The first few weeks at Eigenor

For a long period of time, I was troubled by being interested in seemingly unrelated topics across technology and science. Earlier hobbies included programming and electronics: even radar maintenance in the Finnish military service, which resulted in a spark of interest towards signal processing. Later, the studies at Helsinki University of Technology converged to an odd combination of computer science studies: topics like data mining and machine learning as the major subject (those guys usually have statistics and math as their minor), while having software techniques and interactive digital media as the minor subjects (those people turn out web or game technology wizards of some sort).

Yet another set of spices to the multidisciplinary soup were added, when I continued postgraduate studies in the ISMO research project and the reformed Aalto University. It included studies on performing statistical pattern recognition on signals produced by wireless accelerometers. After spending my share of time in academia, it felt natural to continue in bringing the knowledge to industrial use. By the way, this would be called a shift from "exploration" to "exploitation" in the artificial intelligence jargon.

 

At Eigenor, I have finally found a place to utilize my expertise on both software engineering and data processing. It is wonderful to work in a group where colleagues appreciate both the nasty field of statistical modeling and the tedious business of developing practical software. Even my interest towards 3D computer graphics seems to pay off, since working on computed tomography requires a solid understanding of geometry and projections.

 

Obviously, working in a commercial environment has differences to the academia, like keeping business secrets. Other than that, I have found surprisingly many similarities, like debugging sensor data, especially related to the measurement geometry, and dealing with sparsity or incompleteness of data, and accessing vast amounts of it in a proper way. I'm not a tomography guru (yet!), but have been able to catch up with the code and math relatively fast.

 

 

Janne Toivola 
Jr. Software Engineer
Eigenor Corporation