Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence Impact Case Study Department of Computer Science 2018 CASE Study CASE Study

The AI Day at Dipoli on 13 December 2017. The sold-out event, organised by FCAI, gathered over 600 people to Otaniemi. Representa- tives of over 180 companies joined academics and public-sector par- ticipants to hear keynote speeches from top AI researchers and to benefit from the matchmaking opportunities during pitching, demo and poster sessions. Photo: Aalto University/Matti Ahlgren

Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence Impact case study Department of Computer Science 2018 CASE Study CASE Study

Aalto RAI 2018 Case Study

Field: 4 – ICT and mathematics Unit of Assessment (UoA): Department of Computer Science Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence

1. Summary of the societal 2. Underpinning research/artistic impact activity related to Aalto activities

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is bringing disruptive trans- Starting from the pioneering works of Academician formations to all societies in the very short-term Teuvo Kohonen in development of neural networks, future. AI is also strongly in the political agenda of and Aalto Distinguished Professor Erkki Oja, Profes- Finland as Prime Minister Juha Sipilä wants to make sor Heikki Mannila, and many others in related Finland world leader in artificial intelligence, and ac- fields, we have conducted decades of world-class tions of Finland’s AI programme (with Prof. Samuel research, including several Academy of Finland Cen- Kaski of Aalto Department of Computer Science tres of Excellence at Aalto University and the Univer- (CS) in the steering group) are being implemented. sity of Helsinki (UH). Close collaboration between The society needs to understand AI and its impact, Aalto and UH through a joint research institute, the and to have access to practical tools for utilizing it. Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), Therefore, high-level education and research in AI, has created a lively ICT hub in the capital area. This and close contact between academia and both pri- has provided a critical mass of excellence with hun- vate and public sectors, are crucial for fulfilling the dreds of researchers involved in various research needs of both companies and society as a whole. and educational activities, and tens of industrial actors collaborating in joint initiatives. The Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI) is a joint effort of Aalto University and the University AI is one of the main research fields in the CS de- of Helsinki to boost and extend AI research and its partment at Aalto, and the work of our professors in applications. It builds on our strong track record in core areas of AI research is showcased by the recent the AI field that has already produced significant cutting-edge results in privacy-preserving machine impact to society in the following three areas: 1) learning, resilient deep learning, agile probabilistic Educating skilled professionals: With our strong AI AI, simulator-based inference, and interactive AI. curriculum, our alumni have taken positions as ex- FCAI is a prominent player in AI research on an inter- perts and executives fulfilling the growing need for national level: Our AI output compares favourably AI professionals in the public and private sectors as to global top-20 universities known for their AI fo- well as in academia. 2) Companies: There is direct cus (University College London UK, Cornell Univer- impact stemming from research since the distance sity USA); and in terms of number of publications in between AI research and products is short and re- top AI journals, we outperform even Stanford (top-3 search results are straightforwardly applicable in university ranked 1st in CS in Times Higher Educa- companies and society. Our work has resulted in tion Ranking). FCAI research programs are led by several spinoff companies, and researchers also 15 high-profile scientists (for the list of researchers, collaborate actively with existing companies in re- see the webpages www.fcai.fi), and ~70 professors search projects. We have organised matchmaking participate in FCAI. events to create new connections between companies, academia and the public sector. 3) Community, The work in the field is multidisciplinary and pro- communications, public discussion, policy making: fessors from different departments and schools Our researchers are actively involved in developing at Aalto are working closely with us in AI-related several open-source software platforms utilizing AI projects. This is demonstrated by our success in methods. Our AI research has received media atten- the recent Academy of Finland AIPSE call, targeting tion, and we participate in both public discussion collaboration of AI researchers and applied fields, and policy making in the field. where FCAI researchers now participate in 6 out of the 9 funded consortia.

