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Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis will hold an information session concerning summer internships on Tuesday, January 12 at 14.15-16.00 in Zoom. The department’s research groups will also be briefly presented (http://math.aalto.fi/en/research/). The official advertisement of the internships will be published on the home page of the department at http://math.aalto.fi/en/ on January 11. The application period ends on January 31.
A link to the Zoom session https://aalto.zoom.us/j/65395644589
The results of the internship can be reported as, e.g., a bachelor’s thesis or a special assignment. Many topics can be continued toward a master’s thesis.
Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis at Aalto University School of Science is looking for
interns for the summer of 2021.
A summer internship includes research under the supervision of a professor or a person designated by a professor. The department’s professors are divided into research groups as follows:
- Algebra and Discrete Mathematics: Chris Brzuska, Alexander Engström, Camilla Hollanti, Kaie Kubjas
- Analysis and Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations: Kari Astala, Juha Kinnunen, Riikka Korte
- Numerical Analysis: Antti Hannukainen, Nuutti Hyvönen, Vanni Noferini, Rolf Stenberg
- Stochastics, Statistics, and Mathematical Physics: Pauliina Ilmonen, Kalle Kytölä, Lasse Leskelä
- Systems and Operations Research: Fabricio Oliveira, Antti Punkka, Ahti Salo, Kai Virtanen
More information on the research groups: http://math.aalto.fi/en/research/. The results of the internship can be reported as, e.g., a bachelor’s thesis or a special assignment. Many topics can be continued toward a master’s thesis.
- free-form application
- cv
- transcript of records (does not have to be official)
The free-form application must include
1) Preferred topics for the summer internship. It is recommendable to give a priority list of several topics. A list of summer internship topics offered by the professors can be found here: https://math.aalto.fi/en/current/summer_trainees and Systems Analysis Laboratory - Summer jobs (aalto.fi).
2) Description of previous (summer) employment at the department.
3) Start and end dates of the internship. A summer internship typically lasts for three months. A six-day vacation must be taken during the summer, preferably in July.
The summer interns are selected based on their academic merits, suitability of their studies, other relevant skills and possible interviews.
A link to the electronic application form can be found here. An application and its attachments must form a single pdf file: lastname_firstname.pdf
Fill in and submit the electronic application and its appendices at the latest on January 31, 2021. The summer trainees will be selected before February 28. All applicants will be informed about the decision.
More information
Nuutti Hyvönen (nuutti.hyvonen@aalto.fi)
For information on practical issues related to the recruitment process, contact Johanna Glader (tel. 050 411 7666, johanna.glader@aalto.fi).
Opponent is Professor Herbert De Gersem, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
Custos is Professor Antti Hannukainen, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis
Contact details of the doctoral candidate: Lauri Perkkiö, Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis, 0400620864, lauri.perkkio@gmail.com, Otakaari 1 F, room M329
Scientific Communication Award
Pauliina Ilmonen
Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis
“Pauliina has been super active during this exceptional year explaining the spreading of the virus to the general public in various media. She is enthusiastic and engaging, and a great role model for girls and young women. Two years ago in her Shaking up Tech presentation, she stated that ‘Science geeks rock!’. She’s definitely a rock star of statistics.”
See Pauliina on Yle’s A-studio: https://areena.yle.fi/1-50330942?seek=1841
Team-building and Co-operation Award
Kendrick Bingham
Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis / SCI Technical Services
Kenny has had a key role this year in enabling the shift to hybrid mode of working for the School of Science and the Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis. He has a wide general picture of the matters of the School and department. He is extremely helpful and positive in all possible ways. Kenny is helpful and inspiring, professional, and multiply skilled person when it comes to IT issues.
“Sometimes I wonder what are Kenny's tasks according to his job description - he knows about everything and at the same time is friendly and helpful. He is dedicated to helping others and in particular making researchers' life easier.”
“Kenny is a genuinely cheerful and positive person. There is no such bad weather he wouldn’t cycle to work. And even if it would sleet horizontally, he would sing out very good morning to the department. A savior of mornings!”
