Teuvo Kohonen

Teuvo Kohonen
Born	Teuvo Kohonen (1934-07-11)11 July 1934 Lauritsala, Finland
Died	13 December 2021(2021-12-13) (aged 87)
Nationality	Finnish
Alma mater	Helsinki University of Technology
Known for	Self-organizing map Learning vector quantization
Awards	IEEE Neural Networks Council Pioneer Award (1991) International Neural Network Society Lifetime Achievement Award (1992) IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award (1995) IEEE Fellow
Scientific career
Fields	Machine learning Artificial neural networks
Institutions	Helsinki University of Technology Academy of Finland
Doctoral students	Erkki Oja

Teuvo Kalevi Kohonen (11 July 1934 – 13 December 2021) was a prominent Finnish academic (Dr. Eng.) and researcher. He was professor emeritus of the Academy of Finland.

Prof. Kohonen made many contributions to the field of artificial neural networks, including the Learning Vector Quantization algorithm, fundamental theories of distributed associative memory and optimal associative mappings, the learning subspace method and novel algorithms for symbol processing like redundant hash addressing. He has published several books and over 300 peer-reviewed papers.

Kohonen’s most famous contribution is the Self-Organizing Map (also known as the Kohonen map or Kohonen artificial neural networks, although Kohonen himself prefers SOM). Due to the popularity of the SOM algorithm in many research and in practical applications, Kohonen is often considered to be the most cited Finnish scientist. The current version of the SOM bibliography contains close to 8000 entries.

During most of his career, Prof. Kohonen conducted research at Helsinki University of Technology (TKK). The Neural Networks Research Centre of TKK, a center of excellence appointed by Academy of Finland was founded to conduct research related to Teuvo Kohonen's innovations. After Kohonen's retirement, the center was led by Prof. Erkki Oja and later renamed to Adaptive Informatics Research Centre with widened foci of research.

Teuvo Kohonen was elected the First Vice President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition from 1982 to 1984, and acted as the first president of the European Neural Network Society from 1991 to 1992.

For his scientific achievements, Prof. Kohonen has received a number of prizes including the following:

• IEEE Neural Networks Council Pioneer Award, 1991
• Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, 1995
• IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award, 2008

Kohonen died on December 13, 2021, at the age of 87.

Bibliography

• Teuvo Kohonen (2014): MATLAB Implementations and Applications of the Self-Organizing Map, http://docs.unigrafia.fi/publications/kohonen_teuvo/
• Interview with Teuvo Kohonen, by CIM Editorial Officer, Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCI.2008.926611 in IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, August 2008, Volume 3, Number 3, pages 4–5.

External links

• Teuvo Kohonen. Dr. Eng., Emeritus Professor of the Academy of Finland; Academician
• http://www.cis.hut.fi/research/som-bibl/
• http://docs.unigrafia.fi/publications/kohonen_teuvo/