When I landed in Finland, almost six full years ago, I would have never imagined I would come to call the place home one day. I knew close to nothing about Finland, a country which has a very limited visibility in Italy. I found out I knew some of its most popular exported products very well, but […]
Ch- ch- changes!
I have been neglecting my blog lately as some major changes happened in my life. About three weeks ago I said goodbye to academia and started working at RELEX Solutions, a growing Finnish (& international) software company which offers automatized solutions for managing the supply chain processes. Leaving academia - after about 10 years, studying […]
Childcare at conferences: guidelines
I have been talking so much(*) about childcare at conferences that someone may think this has become a parenting blog. This post aims at summarising why organisers should offer support to parents working in academia and how exactly they can do that. Why you should do it I can give you plenty of reasons why. […]
A small guide to Random Forest - part 2
This is the second part of a simple and brief guide to the Random Forest algorithm and its implementation in R. If you missed Part I, you can find it here. randomForest in R R has a package called randomForest which contains a randomForest function. If you want to explore in depth this implementation, I […]
A small guide to Random Forest - part 1
I've recently started playing with Kaggle and got curious about one of the most famous classification/regression framework, Random Forest. In a problem of classification or regression, several random decision trees (a "forest") are built and at the end the outputs are combined ("bagging"). The intuition is that randomness and a meaningful quantity of trees will avoid […]
Women in Mathematics in Finland: Amal Attouchi
As promised, the series of lectures continues, after the inaugural event hosted by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of University of Helsinki. This time I'll travel to University of Jyväskylä and the guest speaker will be Amal Attouchi, local postdoctoral researcher. Amal graduated in 2014 at Université Paris XIII, with a thesis on PDEs titled […]
The man who knew infinity: a movie about Ramanujan
Thank you Youtube suggestions! Today I came across this trailer of an upcoming movie, "The man who knew infinity". The movie depicts the story of one of the finest minds of last century and one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Srinivasa Ramanujan. He was what you'd call a true genius, an independent thinker […]
Lego stay-at-home dad: a reflection on role and hidden bias
Few days ago, Lego Group presented some new figurines which depicted a father caring for an infant baby, along with the mother in an office outfit. The goal is to “mirror the world we live in today,” Lego says. I came across the news through one of the major Italian newspaper, La Repubblica. The title, translated […]
Open Data: CT datasets and prototypes
In my research work, I often find it difficult to get datasets for X-ray CT for method validation, neither simulated and real data. Of course, there's the classic Shepp-Logan phantom, but in many cases it would save a lot of work to download datasets to test one's methods. As for my knowledge, there is no broad […]
Paula Eerola, coordinating Finnish physics research at CERN
I publish here my interview to Paula Eerola, which was originally published on the blog of our local network of women in science, Kumpula Women's Network. Since January 1st, 2016, the Helsinki Institute of Physics has a new appointed director, Prof. Paula Eerola from University of Helsinki. Paula is the 4th director of the Institute since its start of […]