People

Laura Ruotsalainen is a Professor of Spatiotemporal Data Analysis for Sustainability Science at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She leads the Spatiotemporal Data Analysis (SDA) group, which develops novel machine learning methods for complex spatiotemporal systems, with a focus on computer vision (including diffusion and flow-based models, neural radiance fields and Gaussian splatting), multi-objective hierarchical decision-making, and representation learning.

She serves as Vice-chair of the management board of the and is a member of the steering group of the Finnish Center for AI (FCAI), where she leads AI and Sustainability activities. She serves on the Board of Directors of , where she is responsible for AI research. She is also a professor at the Helsinki Institute of sustainability Science (), which is a cross-faculty research unit in sustainability science within the University of Helsinki.

Klavdiia Bochenina is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Spatiotemporal Data analysis group (SDA), department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki. She has a PhD in Computer Science on scheduling for cloud computing applications. Before joining the SDA group, she worked as a Senior Researcher and the Head of the Algorithmics of Complex Systems research lab at National Center for Cognitive Studies of ITMO University. In the SDA group she works in the Artificial Intelligence for Urban Low-Emission Autonomous Traffic (AIForLessAuto). Her research interests include complex systems simulation, modelling of socio-economical systems, complex networks, data-driven modelling and forecasting, parallel and distributed computing.

Linsen Gao is a postdoctoral researcher at the Spatiotemporal Data Analysis (SDA) Group. She received her Ph.D. in Information and Communication Engineering from Harbin Engineering University in 2023. She is currently working on the Matine project, where she improves multiple-object tracking using deep learning, and the AIOSUT project, which focuses on developing advanced artificial intelligence for enhancing urban sustainability. Her research interests include target detection, association, and tracking methods, as well as deep learning and reinforcement learning.

Dominik Kuczkowski joined SDA group in spring 2024 as a research assistant. Initially he worked with Sara Pyykölä on offline multi-objective reinforcement learning and SUMO simulations. He wrote his master’s thesis on the topic. At the beginning of 2025, Dominik became an FCAI doctoral researcher supervised by Laura Ruotsalainen and Ville Kyrki. In his work he tries to utilize the power of generative vision models, such as diffusion or flow models, to solve complicated computer vision problems in a sample efficient way. He holds a BEng degree in Automatic control, Cybernetics and Robotics from Gdansk University of Technology and a MSc degree in Computer Science from University of Helsinki.

Teemu Sarapisto started as a doctoral researcher in the Spatiotemporal Data Analysis group in the fall of 2022. Before that he worked as a research assistant and did his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in computer science at the University of Helsinki. He has over 5 years of industry experience from working in companies such as Varjo, Yleisradio, and Reaktor among others. Previously he focused on topics such as computer vision, hyperspectral imaging, 3D graphics, and web development. Currently he is working in the space system failure prediction (NASA) project, doing research on machine learning for anomaly detection from high-dimensional sensor data.

Wenzhe (Berry) Tian started as a doctoral researcher in SDA group at the beginning of 2026. Before that he conducted research in computational imaging and low-level vision. Currently he's working at the intersection of diffusion models, object pose estimation, and world models, aiming to advance 3D and dynamic scene understanding. He wrote his master's thesis on developing a diffusion-based framework for pose estimation task, with a focus on improving the generalization. Previously he received his master's degree of computer science from University of Helsinki and bachelor's degree of software engineering from Northwestern Polytechnical University. 

(Cosmo) Haoyu Wei started his Ph.D. in the fall 2022, co‑supervised by Associate Professor Arto Klami, and Professor Laura Ruotsalainen. Currently he is working in the space system failure prediction project with Teemu Sarapisto, doing research on deep learning for time-series analysis and  anomaly detection from high-dimensional sensor data. Before he received his Master’s degree in data science from the University of Helsinki and Bachelor’s degree in Control Engineering from Zhejiang University.