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Aalto strategy: As an indication of the significance approximate Bayesian computation’. Proceed- of our AI related research in Aalto’s strategy, FCAI ings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human was selected as one of the two flagship applications Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi. submitted by Aalto University to the Academy of org/10.1145/3025453.3025576 (Jufo 2). Finland Flagship call in November 2017. In January 5. J. Liu, M. Juuti, Y. Lu, and N. Asokan (2017). 2018, FCAI was selected to the second round. ‘Oblivious neural network predictions via MiniONN transformations’. Proceedings of the Major grants and funding: 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. https://dl.acm.org/ Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence: COIN citation.cfm?id=3134056 (Jufo 2). (Computational Inference Research, 2012- 6. A. Vehtari, A. Gelman, and J. Gabrym (2017). 2017), Director: Academy Prof. Samuel Kaski ‘Practical Bayesian model evaluation using (2015-2017), Prof. Emeritus Erkki Oja (2012- leave-one-out cross-validation and WAIC’. Sta- 2014) tistics and Computing, Volume 27, Issue 5, pp Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence: 1413-1432. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11222- SyMMyS (Molecular Systems Immunology and 016-9696-4 (Jufo 2). Physiology Research, 2012-2017), Prof. Harri Lähdesmäki is one of the five team leaders 4. Societal Impact, activities and Academy Professorship to Samuel Kaski (2016- 2020) roadmap for the case ERC Starting Grants: Professors Petteri Kaski AI and education: The FCAI community is respon- (2014-2019), Antti Oulasvirta (Aalto Depart- sible for the university-level AI and Data Science ment of Communications and Networking, education in the Helsinki area, and our researchers 2015-2020), and Parinya Chalermsook (2018- have—among other teaching activities—authored 2023) books widely used in teaching [1,2]. Many of our Academy of Finland ICT2023 call in April 2017: alumni work in companies as experts and executives Computation, machine learning and artificial [3]. As an example of higher education output, the intelligence, FCAI researchers participate in 6 of Centre of Excellence COIN produced in total 42 7 funded consortia and in 6 of 9 other projects PhDs by the end of year 2016 and from Prof. Samuel Academy of Finland AIPSE call in the Septem- Kaski’s group alone 8 lab alumni are now in faculty ber 2017: Novel applications of AI in physical positions. sciences and engineering, FCAI researchers participate in 6 out of the 9 funded consortia Companies: FCAI researchers have had substantial impact through numerous joint projects with industry and through several spinoff companies [4]. 3. Recent references to research / Key FCAI researchers hold more than one hundred artistic activities patents, and we have excellent connections to the 1. A. Rasmus, M. Berglund, M. Honkala, H. Valpola, local startup incubator programs and other eco- and T. Raiko (2015). ‘Semi-supervised learning systems, both local and national. We have coordi- with Ladder networks’. Proc. NIPS. https://arxiv. nated industry-related research activities with over org/pdf/1507.02672.pdf (leading level publica- €100m in budget in the last 5 years. Matchmaking tionJufo 2, based on Publication forum). events organised by us and Aalto Digi Platform have 2. T. Ruotsalo, G. Jacucci, P. Myllymäki, S. Kaski brought together researchers, companies and the (2015). ‘Interactive intent modeling: Infor- public sector involved in AI research [5,6,7]. mation discovery beyond search’. Commun. ACM, Vol. 58, No. 1, Pages 86-92. https://doi. Community, communications, public discussion, org/10.1145/2656334 (Jufo 3). policy making: Prof. Aki Vehtari is one of the core 3. M. U. Gutmann and J. Corander (2016). ‘Bayes- developers of the probabilistic programming plat- ian optimization for likelihood-free inference form Stan, which has tens of thousands of users in of simulator-based statistical models’. Journal industry (including Facebook, Google, Amazon, No- of Machine Learning Research, Volume 17, No vartis) and science (including the research awarded 125, pages 1-47. http://jmlr.org/papers/vol- the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017) [8]. Professors ume17/15-017/15-017.pdf (Jufo 3). Samuel Kaski, Jukka Corander (UH, University of 4. A. Kangasrääsiö, K. Athukorala, A. Howes, Oslo, Sanger Institute) and Aki Vehtari co-direct the J. Corander, S. Kaski, A. Oulasvirta (2017). Engine for Likelihood-free Inference (ELFI) software ‘Inferring cognitive models from data using initiative, which aims to build a community-driven

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ecosystem of simulator models and inference algo- [10] https://tekoalyaika.fi/; the interim report ‘Fin- rithms. The core technology behind the initiative is land’s Age of Artificial Intelligence’ can be found based on our recent breakthrough, which acceler- here. ated inference by several orders of magnitude [9]. [11] Interview of FCAI professors in Helsingin Sano- Academy Prof. Samuel Kaski is a member of the mat (in Finnish) 19.10.2017 (‘Finnish AI experts: steering group appointed by Minister of Economic There is no need to fear AI taking over even Affairs Mika Lintilä [10]. Our work has received -at though it learned to play a game without seeing tention in the media, and we have also arranged any examples’). special events for AI in general, such as a breakfast [12] Media hits counted from the reports provided event in October 2017 for journalists where several by Meltwater and researchers’ TV and radio ap- FCAI professors were available for questions and pearances. comments regarding AI [11]. As an example, in the year 2017, we found media hits in 51 different me- 6. dia channels in Finland and abroad regarding our Future goals AI-related research [12]. We have seen that AI will transform the economy and society by providing new opportunities but also The work we have already done in company and by redistributing work and wealth. To cope with this academic partnerships, AI education, platforms and challenge, FCAI will continue and expand efforts communication will be continued and boosted by already undertaken by Aalto and UH in this field. the impact programs of FCAI. FCAI already has 15 signed intents from companies for partnership. Most recently, Nokia and Aalto an- nounced that AI will be one of their new areas of 5. Sources to support the impact case cooperation and Nokia will participate in FCAI ac- [1] A. Gelman, J. Carlin, H. Stern, D. Dunson, A. tivities. FCAI will play a key role in Finland’s recently Vehtari, and D. Rubin (2013). Bayesian Data published AI agenda to realize the potential for AI- Analysis, Third edition. Chapman & Hall. (over led economic growth, where Finland is expected to 20,000 citations). be in the top position with the United States (see [2] Simo Särkkä (Aalto, Department of Electrical the report by Accenture). More information about Engineering and Automation) (2013). Bayesian the research areas, education and partnership pro- filtering and smoothing. Cambridge University grams, company members and other activities of Press. FCAI can be found on the webpages www.fcai.fi. [3] As an example, Harri Valpola is the CEO and founder of the Curious AI Company that aims at creating artificial general intelligence. Before Curious AI, Valpola founded ZenRobotics Ltd., which applies machine learning in advanced robotics, currently recycling by robots. [4] ZenRobotics, Curious AI, Etsimo, cloudnsci.fi, BayesIT, Ekahau, Multitaction, Moprim, Seneqo, Spaceify. [5] AI Day 13.12.2017 in Dipoli, Otaniemi–600 par- ticipants, over 180 companies represented. [6] Digi Breakfast: AI goes industry 12 September 2017–230 registrations, 78 different companies represented, organised by Aalto Digi Platform. [7] Aalto Digi Matchmaking 23 March 2017–350 registrations, organised by Aalto Digi Platform and CS dept. [8] Stan: A probabilistic programming language. http://mc-stan.org. [9] J. Lintusaari, H. Vuollekoski, A. Kangasrääsiö, K. Skytén, M. Järvenpää, M. Gutmann, A. Vehtari, J. Corander, S. Kaski. (2017). ELFI: Engine for Likelihood Free Inference. arXiv:1708.00707, http://elfi.readthedocs.io..