Royal Holloway logo and departmental theme Royal Holloway, University of London

Professor Jorma Rissanen

J. Rissanen photo
Position Visiting Professor
Email Jorma.Rissanen@hiit.fi
Research Area Minimum Description Length

Brief Biography

The Centre of Reliable Machine Learning and Department of Computer Science at Royal Holloway University of London is sad to announce the passing of its Visiting Professor and the winner of the 2006 Kolmogorov Lecture and Medal, Prof. Jorma Rissanen on the 9th of May 2020. He will be remembered for his pioneering work on Minimum Description Length principle which he presented in his inspired talk at 1998 Colloquium "Importance of Being Learnable".


We lost a great scientist and a friend of the department. The obituary will appear in the September Edition of the Information Theory Society Newsletter in 9/2020 (early excerpt here).

Jorma Rissanen is one of the founders of Minimum Description Length, a new inductive principle in machine learning. He has carried out significant research in the fields of control, prediction and system theories, relation theory, numerical mathematics, information and coding theory, probability theory and statistics. He has now retired from IBM Research in San Jose after more than three decades of research, and is a fellow of the Helsinki Intitute for Information Technology (HIIT). He is also a Professor Emeritus at Tampere University of Technology. He has published more than a hundred papers and a monograph "Stochastic Complexity in Statistical Inquiry".

He was one of the invited speakers at the Colloquium "The Importance of being Learnable" hosted by the Computer Learning Research Centre at Royal Holloway in September 1998, and has since been appointed Visiting Professor in Computer Science at Royal Holloway.

Professor Rissanen gave an invited talk in the MDL Workshop in connection with the NIPS conference in Whistler, BC, in December 2001.

He gave the Fourth Annual Kolmogorov Lecture on 3 February 2006.

Professor Rissanen will be one of the guest editors of the EURASIP Journal on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology's special issue on Information Theoretic Methods for Bioinformatics. For further information or to submit a paper, please see the journal's website.


Last updated Wed, 17-Jun-2009 15:57 GMT
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