I have defended my thesis!

On 21 March 2014, I have defended my thesis against (?) the opponent, Prof. Nando de Freitas from the University of Oxford. Thanks to all those who have attended the defense as well as the after-party (I haven’t had time nor energy to send a separate thank-you note, but will do soon at least by email!)  The defense in Finland is, from the beginning to the end, public, meaning anyone is welcome to the defense. It starts with a candidate (on Friday, it was me) giving a 20-min introductory lecture on the subject on which the candidate conducted research. The

Research Visit to the University of Montreal

I have just made a research visit to the Machine Learning lab at the University of Montreal led by Prof. Yoshua Bengio for six months (Aug. 2013 – Jan. 2014). It has been an interesting experience to be a part of the lab that is so large and so focused on deep learning. I was fortunate to have collaborated with Yoshua, Razvan, Caglar, Li and others on various topics related to neural networks. In particular, I worked on feedforward neural networks, recurrent neural networks and generative stochastic networks, all of which have not been the focus of my research before.