News

From Mars to machine learning

Aalto PhD student Tuomas Kynkäänniemi did summer- and part-time work at the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) calibrating sensor of a Mars rover, but his research is now worlds away
On the right, NASAs perseverence rover, on the right, a selection of GAN generated images showing some convinving and some bad pictures of dogs, mountains, lighthouses and wine
Left: Artist's impression of Perseverance’s landing, Credit: Nasa/JPL Right: GAN image samples Credit: Kynkäänniemi et al. (2019) Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models.

A project that Aalto University PhD Student Tuomas Kynkäänniemi was working with at the summer 2017 has reached worldwide attention, as part of the Perseverance rover that just landed on Mars on Thursday night. 

In 2016 as an undergraduate student at Aalto university studying engineering physics, Kynkäänniemi got a summer research job at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, working in what is now the Planetary Research and Space Technology Group at FMI. Kynkääniemi’s job was to help with the calibration of the temperature and pressure sensors that make up MEDA a Martian weather station that takes a wide range of atmospheric measurements that FMI helped develop. ‘The sensors give an electrical signal, and my job was to take that electrical signal and turn it into a ‘real world’ unit, like degrees celsius’

Kynkäänniemi’s work now is “on another planet” as he puts it, from his engineering work from his student internship days. He now works in the Computer Science research group of Jaakko Lehtinen, developing machine learning methods called generative models for generating highly realistic images. ‘When I finished my job with FMI, the field of machine learning, and generative models were very exciting and interesting to me. I got an internship at Nvidia Finland and started working in this area instead, so when it came to choosing what to focus on for my Master’s project, I swapped from engineering physics to computer science.’ Professor Lehtinen also worked at Nvidia as a principal research scientist, and Kynkäänniemi did his master’s project with him developing a method for evaluating the performance of AI that generates images.

Tuomas Kynkäänniemi.
Tuomas Kynkäänniemi NeurIPS 2019 -konferenssissa.

‘A model that generates images needs to meet two criteria,’ explain Kynkäänniemi, ‘they need to be realistic looking, but they also need to be highly variable. It’s no good if your model can only turn out one realistic looking image and they all look the same. It needs to make a wide range of realistic looking pictures.’ Kynkäänniemi's master's thesis was given the MSc Thesis Award of 2018-2019 by the Finnish Society for Computer Science, and was also published as a paper for the NeurIPS 2019 conference.

Kynkäänniemi describes his research path from undergraduate to now as a bit of a ‘random walk’ but he hopes it inspires other students, and people thinking about studying technology at university. ‘I hope my example shows that if you are open-minded and curious, you can get the opportunity to work on lots of very different and fascinating projects’

Read more

For more information about the FMI involvement with the Mars Perseverance lander, you can read about it on their website  

You can read Kynkäänniemi’s master’s thesis here: https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/39830 

Link to research article:https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2019/file/0234c510bc6d908b28c70ff313743079-Paper.pdf

Forbes AI Award to research on image-creating GAN models

The magazine pays tribute to the development of a model that starkly reduces the amount of data needed for generating new, artificial images

Lue lisää
Gan.uvia

A student satellite project launched alumna Maria Hieta’s career in the space industry

Alumna Maria Hieta majored in Space Science and Technology.

Lue lisää
Aalto-yliopisto / Maria Hieta / photo: Maria Hieta
  • Published:
  • Updated:

Read more news

Kampuksen uudet ulkokalusteet
Campus, Studies Published:

Vote for the best idea! How do we spend 14 000 euros on student wellbeing?

In autumn 2024, students were asked to come up with ideas on how the university should spend 14 000 euros to improve student wellbeing on campus. Now it's time to vote for the best idea to be implemented during spring 2025.
Alum Maria Kupila
Cooperation, Studies Published:

Alum Maria Kupila: ‘I strongly believe in the power of multidisciplinary approach’

An IDBM alum Maria Kupila has embraced the multidisciplinary approach in her work in management consulting. She believes combining design thinking, technology and strategic analysis is a key to changing future challenges into opportunities.
A man Diving into radical creativity online course. photo Lina Jelanski
Studies Published:

Boost your skills: learn the basics of radical creativity

Creative thinking and related ability to change are core competencies of the future in all fields. Aalto University will launch a free online introductory course on radical creativity in Finnish and English on November 14, 2024.
Photo: Ville Heirola/Aalto University.
Appointments, Research & Art Published:

Call for two Assistant Professors in Computational Physics

The Department of Applied Physics at Aalto University School of Science invites applications for two Assistant professor positions in Computational Physics.