.
• University of Oxford, UK, March 7–8.
• University of East Anglia, UK, March 22–23.
• Durham University, UK, April 2–5.
• WITMSE 2012, Amsterdam, August 26—30.
• University of Bern, Switzerland, November 22–24.

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:

• Studia Stemmatologica IV, University of Cambridge and Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, March 21–26.
• BCSMIF-2011 and University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, April 9–17.
• ICANN-2011, Helsinki, June 14–17.
• ISIT-2011, St. Petersburg, Russia, July 31–August 5.
• WITMSE-2011, Helsinki, August 7–10.
• Studia Stemmatologica V, Rome, October 5–8.
• Nonlinear physics (!), Stockholm, October 18–20.
• ICDM-2011, Vancouver, December 11–14.

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:

• MIT, Boston, February 8–April 30.
• Columbia University, New York, February 22–23.
• Yale, New Haven, April 1–2.
• Washington University, St. Louis, April 22–23.
• SCAS, Uppsala, Sweden, June 21–23.
• UCLA & UAI-2010, Los Angeles, July 8–11.
• WITMSE-2010, Tampere, Finland, August 16–18.
• Studia Stemmatologica, Pisa, Italy, November 21–24.

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!):

• ITA-2009, San Diego & HP Labs, Palo Alto, February 8–13.
• ITW-2009, Volos, Greece, June 10–12.
• ISIT-2009, Seoul, Korea, June 28–July 3.
• WITMSE-2009, Tampere, Finland, August 17–19.
• ISTI/CNR & Univ. Pisa, Pisa, Italy, November 5–6.

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 December 19, 2024