Short biography
Heikki Mannila received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1985 from the
University of Helsinki. After some time at the University of Tampere and
various researcher positions, in 1989 he was appointed a professor of
computer science at the University of Helsinki. He was a visiting
professor in the Technical University of Vienna in 1993 and a visiting
researcher at Max Planck Institute for Computer Science in Saarbruecken
in 1995-96. He moved to Microsoft Research in Redmond in 1998, came back
to Finland to Nokia Research in 1999, where he stayed until the end of
2001. After that, Heikki Mannila was the research director of the basic
research unit of Helsinki Institute for Information Technology in
2002-2004. Since 1999 he is a professor of computer science at Helsinki
University of Technology. In 2004-2008 he was an academy professor.
In 2009 he was the director of Helsinki Institute for Information
Technology HIIT, a joint research institute of University of Helsinki
and Helsinki University of Technology.
In 2009-2012 he was vice president for academic affairs at Aalto University,
a new university formed by the merger of Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki School of Economics,
and University of Art and Design Helsinki.
Currently, he is president of the Academy of Finland.
Heikki Mannila is the author of two books and over 190 refereed articles
in computer science and related areas. His specific area of interest
is in algorithms for data analysis, and applications in science
and in industry. The book Principles of Data
Mining, with David Hand and Padhraic Smyth, is available also in Chinese
and in Polish. He received the ACM SIGKDD Innovation award in 2003
and the IEEE ICDM research contributions award in 2009.