Joel Ensio Kaasinen

Who

An undergrad student at the CS department of The University of Helsinki. My interests include mathematics (esp. algebra and logic), type theory, programming languages and Linux.

I have (somewhat dormant) a blog.

I'm on Google+

I endorse:

• Haskell - a pure functional programming language of astounding elegance
• Git - distributed fileystem infrastructure in the guise of a DVCS
• Ion - static tiled window manager par excellence
• Lua - a minimalist but powerful dynamic scripting language
• GNU Emacs - my editor of choice

Play

Sakura is a short film by me and a few friends. It premiered at Assembly 2008.

I'm active in the student organisations Lambda and TKO-Äly

I'm a member of Fixme Internet-käyttäjät ry, a small group that maintains a bunch of servers for tinkering purposes.

Work

I've done miscellaneous prototyping and research at Nokia Research Center and at the Helsinki Institute of Information Technology.

I also do teaching assistant on some courses at University of Helsinki. An incomplete list:

• Autumn 2008: Laskennan mallit / Models of computation. Teaching assistant.
• Autumn 2009: Formal Type Theory. Teaching assistant.
• Spring 2009: Johdatus funktionaaliseen ohjelmointiin / Introduction to Functional Programming. Co-lecturer.
• Summer 2009: Haskell-harjoitustyö / Haskell project
• Spring 2011: Clojure programming. Co-lecturer.
• Spring 2012: Johdatus funktionaaliseen ohjelmointiin / Introduction to Functional Programming. Lecturer.

Currently I'm employed at Zenrobotics, a startup that works on bestowing robots with intelligence by using machine learning. I also lecture on Haskell and topics in functional programming now and then at Helsinki University.

Publications

From when I worked as a research assistant for Jukka Suomela at HIIT, the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.

• Patrik Floréen, Joel Kaasinen, Petteri Kaski, and Jukka Suomela. An optimal local approximation algorithm for max-min linear programs. 21st ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), Calgary, Canada, August 2009: pp 260-269
• Patrik Florén, Marja Hassinen, Joel Kaasinen, Petteri Kaski, Topi Musto and Jukka Suomela: Local approximability of max-min and min-max linear programs. Theory of Computing Systems, Springer-Verlag New York. To appear.
• Marja Hassinen, Joel Kaasinen, Evangelos Kranakis, Valentin Polishchuk, Jukka Suomela, Andreas Wiese, Analysing local algorithms in location-aware quasi-unit-disk graphs, Discrete Applied Mathematics, Volume 159, Issue 15, 6 September 2011, Pages 1566-1580, ISSN 0166-218X, DOI: 10.1016/j.dam.2011.05.004.