Expert profile: Dr. Timo HONKELA

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Prof. Timo Honkela is currently a chief scientist at Adaptive Informatics 
Research Center of Helsinki University of Technology (TKK). The unit is a 
center of excellence appointed by the Academy of Finland. In the center, 
Honkela is the head of one of the five research groups called Computational 
Cognitive Systems. Earlier he has served as a professor at the laboratory of 
computer and information science at TKK and as a professor at the Media Lab of 
University of Art and Design Helsinki. He is also a docent in three 
universities and has given hundreds of presentations and invited talks in 
locations such as Kobe, Beijing, Dubai, Washington D.C., Boston and many 
European major cities.

Honkela has conducted research on several areas related to knowledge 
engineering, cognitive modeling and natural language processing including a 
central role in the development of the Websom method for visual information 
retrieval and text mining based on the Kohonen self-organizing map algorithm. 
The current research interests include cognitive modeling, statistical machine 
translation, adaptive knowledge representation and reasoning based on 
continuous formal systems, and the underlying cognitive, linguistic and 
philosophical issues.
Honkela is a former long-term chairman of the Finnish Artificial Intelligence 
Society. He is currently the vice chair of Finnish Cognitive Linguistics 
Association and the chair of the IFIP working group on knowledge representation 
and reasoning (WG 12.1).