Welcome to my homepage

I am an associate professor (tenured) at Aalto University, School of Electrical Engineering. I hold a Ph.D. (2002) degree in statistics from University of Jyvaskyla Finland as well as a D.Sc. (2010) degree in signal processing from Aalto University. I am also adjunct professor (docent) of statistics at University of Oulu. For more details, see my biography or read my interview, or check out my tenured professors installation lecture learning from signals at youtube

My research interests lie in the intersection of the fields of statistical signal processing, high-dimensional statistics, and machine learning. One of my long-lasting interest has been robust multivariate statistics, and I have recently co-authored a text-book published by Cambridge University Press on this topic. I am an author or coauthor of nearly 100 papers in the top journals and conference in signal processing and statistics. If you are looking for a thesis advisor on these topics then please sent me an email.

At Aalto University, I am the director of the BSc major in Information Technology as well as MSc major in Signal Processing and Data Science. If you are a student interested in these majors, then do not hesitate to contact me.

News

  • Pleased to share that my former doctoral student, Elias Raninen, received the Aalto doctoral thesis award for his thesis. Congratulations to Elias!
  • The 4th edition of Statistical Learning for Signal and Image Processing, that I organized with my colleagues profs. Jordi Vila-Valls, Michael Muma, Frederic Pascal and Guillaume Ginolhac at Cadaques, Catalunya was as a big success, gathering roughly 40 participants from Spain, Germany, France Finland, and Sweden.

    Due to the success of the workshop, the 5th edition is being planned for 2024. Follow the news!
  • Really proud of Elias Raninen, my 3rd PhD student, who successfully defended his PhD thesis, "Contributions to the Theory and Estimation of High-dimensional Covariance Matrices", on May 27, 2022. The thesis proposes new theory and methods for covariance matrix estimation in finite sample size situations, where the dimension of the observations is comparable in magnitude to the total number of available samples.
  • The application period for Signal, Speech and Language Processing MSc studies at Aalto University is now open! Make sure to apply no later than 3rd of January 2022.
  • Please to share that I am joining as an elected member (term 2022-2024) the IEEE SPS Signal Processing Theory and Methods (SPTM) Technical Committee.
  • I am delivering a talk On robust estimates of sphericity in high-dimension at CMStatistics 2021 (London, UK), Dec. 18th, 2021. Hope to see you there!
  • The 3rd edition of Finnish-French-German Statistical Learning for Signal and Image Processing, that I organized with my colleagues profs. Michael Muma, Frederic Pascal and Guillaume Ginolhac at Rudesheim-am-Rhein was a big success, gathering roughly 40 participants from Germany, France and Finland.
    Due to the success of the workshop, the 4th edition is now being planned for summer 2022. Follow the news!
  • July 2021 I spent as invited visiting professor at Universite Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France. Many thanks for Prof. Adrian Basarab for hosting.
  • On Dec. 18th 2020, I delivered a virtual seminar talk of DataIA institute of University of Paris-Saclay. Here are the slides of the talk or watch it at youtube:

  • Professor Arnaud Breloy (University Paris at Nanterre, France) spends his sabbathical (6 months, from Feb 1/2021 - July 31/2021) at Aalto University, hosted by my research group.
  • We are organizing a special session, called Robust and High-Dimensional Statistical Learning for Signal Processing Applications at MLSP 2020. Hope to see you there!
 
  • On June 12th 2020, I acted as an opponent for a Modeling and Sampling of Spectrally Structured Signals by Filip Elvander from Lund University (Sweden) The thesis was excellent and the discussions lasted for 4hours.

  • On May 14th 2020, my doctoral student Muhammad Naveed Tabassum succesfully defended his thesis Sparsity Driven Statistical Learning for High-Dimensional Regression and Classification online via zoom. Many thanks for the thesis opponents, Profs Andreas Jakobsson and Christoph Mecklenbrauker.
  • I am organizing a special session on Robust Statistics for Signal Processing in CAMSAP'2019 at Guadeloupe, West Indies, Dec. 15-18, 2019. Hope to see you there!
  • My doctoral student Elias Raninen received the Nokia scholarship. Congratulations!

  • A post-doctoral fellow Ammar Mian just started in my group from Oct. 1st, 2019. Wellcome!
  • The 2nd edition of Finnish-French Statistical Learning for Signal and Image Processing, that I organized with my colleagues prof. Frederic Pascal and prof. Guillaume Ginolhac at Annecy in July 2019 was a big success, gathering roughly 50 participants from France and Finland.
    The programme and slides of the talks are available online. The 3rd edition of the workshop in now being planned.
  • I returned from my visit (June 8-15, 2019) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where I delivered a seminar talk on High-dimensional Covariance Matrix Estimation of Multiple Classes. Many thanks to Prof. Daniel P. Palomar for hosting.

  • I am a co-editor for Signal Processing (Elservier) special issue on Statistical Signal Processing Solutions and Advances for Data Science: Complex, Dynamic and Large-scale Settings. Submission Deadline is May 1st, 2019.
  • I returned from my visit (March 7-9) from KTH (Sweden, Stockholm), where I acted as an opponent of a PhD thesis, In Pursuit of Ideal Model Selection for High-Dimensional Linear Regression, by Mr. Arash Owrang. Very interesting thesis and great discussion on it. You can find the slides of my opponent talk on the thesis here

  • I am organizing a Finnish-French Statistical Learning for Signal Processing mini-workshop during Dec 5th and 7th, 2018. Hope to see you there.
  • My doctoral student Muhammad Tabassum received the Nokia scholarship. Congratulations!
  • I gave a talk about high-dimensional covariance matrix estimation at Machine Learning coffee seminar (Nov 12, 2018) organized by the Aalto University and the University of Helsinki. You can find my slides here
  • Nora Ouzir started (Nov. 1st, 2018) as a post-doctoral fellow. Wellcome!
  • I returned from my visit (March 7-9) from KTH (Sweden, Stockholm), where I acted as an opponent of a PhD thesis, Cardiac Motion Estimation In Ultrasound Images using a Sparse Representation and Dictionary Learning
  • I am an invited speaker at International Conference on Robust Statistics at Leuven, Belgium (ICORS 2018).
  • I am visiting for 8 days the CentraleSupelec, France. Many thanks to Prof. Frederic Pascal for hosting.
  • On June 15th, 2018, my doctoral student, Shahab Basiri, defended his Ph.D. thesis Robust large-scale statistical inference and ICA using bootstrapping. Many thanks for the opponents, Profs Daniel P. Palomar and Jean-Yves Tourneret.
  • I will be visiting for June 4-12, 2018, the University of Grenoble (Gibsa-lab) and University of Savoie. Many thanks to Profs Romain Couillet and Guillaume Ginolhac for hosting.
  • From May 28th, 2018, Prof David E. Tyler (Rutgers - The State University of New Jersey) is visiting our group for a whole week. Wellcome!
  • From November 16-19, 2017, I will be visiting the University of Bern (Switzerland). Thanks to Prof. Lutz Duembgen for hosting.
  • From Aug 1st, 2017, Jari Miettinen started as a post-doctoral fellow. Wellcome!
  • From June 4th, 2017, I will be visiting for two weeks the Riken Brain Science Institute at Tokyo. Thanks to Prof. Andrzej Cichocki for hosting.