Teaching Award
Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis
"Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis transferred all the basic courses and exams of mathematics to remote mode very efficiently in spring 2020. More students than ever participated in these courses and overall the credit points given by the department increased by more than 30% compared to the previous year. In addition, the department offered summer courses online. In the autumn 2020 the departments’ service teaching was done in hybrid mode with lectures online and exercise sessions on campus. Due to the restrictions in group sizes, there were 150 exercise groups, and in the beginning of the semester the department stretched to organize even more groups to serve the high number of students.
To accept the award on behalf of the department we have: Pekka Alestalo, Ragnar Freij-Hollanti, Harri Hakula, Björn Ivarsson, Jukka Kohonen, Jarmo Malinen, Georg Metsalo, Anssi Mirka, Ville Turunen, David Radnell, Matti Harjula
When she was in the ninth grade at school, Kaie Kubjas’ physics teacher gave the girls in her class a different test than what the boys got. The reason was that the teacher thought that girls are not as good in physics. At the time Kubjas won second place in a regional physics competition in Estonia – and she was given the boys’ test by the teacher. Now Kubjas is a professor of mathematics at Aalto University, and the Deputy Convenor of the European Women in Mathematics association.
‘Sometimes prevailing attitudes in society suggest that girls would not be good at mathematics. It is important to give encouragement to girls and young women if they are unsure of their abilities. Teachers can invite gifted girls and women to take part in training or competitions, for instance,’ Kaie Kubjas says.
‘My father studied mathematics and he never said that girls were incapable of doing mathematics or physical sciences. I was lucky that my family always encouraged my interest in mathematics,’ Kubjas adds.
Kaie Kubjas is from Estonia, a country where more than half of all mathematics students are women. Many of them also become teachers of mathematics.
‘I am surprised at the small number of women studying mathematics at Aalto. There are hardly any young women studying for a master's degree in mathematics. However, almost a quarter of the current professors are women. But where will the female professors of mathematics of the future come from if there are hardly any female students?’ Kubjas asks.
Kubjas has taken part in research around the world. In Berlin, there were some women among mathematics students, but she never saw any female professors giving lectures there. In Paris she did research at a department of computer science where she met no women as professors at all. The situation was better at an information and data systems laboratory at MIT in Boston, where there were some women both among researchers and professors.
Association activities
European Women in Mathematics is an association that was founded in 1986 and Kaie Kubjas started as its Deputy Convenor in July. It has 300-400 members. In addition to Kubjas, three researchers from Aalto are actively involved. Professor Camilla Hollanti has served as the association's treasurer for several years. Doctoral student Olga Kuznetsova is responsible for the association's website and its technical maintenance. Doctoral student Ellie Dillon writes articles for the group's newsletter and takes part in compiling the newsletter.
Activities of the association include a General Meeting, which convenes once every four years. In August 2022 it will be held in Finland. In addition, EWM events take place at the European Congress of Mathematicians also held every four years. Local events are also held in different countries. There are also mentoring programmes, travel grants being distributed, and job openings being listed.
At present European Women in Mathematics has an ongoing appeal on behalf of women and researchers with families, who are just starting their research careers. Even in the time of the coronavirus women are generally more involved in caring for family members, be they children or the elderly. On the other hand, conferences have been cancelled and other types of networking among researchers has become more difficult, and these challenges are not equally distributed. The association is appealing to universities to extend fixed-term contracts for young researchers, for example.
‘The appeal now has over 800 signatures and many organizations have also expressed their support,’ Kubjas says.
The open letter will remain open until March 2021.
