Teuvo Kalevi Kohonen (11 July 1934 – 13 December 2021) was a prominent Finnish academic (Dr. Eng.) and researcher. He was professor emeritus of the Academy of Finland.

Prof. Kohonen made many contributions to the field of artificial neural networks, including the Learning Vector Quantization algorithm, fundamental theories of distributed *ociative memory and optimal *ociative mappings, the learning subspace method and novel algorithms for symbol processing like redundant hash addressing. He published several books and over 300 peer-reviewed papers.

Kohonen’s most famous contribution is the Self-Organizing Map, also known as the Kohonen map or Kohonen artificial neural networks, although Kohonen himself prefers SOM. Due to the popularity of the SOM algorithm in many research and in practical applications, Kohonen is often considered to be the most cited Finnish scientist. The current version of the SOM bibliography contains close to 8000 entries.

During most of his career, Prof. Kohonen conducted research at Helsinki University of Technology (TKK). The Neural Networks Research Centre of TKK, a center of excellence appointed by Academy of Finland was founded to conduct research related to Teuvo Kohonen's innovations. After Kohonen's retirement, the center was led by Prof. Erkki Oja and later renamed to Adaptive Informatics Research Centre with widened foci of research.

Teuvo Kohonen was elected the First Vice President of the International *ociation for Pattern Recognition from 1982 to 1984, and acted as the first president of the European Neural Network Society from 1991 to 1992.

For his scientific achievements, Prof. Kohonen received a number of prizes including the following:

• IEEE Neural Networks Council Pioneer Award, 1991
• Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, 1995
• IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award, 2008

Kohonen died on December 13, 2021, at the age of 87.

Some publications

• An introduction to neural computing in Neural Networks, vol. 1, no. 1, pages 3–16, ⋅1988.
• Self-organizing maps, Springer-Verlag, 3rd edition, 2001

External links

• Kohonen, Teuvo (2014): MATLAB Implementations and Applications of the Self-Organizing Map, a text book.
• Interview with Teuvo Kohonen, by CIM Editorial Officer. IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, August 2008, Volume 3, Number 3, pages 4–5. doi:10.1109/MCI.2008.926611

References