University of Helsinki

Hannu Toivonen is a professor of computer science at the University of Helsinki, Finland, since 2002. He works in the areas of artificial intelligence and data science, more specifically in computational creativity, data mining as well as analysis and generation of natural language. Hannu has published some 200 papers and has been cited over 20,000 times.

Mark Granroth-Wilding is a research associate at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, with expertise in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Creativity and Computational Music Analysis. His current work concerns unsupervised analysis of low-resourced languages for linguistic typology; topic modelling of noisy, historical data; and Natural Language Generation for news reporting.

Elaine Zosa is a doctoral student at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki.

Her background is in bioinformatics and natural language processing (NLP). Her current research interest is on the applications of topic modelling and word embeddings in the temporal analysis of textual data.

Lidia Pivovarova is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. Her primary research interest lie in machine learning methods for natural language processing and media analysis. Her PhD thesis, defended in December 2018 with distinction, is devoted to classification and clustering techniques for online news monitoring.

Leo Leppänen is a doctoral student at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. He has expertise in Natural Language Generation (NLG), Data Mining and Learning Analytics. His current research focus is on the generation of factual natural language content, such as news and other reports, from structured data.

Khalid Alnajjar is a doctoral student at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. He has expertise in Computational Linguistic Creativity and Natural Language Generation (NLG). His current research is focused on making generated news colourful and natural by having a natural structural flow and using multi-lingual creative expressions.

Prof. Mikko Tolonen is an intellectual historian by training and has established himself as an eighteenth-century scholar. Tolonen has played an important role building digital humanities infrastructure at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki. Tolonen’s current main research focus in on an integrated study of public discourse and knowledge production that combines metadata from library catalogues as well as full-text libraries of books, newspapers and periodicals. 

Tolonen’s digital humanities strategy is to build a widening network from ground up that includes the application of his research interests to a larger infrastructural level. In 2016 Tolonen was awarded an Open Science and Research Award by Finnish Ministry of Education. Tolonen is a PI of two major research projects and also the PI for Finland for the ‘Humanities at Scale’ (DESIR) project that will further the DARIAH ERIC’s aim to integrate digitally enabled research in the arts and humanities in Europe (2017-2019).

Jani Marjanen is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki from where he gained his PhD in 2014. In 2014-2015 he was visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. Jani specializes in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century language of economic patriotism in Scandinavia, the theory and method of conceptual history, and public debate in Finland in the nineteenth century. In digital humanities he has worked especially with analysis of knowledge production through statistical analyses of library catalogues and the study of public discourse by combining content analyses and metadata analyses of Finnish newspapers 1771–1920. He is one of the editors of Contributions to the History of Concepts and his main publications include Den ekonomiska patriotismens uppgång och fall: Finska hushållningssällskapet i europeisk, svensk och finsk kontext 1720–1840 (2013) and the edited volume together with Koen Stapelbroek The Rise of Economic Societies in the Eighteenth Century: Patriotic Reform in Europe and North America (2012).

Minna Kaukonen is Head of Planningat the Mikkeli Unit of The National Library of Finland. She has been involved in several national and international digitization development and DH projects. She has been Chair of the IFLA News Media (Newspapers) Section in 2013-15 and Secretary of the LIBER Steering Committee on Digitisation and Resource Discovery 2009 - 2011.

Juha Rautiainen is Information Systems Specialist at the Mikkeli Unit of The National Library of Finland. He is involved in development of digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi -service and DH projects.