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Aalto University President Ilkka Niemelä appointed Professor Visa Koivunen from the School of Electrical Engineering’s Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics as a Distinguished Professor at the opening ceremony of the academic year on 1 September 2020. The title is granted to an Aalto University professor whose scientific merits are exceptionally significant.

Professor Koivunen leads the signal processing research group. Signal processing is an extensive field of research related to the analysis and processing of signals and data from physical phenomena and events into relevant information. Koivunen's research focuses on statistical signal processing, sensor array systems, data science, radar and telecommunications technology and machine learning. The results of his work are applied in future radar and radio systems, data analytics, positioning, health monitoring, smart grids and the Internet of Things, for example.

During his productive career, Koivunen has published more than 430 peer-reviewed articles and obtained six patents, and his publications have been cited more than 11 700 times. He has supervised 28 doctoral dissertations and countless master's theses.

Koivunen has received several major international recognitions. He is the second Finn to receive the Fellow title – the highest distinction awarded by the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP). He has been recognised as a Fellow by the IEEE, the world's largest engineering organisation, and was named the IEEE Distinguished Lecturer in signal processing for 2015. Koivunen was awarded the EURASIP Technical Achievement Award in 2015, and he has also won several best article prizes for IEEE articles and international conference publications.

Professor Koivunen served as an Academy Professor appointed by the Academy of Finland in 2010-2014. He was also a principal investigator at the Academy of Finland's Smart and Novel Radios Research Unit (SMARAD) in 2002-2013.

Visa Koivunen earned his doctoral degree in technology at the University of Oulu in 1993, where he also received the primus doctor award. From 1992 to 1995 he was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, USA. Koivunen has been a professor at Aalto University and its predecessor Helsinki University of Technology since 1999.

Koivunen networks closely with the world's leading research universities and he has spent several extended periods as a visiting professor or researcher at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Princeton as well as at the Nokia Research Centre. Since 2010, he has worked for 1-3 months each year at Princeton University.

Koivunen has also held numerous IEEE positions of trust and served on international award and evaluation committees.

He was awarded the Knight First Class of the Order of the White Rose of Finland in 2015.