You are warmly welcome to the DEMO Seminar on Wednesday, April 24, 2024. The topic is different from typical scientific talks – the seminar is dedicated to the legacy of Prof. Pekka Korhonen in the scientific community. He worked for a long time at Helsinki School of Economics/Aalto University and contributed widely – see more below. The speaker is Pekka’s long-time colleague and friend, Prof. JyrkiWallenius.
Abstract: Professor Pekka Korhonen died January 24th, 2024. He was born in Kuopio in 1944. For most of his professional life, Pekka Korhonen was professor at the Helsinki School of Economics. Pekka Korhonen was an important person in Multiple Objective Mathematical Programming and in Data Envelopment Analysis. He was the former President of the International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making.
I will overview the highlights of Pekka Korhonen’s career and most important works in multiple objective mathematical programming, the discrete choice problem, his contribution to behavioral decision research, and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). With a background in (computational) multivariate statistics (Helsinki University), he became one of the pioneers in multi-objective interactive Linear Programming. Pekka Korhonen was not a utility theorist, nor an economist. He did not believe in money metrics, and did not believe in all the economists’ rationality assumptions. In his algorithms, he wanted to minimize underlying behavioral assumptions about decision maker’s preferences, emphasizing the importance of psychology. In his algorithm development, Korhonen was an advocate of “free search”. In Korhonen’s DEA work he skillfully combined ideas from Multi-Objective Optimization and DEA. He was also very interested in applying his work to practical problems.
Briefly about the speaker: Jyrki Wallenius is emeritus professor at Aalto University School of Business (Aalto BIZ), Department of Information and Service Management. He was appointed professor of Management Science at former Helsinki School of Economics (HSE) in 1998. During his career at HSE and Aalto BIZ, he served in many roles: as professor, MBA director, doctoral program director, department head, vice rector, and dean. Prior to joining the Helsinki School of Economics, Jyrki served as Associate Professor and department head at the University of Jyväskylä. His research interests are in Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), in particular in multi-objective optimization and decision support. During his career, he received five multiple-year research grants from the Academy of Finland (jointly with Professor Pekka Korhonen).
Welcome!