Title of the dissertation is: “On Hypercomplex and Time-Frequency Analysis"
Opponent is Professor Paula Cerejeiras, University of Aveiron, Portugal
Custos is Professor Juha Kinnunen, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis
Contact information of the doctoral candidate: Vesa Vuojamo, Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis, +358500654241, vesa.vuojamo@aalto.fi
The public defence will be organised via Zoom.
https://aalto.zoom.us/j/65397035228
Title of the dissertation is "New approaches for modeling and estimation of discrete and continuous time stationary processes”
Opponent is Professor Paavo Salminen, Åbo Akademy, Finland
Custos is Assistan Professor Pauliina Ilmonen, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis
Contact details of the doctoral candidate: Marko Voutilainen, Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis, marko.voutilainen@aalto.fi, p. 0404131617
The public defence will be organised via Zoom. Link to the event: https://aalto.zoom.us/j/61650076687
he NordicMathCovid project aims to model corona and future epidemics more extensively than has been previously attempted. It also builds towards long-term cooperation in mathematical modelling and extensive collection of health data.
"’One of the purposes of the project is to compare different corona models and scenarios in different countries. For example, we can apply Swedish figures to conditions in Finland and Norway or see what would have happened if Sweden had acted differently,’ says Professor Lasse Leskelä from Aalto University.
Traditional epidemic modelling does not take into account the network structure, geographical location or human mobility. Modern network theory provides computational methods for modelling population contact structures, which is needed in order to assess, for example, the contribution of school closures towards slowing down the epidemic.
‘We are studying large populations. We do not assume that individuals are associated to each other on an entirely random basis; instead, we apply knowledge about how social networks are usually shaped: some people, such as superspreaders, have more contacts than others. In addition, social networks are clustered, which means that the connections are interlaced,’ explains Professor Mikko Kivelä.
The large variations in contacts, mobility and social activity in different population groups have a significant impact on the spread of the epidemic and the formation of immunity. In order to understand these phenomena, the project will develop new stochastic models.
Read more: https://www.aalto.fi/en/news/new-epidemic-modelling-facilitates-assessment-of-corona-strategies
Title of the dissertation is: "On blind source separation under exotic data structures"
Opponent is Professor Davy Paindaveine, Universite de Libre Bruxelles, Belgium
Custos is Assistan Professor Pauliina Ilmonen, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis
Contact details of the doctoral candidate: Niko Lietzén, matematiikan ja systeemianalyysin laitos, tel. +358408374036, niko.lietzen@aalto.fi
The public defence will be organised via Zoom.
https://aalto.zoom.us/j/68817346436
Title of the dissertation is "Well-rounded lattices and applications to physical layer security".
Physical layer communication is a family of methods and techniques that are dedicated to ensuring reliability and security by exploiting noisy communication channels’ characteristics.
In plain terms, the present thesis is devoted to using our understanding of the noise to propose reliable and secure codes. Indeed, one can define a reliable communication system as a system where the probability of error is as small as possible. Similarly, a secure communication scheme can be seen as a system where the chances of an eavesdropper recovering the message are minimal. In the wireless setting, these optimisation problems can be again translated to finding configurations of points in Euclidean space satisfying some given properties. In fact, one can represent signals of finite bandwidth by points in Euclidean space, and this representation allowed mathematicians to see codewords or messages as geometric objects. More precisely, we can consider cookbooks as discreet sets in Euclidean spaces.
Lattices are simply discrete subgroups of Euclidean spaces. Consequently, many reliability and security problems can be reformulated as optimisation problems on the space of all lattices.
The space of all lattices has many technical difficulties, thus, a natural direction to take is to restrict our problems to “smaller” subspaces, in our case, we considered a particular subset of lattices called well rounded lattices, and our investigation laid on studying the restriction of some communication problems to these lattices.
The significance of this restriction can be supported by the fact that well rounded lattices are rare among all lattices. Hence, constructing them is also an interesting problem in its own right. Our study is further supported by explicit constructions where we used number theoretic methods or more precisely the arithmetics of number fields to capture the well roundedness property.
Opponent is Professor Kazim Büyükboduk, University College Dublin, Ireland
Custos is Professor Camilla Hollanti, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis
Contact information of the doctoral candidate: Mohamed Taoufiq Damir, 0505215321, mohamed.damir@aalto.fi / mohamed.taoufiq.damir@gmail.com
The public defence will be organised via Zoom. The link will be added here later.
