The first group of principal investigators (PI) is starting at ELLIS Institute Finland, the newest expansion of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). A highly competitive first call for AI and machine learning research group leaders attracted 360 applications. Nine rising stars and leading scholars have been recruited from around the world to establish their own research groups and build up the newly established institute. As principal investigators at ELLIS Institute Finland, these researchers will also hold professorships at partner universities across Finland. The new PIs will also include PS Fellows as part of 13 professorships funded by Foundation PS to attract international talent to Finland.
“The new ELLIS Institute scholars are leading researchers in AI and machine learning, and their recruitment shows that Finland is an attractive and competitive hub for this vital field. The growing ELLIS Institute significantly strengthens Finland’s AI expertise, which is in high demand across industry and society,” says Sasu Tarkoma, dean of the Faculty of Science and professor at University of Helsinki.
University of Helsinki welcomes Andrew Cropper, a PS Fellow, as one of the nine new scholars at the ELLIS Institute. Cropper iscurrently a research fellow at the University of Oxford. He works on combining logical reasoning and machine learning, known as inductive logic programming.
“Andrew Cropper's research focuses on inductive logic programming (ILP) which combines knowledge representation and machine learning to integrate logical reasoning with data-driven learning. He has made fundamental breakthroughs in ILP, improving its efficiency, scalability, and ability to handle noisy and numerical data. Andrew's research complements department's existing work on machine learning and artificial intelligence research and opens new possibilities for broad impact across many fields of science,” says Jussi Kangasharju, Head of Department and professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki.
“University of Helsinki has world-class researchers in both logical reasoning and machine learning. I am excited to bring these communities together to tackle problems neither could solve alone, combining logical reasoning's clear explanations with machine learning's pattern-finding abilities. My goal is to establish Helsinki as a global leader in hybrid AI, developing systems that are both powerful and understandable,” says professor Andrew Cropper.
In total nine new PIs, rest listed below, will join the institute during the 2025-2026 academic year. ELLIS Institute Finland will hold its launch event in November 2025, and further international calls for new researchers will be announced this fall.
Qi Chen is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include trustworthy and efficient AI, with a future focus on the theories and applications of generative AI. She will be co-affiliated with Aalto University.
Michael Cochez is currently an assistant professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research interests are in knowledge graph embedding, scalable hierarchical clustering, prototype-based ontologies, ontology matching and knowledge evolution. He will be a PS Fellow affiliated with Åbo Akademi University.
Francesco Croce is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). His research focuses on multimodal foundation models, with a particular interest in their adversarial robustness and alignment with human perception. He will be a PS Fellow affiliated with Aalto University.
Azade Farshad is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Technical University of Munich. Her research interests are semantic scene modeling, generative models, and graph learning for general and healthcare applications. She will be co-affiliated with Aalto University.
Shaoxiong Ji is currently a research group leader at the Technical University of Darmstadt. His research interests are multilingual large language models and health applications. He will be a PS Fellow affiliated with the University of Turku.
Mikko Karttunen is currently professor of physics and chemistry, and Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in computational materials and biomaterials research at the University of Western Ontario. His research interests are in materials science, biology and biomedical sciences, with high-performance simulations, machine learning and AI. He will be a PS Fellow affiliated with the University of Eastern Finland.
Simone Parisiis currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta. His research interests are in reinforcement learning, especially in the fields of exploration, representation learning, partial observability, transfer learning, and multi-objective optimization. He will be co-affiliated with Tampere University.
Jiancheng (JC) Yang is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). His research emphasizes spatial intelligence for healthcare, leveraging geometric, generative, and multimodal deep learning, and translating these methods into real-world clinical impact. He will be co-affiliated with Aalto University.
About ELLIS Institute Finland
Established in 2025, ELLIS Institute Finland is the second institute in ELLIS, the pan-European AI network of excellence. It functions as a world-class research hub in AI and machine learning and a unique gateway to collaboration Europe-wide and globally. For researchers, the institute offers a dynamic, international research environment, access to cutting-edge computing resources (including the EuroHPC LUMI supercomputer), and close ties to both academia and industry in Finland and beyond. The institute operates in partnership with Finnish universities, RDI organizations and businesses, and is funded by Finland's Ministry of Education and Culture, partner organizations and private sources such as Foundation PS, established by Peter Sarlin to strengthen Finland’s and Europe’s AI ecosystem.