2009 Cor Baayen Award to Teemu Roos

ERCIM, The European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, has chosen Teemu Roos from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT as the winner of the 2009 Cor Baayen Award for a promising young researcher in computer science and applied mathematics.

Teemu Roos received his PhD degree from the University of Helsinki, Finland, in September 2007. During and after his postgraduate studies he has performed groundbreaking research by combining advanced theoretical reasoning with innovative technical solutions in the fields of information theory, data analysis and machine learning.

His highly cited work in mobile device positioning has been patented and successfully commercialized in the award-winning spin-off company Ekahau Inc. The positioning techniques are being used every day in more than 150 hospitals around the world, and numerous other locations in government, military, and industry.

As an another example, in collaboration with historians, Roos has gained significant advances in the study of the "evolution" of ancient manuscripts by unprejudiced application of state-of-the-art information-theoretic methods to stemmatology, a long-standing problem in textual criticism.

Teemu Roos' interdisciplinary work on stemmatology, introducing exact mathematical and computational tools in an area where they have been largely unused, has lead to a prolific collaboration rousing both domestic and international interest. This work has already contributed to historical research as reported in at least three books and academic dissertations.

www.ercim.org