My whole work career has been about Digital Technologies, much of which is now called Artificial intelligence.
Big Data and AI
During 1979-82, I worked for three years in industry designing machine vision systems for sawmills. After joining VTT 1982, I have worked in numerous image processing and media technology projects, of which I have initiated and lead a significant part. During the years 1982-94, I developed together with my colleagues several image processing systems that were adopted in the graphic arts industry. Six of these systems are documented in my doctoral thesis from 1994. After this period, I got a professorship in digital media 1997 and focused on creating systems for integrating TV, newspaper and web content in a personalised way – a work that got a US patent and was utilized by the media and telecom industry. A continuation on this was the mobile television research, where my team made one of the world´s most cited pilot study. I have been involved in social media research leading a Finnish Academy funded project on social media in citizen participation. Personalization and contextualisation of content and services have been a long-term research topic. Recently, I have been studying big data topics, especially in the Data-driven Bioeconomy (DataBio), a 48 partner Lighthouse EU project, where I was Technical Manager. In another project together with University of Helsinki, we produced AI based Valtteri system, that wrote millions of election news in 3 languages.
Hybrid media and collaborative AI
In parallel with Big data and AI research, from the beginning of nineties I pursued and patented the concept of hybrid media, e.g.,linking printed and digital media by pattern recognition. In 2000, I was one founder of Ultravision Oy, which developed the prototype of a multifunctional PC mouse acting also as a scanner. In 2002, I initiated the PrintAccess project together with prof. Pirkko Oittinen. In this project, VTT developed one of the first code reading applications for smart phones. This code reader technology was licensed to several companies, of which UPC/UpCode was most notable. VTT continued to develop the technology for UpCode for several years. Since 2003 I have lead several projects, where hybrid multichannel media has been applied for informing the consumer about healthy eating and exercising, about ecological product selections and for smart packaging. Both barcodes and object recognition can be used in the linking.
Recently, I have studied broader hybrid solutions for combining human and artificial intelligence – so called collaborative AI. One example is the AI Empowered Material Scientist (AIMS) project, where we developed novel methods for a radical speeding up of discoveries of new biomaterials and got the results published in international top journals (see publications).