Jussi Ahola
- Computer scientist

There was no straight path for Jussi from university studies to remote sensing. While still a student, he had work experience in shipyards and later used his software development talents in neural networks (machine learning) before, in his own words, “drifting into earth observation”.

Now he works at a VTT Technical Research Centre, one of six research institutes in Finland that accept commissions to support clients' product development, or enters into joint venture projects with them. He manages a mixed group of some twenty students and professional researchers. They apply earth observation data to traffic, forest and disaster monitoring. This group develops methods for the pre-processing and analysis of large databases. They deal with forest inventories based on satellite images and the mining and visualising of multi-dimensional data.

Jussi has now had over seven years experience in high level data mining, which is a class of database applications that looks for hidden patterns in a group of data that can be used to predict future behaviour. Jussi works with his team to offer hardware and software solutions to a variety of customers that include civil rescue administrations, forestry companies, city planners, etc. The raw data is collected from a large variety of Earth observation optical and radar satellites and aerial photographs.

He is concerned about the environment and glad that he and his wife are able to live close to the forest and a nature preservation area.