Professor Maxime Crochemore conferred Doctor Honoris Causa

Professor Maxime Crochemore received the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa of University of Helsinki in a conferment ceremony of the Faculty of Philosophy in 23 May 2014.

Professor Maxime Crochemore conferred Doctor Honoris Causa

Professor Maxime Crochemore received the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa of University of Helsinki in a conferment ceremony of the Faculty of Philosophy in 23 May 2014. Professor Crochemore is one of the founders and leading figures of the international research area of string algorithmics. His research interests include pattern matching, text indexing, coding, and text compression. He also works on the combinatorial background of these subjects and on their applications to bioinformatics. He has published more than 200 original research articles and has written several influential scientific monographs in the area. He is also the initiator of the annual symposium Combinatorial Pattern Matching.

Maxime Crochemore received his PhD in 1978 and Doctorat d'état (DSc) in 1983, Université de Rouen. His first professorship was at Université Paris-Nord in 1985 where acted as the President of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. He became professor at Université Paris 7 in 1989 and was involved in the creation of Université Paris Est (Marne-la-Vallée). He was professor at Université Paris Est for 16 years and research laboratory director for 12 years. Then followed a position as Deputy Scientific Director of the Information and Communication Department of CNRS, 2004-2006. From 2007 he is Professor of Computer Science at King's College London.

The string algorithmics group of the Department of Computer Science has a long-standing contact with professor Crochemore that dates back to the 1980's. On the occasion of the conferment, the Department organized a special seminar in 22 May, talks given by Juha Kärkkäinen, Simon Puglisi, Dominik Kempa, Emanuele Giaquinta, Daniel Valenzuela, Jouni Siren, Travis Gagie, Djamal Belazzougui, Fabio Cunial, Leena Salmela, Jarkko Toivonen, Teppo Ahonen, and Antti Laaksonen.

Picture: Professor Maxime Crochemore together with the string algorithmics researchers at the UH.

Created date

02.06.2014 - 16:41

Not just the local hero

For the Department of Computer Science, the well-being of international staff has a long history. Everyday communication in English is an essential part of this.

“It makes no sense to be just the local hero. If we want to develop further, we’ll need to follow international research standards” emphasises Juergen Muench. The German Professor has been leading the Software Systems Engineering research group at Helsinki University’s Department of Computer Science since 2011.

Linus Torvalds inspiring department students


Linus Torvalds – alumnus of the department, doctor honoris causa of the University of Helsinki, the best known representative of Finnish computer science internationally – visited the Kumpula campus on 23 October. He answered the questions of students and staff during an informal Q&A session attended by some 300 guests. As the floor was open, and Torvalds emphasized that all questions were welcomed, the queries ranged from extreme to extreme

Exactum rooftop greenhouse experiment grows herbs

A greenhouse has been built on the roof of Exactum in a collaboration by the Department of Computer Science and the Fifth Dimension science project. To begin with, sedum grass is growing on the roof and tomatoes, courgettes and chilli in the greenhouse. The greenhouse is 9.4 square metres large.

The motivation for the computer scientists is the estimation that 2% of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans are emitted by equipment using information technology. This is more than e.g. air traffic produces globally. To the scientists, this is reason enough to look into how to decrease the impact of information technology on global warming.

Study, teach and do what is fun

New postgraduates have recently been selected for the HeCSE graduate school that the department shares with Aalto University. One of the rising young researchers is Antti Laaksonen.

 

Antti finished his Master’s degree in spring 2011. Those whose job description includes reading lightweight Scrum theses written for the industry may be heartened by the fact that this student wrote his thesis on a most essential area of computer science, i.e. minimization of regular expressions. Antti chose his topic himself, because it was ‘interesting and suitably challenging.’