Dr. Teuvo Kohonen received the IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award for outstanding contributions to the advancement of the theory and applications for neural networks, associative memories and the self-organizing map.

The Award was presented to him at the 2008 World Congress on Computational Intelligence hosted in Hong Kong. I was at the banquet with Dr. Kohonen when he received the award, and I shot a video clip of the ceremony. The video will be uploaded shortly (please visit this post again soon).

Dr. Tuevo Kohonen has made pivotal contributions int he fiedl of artificial neural networks, having developed the self-organizing map (SOM), a data-analysis method that helps with the problem of clustering and data exploration. SOM is regularly used in finance, trade, natural sciences and linguistics. This method and its derivatives are also used in speech recognition and robotics. The SOM method, considered by experts to be one of the most significant inventions in computational science, has been the subject of some 8000 scientific papers, a dozen books and six international workshops that haven been organized using the method. Dr. Kohonen is currently a professor and Academician at Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland. An IEEE Fellow, he has received several awards including the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award, the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Technical Achievement Award and the International Neural Network Society Lifetime Achievement Award. Dr. Kohonen holds a master’s and doctorate in engineering from Helsinki University of Technology and holds three honorary doctorates form Universitat Dortmund in Germany, Abo Akademi in Finland and University of York in England.