Timo Honkela

Since 1st of January, 2014:
Professor, Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki

Formerly:
Chief Research Scientist, PhD, Docent (Adjunct Professor)
[ GROUP, CV, PUBS, BLOG ]

Contact Information

Office:: Room T-A314 in Computer Science Building,
Konemiehentie 2, Otaniemi campus area, Espoo
Mail address:: Aalto University School of Science,
Department of Information and Computer Science,
P.O. Box 15400, FI-00076 Aalto, Finland
Email:: timo.honkela@aalto.fi

Publications

Selections:

Timo Honkela, Juha Raitio, Krista Lagus, Ilari T. Nieminen, Nina Honkela, and Mika Pantzar. Subjects on objects in contexts: Using GICA method to quantify epistemological subjectivity. In Proceedings of IJCNN 2012, International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, pages 2875-2883, 2012.
Mari-Sanna Paukkeri, Marja Ollikainen, and Timo Honkela. Assessing user-specific difficulty of documents. Information Processing & Management, 2012.
Timo Honkela, Aapo Hyvärinen, and Jaakko Väyrynen. WordICA - Emergence of linguistic representations for words by independent component analysis. Natural Language Engineering, 16(3):277-308, 2010.
Timo Honkela, Nina Janasik, Krista Lagus, Tiina Lindh-Knuutila, Mika Pantzar, and Juha Raitio. GICA: Grounded intersubjective concept analysis - a method for enhancing mutual understanding and participation. Technical Report TKK-ICS-R41, AALTO-ICS, Espoo, December 2010.
Nina Janasik, Timo Honkela, and Henrik Bruun. Text mining in qualitative research: Application of an unsupervised learning method. Organizational Research Methods, 12(3):436-460, 2009.
Timo Honkela, Ville Könönen, Tiina Lindh-Knuutila, and Mari-Sanna Paukkeri. Simulating processes of concept formation and communication. Journal of Economic Methodology, 15(3):245-259, 2008.

For a full list, see my publications page. See also Google Scholar.

News

ICANN 2013 conference was held in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Activities

Programme co-chair of the ICANN 2011 conference
General chair of the WSOM 2011 conference
Head of the Computational Cognitive Systems research group

Research Interests

Digital humanities and social sciences

The phenomena within humanities and social sciences have traditionally been too complex to be studied with formal and/or computational methods without a clear risk of serious reductionism or applying very restricting background assumptions. My long-term interest is to promote research in which the complexity of real world phenomena is respected when computational methods are developed and applied. Methodologically the focus is in statistical machine learning and agent-based simulation methods. With a number of collaborators, I have published articles e.g. related to linguistics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, economics, cognitive studies of religion and political science.

Machine learning for multilingual and multiprofessional communication

The basic motivation of for my research in this area stems from the need for language-independent and context-sensitive semantics that will speed up development of natural language processing tools and their applications, and the need for new neurocognitive approaches to natural language processing. Machine learning methods make it possible, among other things, create models of conversational language with a large proportion of spelling mistakes, unusual or incomplete syntactic structures, abbreviations and creative use of language with rapid introduction of new lexical items and expressions.

Subjectivity research

According to a commonly held view, concepts are seen independent of any historical, contextual or subjective factors. However, due to differences in the individual life and learning paths, different subjects have gained different conceptual constructions. Therefore, the language use includes subcultures as well as individual idiosyncrasies. My research objective is to develop theories and methods that are based on the recognition of subjectivity of understanding the world and language.

Teaching

T-61.5020 Statistical modeling of natural language, Spring 2005, ..., Spring 2011
T-61.6090 Special course in language technology, Autumn 2005, ...., Autumn 2009

Personal

Married to Nina Honkela, two children. Hobbies: go, golf, photograph y.