Invited Speaker---Prof. Pasi Fränti


School of Computing, University of Eastern Finland, Finland

Biography: Pasi Fränti received his MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Turku, 1991 and 1994 in Science. Since 2000, he has been a professor of Computer Science at the University of Eastern Finland. He has published 75 journals and 166 peer review conference papers, including 14 IEEE transaction papers. Pasi Fränti is the head of the Machine Learning research group. His current research interests include clustering algorithms, location-based services, data, web and text mining. He has supervised 25 PhD graduates and is currently supervising eight more. Pasi Fränti’s free time hobbies include all kinds of sport activities such as running, chess, running chess, football, floorball, orienteering, marathons and ice swimming. He has completed more than 30 marathons including Boston, Berlin, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Speech Title: Social and health care services: How to define it as an optimization problem?
Abstract: Aging of people is causing increasing unbalance between people who are working and those needed to be taken care. This gives tremendous pressure for organizing social and health care services more efficiently. Due to digitalization, we now have much better access to demographic data, where people live, work, and even aggregated health records. In this study, we outline how the organization of these services could be modeled as an optimization problem where the cost and quality of the services are the main indicators. We focus on the location aspect in sparsely lived areas where the problem can be modeled as a clustering problem including also routing, travelling salesman, and assignment as sub-problems. We present preliminary data from an on-going project in Finland.