Erkki Oja - Biography#

Erkki Oja received the D.Sc. degree from Helsinki University of Technology in 1977. He is Director of the Computational Inference Research Centre and Professor at the Department of Information and Computer Science, Aalto University (former Helsinki University of Technology), Finland.

He serves as the Chairman of the Finnish Research Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering. He holds an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, Sweden, and from two Finnish universities. He has been research associate at Brown University, Providence, RI, and visiting professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the Universite Pantheon-Sorbonne, Paris. He is the author or coauthor of more than 300 articles and book chapters on pattern recognition, computer vision, and neural computing, and three books: "Subspace Methods of Pattern Recognition" (New York: Research Studies Press and Wiley, 1983), "Kohonen Maps" (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier, 1999), and "Independent Component Analysis" (New York: Wiley, 2001). His major research interest is machine learning and data analysis.

Prof. Oja is a member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Founding Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR), Past President of the European Neural Network Society (ENNS), and Fellow of the International Neural Network Society (INNS). He is a member of the editorial boards of several journals and has been in the program committees of several recent conferences. He was general chair of the 2010 IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) and the 2011 International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN). Prof. Oja is the recipient of the 2004 IAPR Pierre Devijver Award, the 2006 IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Neural Networks Pioneer Award, and the 2010 INNS Hebb Award.