Rate My Professor Esa Ollila

Esa Ollila is a full professor in the School of Electrical Engineering at Aalto University and Deputy Head of the Department of Information and Communications Engineering. He earned an M.Sc. degree in mathematics from the University of Oulu in 1998, a Ph.D. degree in statistics with honors from the University of Jyväskylä in 2002, and a D.Sc.(Tech) degree with honors in signal processing from Aalto University in 2010. From 2004 to 2007, he was a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Council of Finland. In August 2010, he was appointed Academy Research Fellow at Aalto University for five years. Since June 2015, he has served as associate professor in the Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics, advancing to full professor. He holds the title of docent in statistics at the University of Oulu. Ollila has directed the BSc major in Information Technology since 2016 and the MSc major in Signal Processing and Data Science since 2021. He conducted research visits at Pennsylvania State University in 2001 and Princeton University during 2010-2011.

His research focuses on the intersection of statistical signal processing, high-dimensional statistics, and machine learning, including robust multivariate statistics, array and radar signal processing, compressed sensing, sparse approximation, big data, multivariate statistics, and blind source separation. He has authored or co-authored over 120 papers in leading journals and conferences. Key publications include the book Robust Statistics for Signal Processing (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and papers such as “Complex elliptically symmetric distributions: survey, new results and applications” (IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 2012), “Regularized M-estimators of scatter matrix” (IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 2014), and “Shrinking the eigenvalues of M-estimators of covariance matrix” (IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 2021). Ollila’s influence is evident in his election to the Board of Directors of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP), membership in the IEEE SPS Signal Processing Theory and Methods Technical Committee (2022-2027, chairing the awards subcommittee), and service as associate editor for the Scandinavian Journal of Statistics (2020-2024). He was General Co-Chair for EUSIPCO-2023 and delivered the Aalto University Tenured Professors’ Installation Lecture “Learning from signals” in 2020.