Zoom Quick Guide:https://www.aalto.fi/en/services/zoom-quick-guideThe dissertation is publicly displayed as online display 10 days before the defence at:https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/doc_public/eonly/riiputus/?lang=en
Title of the dissertation is: "Solution of coupled acoustic eigenvalue problems".
Opponent is Professor Kathrin Smetana, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Custos is Professor Antti Hannukainen, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis
Contact details of the doctoral candidate: Antti Ojalammi, Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis, tel. 050 410 3187, antti.ojalammi@aalto.fi
The public defence will be organised via Zoom.
https://aalto.zoom.us/j/67688067521
Zoom Quick Guide:https://www.aalto.fi/en/services/zoom-quick-guideThe dissertation is publicly displayed as online display 10 days before the defence at:https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/doc_public/eonly/riiputus/?lang=en
The Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis is seeking
New hourly-paid teachers in Mathematics and Systems Analysis for spring term 2021
Your tasks include teaching in exercise groups and grading exercises and exams.
Regarding teaching in mathematics, we expect the applicants to have completed at least 20 credits of mathematical studies at university level with good grades. Regarding teaching in systems analysis (courses MS-C/E2xxx), we expect the applicants to have completed the course they are interested in. If you have previous experience in teaching, it is considered as an advantage, but is not necessary. This is a part-time job (2-4 hours/week). The salary is 30-40 euros/teaching hour based on your education level.
Grading exercises and exams will be (typically) compensated separately (300-400 euros depending on your education and the course level).
Apply for this job through an eRecruitment system.
Attach a cv, a transcript of records, and an open motivation letter as one PDF file.
Deadline for the applications is Thursday 5 November.
Based on the applications, we will invite some of the applicants for a web interview.
More information: johanna.glader@aalto.fi
More information:
johanna.glader(at)aalto.fi
Note: if you have previously worked as an hourly-based teacher at the MS Department, you will receive a separate link from johanna.glader(at)aalto.fi.
In their most recent article, Finnish civil servants Jussi Lindgren and Jukka Liukkonen, who study quantum mechanics in their free time, take a look at the uncertainty principle that was developed by Heisenberg in 1927. According to the traditional interpretation of the principle, location and momentum cannot be determined simultaneously to an arbitrary degree of precision, as the person conducting the measurement always affects the values.
However, in their study Lindgren and Liukkonen concluded that the correlation between a location and momentum, i.e. their relationship, is fixed. In other words, reality is an object that does not depend on the person measuring it. Lindgren and Liukkonen utilized stochastic dynamic optimization in their study. In their theory’s frame of reference, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a manifestation of thermodynamic equilibrium, in which correlations of random variables do not vanish.
Further information:
Article: The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as an Endogenous Equilibrium Property of Stochastic Optimal Control Systems in Quantum Mechanics https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/12/9/1533
Jussi Lindgren
jussi.lindgren@aalto.fi
Jukka Liukkonen
jukka.liukkonen@stuk.fi
Title of the dissertation is "Risk-informed optimization of mitigation strategies in safety-critical systems"
The performance of industrial systems can be compromised due to multiple risks, caused by accidents and threats. Such risks may result in system failure, which leads to safety, financial and environmental consequences. For this reason, industrial organizations need to invest in the design and operations of their production systems in order to improve the reliability, availability, maintainability and safety of their systems.
This dissertation proposes an innovative framework to assess and select risk mitigation strategies in the design and operations of systems, based on the minimization of risks of the overall system. In this framework, the analysis of systemic risks integrates component-based analyses to manage the industrial system optimally while satisfying budget and technical constraints. The applicability of this framework is illustrated by re-examining case studies which have been previously analyzed in literature as well as by presenting new real-life case studies based on statistical data and expert judgement.
The methodological and computational results of the dissertation can be readily adapted to develop further applications in other areas of industrial activity.
Opponent: Professor Lesley Walls, University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom
Custos: Professor Ahti Salo, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis
Supervising professors: Professor Ahti Salo, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis and Professor Enrico Zio, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Contact information: Alessandro Mancuso, Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis, alessandro.mancuso@aalto.fi
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