Teuvo Kalevi Kohonen (11 July 1934 – 13 December 2021) was a prominent

Finnish Finnish may refer to: * Something or someone from, or related to Finland * Culture of Finland * Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland * Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people * Finnish cuisine See also ...

academic An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary education, secondary or tertiary education, tertiary higher education, higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membershi ...

( Dr. Eng.) and researcher. He was

professor emeritus ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

of the Academy of Finland.Teuvo Kohonen. Dr. Eng., Emeritus Professor of the Academy of Finland; Academician
a biography from his university, last accessed on 27 January 2022.

Career

Kohonen studied at the

Helsinki University of Technology Helsinki University of Technology (TKK; fi, Teknillinen korkeakoulu; sv, Tekniska högskolan) was a technical university in Finland. It was located in Otaniemi, Espoo in the metropolitan area of Greater Helsinki. The university was founded in ...

and graduated with a master's degree in engineering in 1957. He received his doctorate in 1962 and stayed at the university with a faculty position until 1993. He was an accademy professor of the Academy of Finland between 1975 and 1999. During most of his career, Prof. Kohonen conducted research at

(TKK). The Neural Networks Research Centre of TKK, a center of excellence appointed by Academy of Finland was founded to conduct research related to Teuvo Kohonen's innovations. After Kohonen's retirement, the center was led by Prof. Erkki Oja and later renamed to Adaptive Informatics Research Centre with widened foci of research. Prof. Kohonen made many contributions to the field of

artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...

, including the

Learning Vector Quantization In computer science, learning vector quantization (LVQ) is a prototype-based supervised classification algorithm. LVQ is the supervised counterpart of vector quantization systems. Overview LVQ can be understood as a special case of an artifici ...

algorithm, fundamental theories of distributed associative memory and optimal associative mappings, the learning subspace method and novel algorithms for symbol processing like redundant hash addressing. He published several books and over 300 peer-reviewed papers. Kohonen’s most famous contribution is the

Self-Organizing Map A self-organizing map (SOM) or self-organizing feature map (SOFM) is an unsupervised machine learning technique used to produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional) representation of a higher dimensional data set while preserving the t ...

, also known as the ''Kohonen map'' or ''Kohonen artificial neural networks'', although Kohonen himself prefers ''SOM''. Due to the popularity of the SOM algorithm in many research and in practical applications, Kohonen is often considered to be the most cited Finnish scientist. The current version of the SOM bibliography contains close to 8000 entries.

Honors and awards

Teuvo Kohonen was elected the First Vice President of the

International Association for Pattern Recognition The International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), founded in 1978 by Purdue University computer scientist King-Sun Fu, is an international association of non-profit, scientific, or professional organizations (being national, multi-natio ...

from 1982 to 1984, and acted as the first president of the European Neural Network Society from 1991 to 1992. For his scientific achievements, Prof. Kohonen received a number of prizes including the following: * IEEE Neural Networks Council Pioneer Award, 1991 * Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, 1995 *

IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award The IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award is a Technical Field Award established by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Board of Directors in 2004. This award is presented for outstanding contributions to the advancement of the design, ...

, 2008 Kohonen died on December 13, 2021, at the age of 87.

Some publications

An introduction to neural computing
in ''Neural Networks'', vol. 1, no. 1, pages 3–16, ⋅1988.
Self-organizing maps
Springer-Verlag, 3rd edition, 2001

External links

* Kohonen, Teuvo (2014)
''MATLAB Implementations and Applications of the Self-Organizing Map''
a text book. * ''Interview with Teuvo Kohonen'', by CIM Editorial Officer. ''

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

Computational Intelligence Magazine'', August 2008, Volume 3, Number 3, pages 4–5.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kohonen, Teuvo 1934 births 2021 deaths Academic staff of the Helsinki University of Technology Finnish computer scientists Members of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts Machine learning researchers Members of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters Fellow Members of the IEEE People from Lauritsala