At the Helsinki Book Fair
English
Timo Untamo Honkela (August 4, 1962 – May 9, 2020) was a Finnish computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher.[2,8,7] While most sources state that he was born in Kalajoki, Simple English Wikipedia states that he was born in Helsinki.[8,7] He earned his doctoral degree from Helsinki University of Technology. In 2014, Honkela was diagnosed with incurable brain cancer, and he died in Helsinki on May 9, 2020, at the age of 57.[2,8,7,14,3]
Honkela conducted research across several areas related to knowledge engineering, cognitive modeling, and natural language processing. From 1998 to 2000, he served as an acting professor at the Media Lab of the University of Art and Design Helsinki (Aalto Media Lab), bringing his expertise in Kohonen self-organizing maps (SOM) and collaborating closely with artists and designers.[1,11] He worked as a researcher at Aalto University's Department of Computer Science, leading the Computational Cognitive Systems research group, and as a non-tenured or adjunct professor across Aalto University's School of Science and School of Art, Design and Architecture.[2,10] Additionally, he was a docent of language technology at the University of Helsinki and a docent of knowledge engineering—specifically in interaction design concerning information-theoretical, cognitive, and social modeling—at the Media Lab.[11] From 2014 to 2018, he held a fixed-term professorship in digital resources research at the University of Helsinki and the National Library of Finland's Digitisation Centre in Mikkeli.[9] In 2018, Honkela was awarded the Mensa Prize.[15]
In 2001, Honkela collaborated with George Legrady to create the interactive museum installation Pockets Full of Memories for the Centre Georges Pompidou's National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, allowing visitors to scan their belongings into a database organized by the Kohonen Self-Organizing Map algorithm. He shared his thoughts on his studies and work on the collaborative blog 375 Humanists.[3,4] In 2017, supported by a civic movement that formed earlier that year to assist in its writing and publication, Honkela published the Finnish-language book Rauhankone (English: Peace Machine), presenting his ideas on designing artificial intelligence and machine learning to serve humanity and help people live in peace with one another.[4,12,13]
Publications
In 2011, Timo Honkela co-edited Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning alongside Wlodzislaw Duch, Mark Girolami, and Samuel Kaski, published by Springer. The same year, he also co-edited Advances in Self-Organizing Maps with Jorma Laaksonen, also published by Springer. In 2017, Honkela published Rauhankone through Gaudeamus.