Honours programme student Alexandru Mara is learning signals from huge network graphs

Students admitted to the honours programme are associated to one of the Department of Computer Science research groups, and have the opportunity for part-time employment during semesters in research-related work.

Alexandru Mara from Spain, originally from Romania, is studying massive datasets with an intrinsic network structure, such as the Amazon product database, in professor Alexander Jung’s group.

"We are aiming to process datasets by learning relationships from huge data networks by algorithms that arise from efficient convex optimization methods. Our algorithms allow, for instance, to predict the ratings of products which have received little or no review so far.  This is possible since related products tend to obtain similar ratings. Moreover, these learning algorithms allow to predict the customer’s satisfaction with new products in the Amazon product cloud," tells Mara.

Mara has also contributed to the development and running of the special course "Convex Optimization for Big Data" by professor Jung. This is the first course combining Convex Optimization with big data frameworks at Aalto University. He has also been happy to meet with the other machine learning research groups.

Altogether 15 Master’s students from all over the world will have hands-on experience in the actual computer science research. Oleksii Abramenko and Ivan Baranov from Ukraine, Shishir Bhattarai from Nepal, Mustafa Celikok from Turkey, Kunal Ghosh and Preethi Lahoti from India, Alexandru Mara from both Spain and Romania, Van Linh Nguyen from Vietnam and Siddhart Ramchandran from India all study different aspects of machine learning, data mining and probabilistic modelling.

Rinu Boney from India specializes in computer vision, Rory How from the UK studies cloud computing, Xiaoxiao Ma from China participates in game research, Hannu Seppänen from Finland looks into the digital disruption of the industry, and Rajagopalan Ranganathan from India together with Manish Thapa from Nepal are part of the secure systems research group.

More information:

Honours programme

Preethi Lahoti feels very privileged to be part of the Data Mining research group

Van Linh Nguyen has joined the honours programme in computer science