Rate My Professor Tuomo Hiippala

Hiippala's research focuses on multimodality, investigating how natural language interacts with photographs, illustrations, diagrams, layouts, and other modes in communicative situations, with applications to artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and computer vision in the humanities. His major publications include the books Multimodality: Foundations, Research and Analysis – A Problem-Oriented Introduction (De Gruyter, 2017, co-authored with John A. Bateman and Janina Wildfeuer) and The Structure of Multimodal Documents: An Empirical Approach (Routledge, 2015). Recent works encompass Corpus-based insights into multimodality and genre in primary school science diagrams (Visual Communication, 2026), Introducing the diagrammatic semiotic mode (Diagrams 2022, co-authored with John A. Bateman, Best Paper Award), and Semiotically-grounded distant viewing of diagrams: insights from two multimodal corpora (Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2022). He has received the Best Paper Award at the 13th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams (2022), runner-up for best paper at the 2017 IEEE Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, membership in Young Academy Finland (2018–2022), the TUHAT prize (2025), and the yearly award for the best Master's thesis (2007). Hiippala leads the ERC-funded project FOUNDATIONS: A Foundation for Empirical Multimodality Research (2024–2029) and other initiatives on crowdsourcing and multimodal corpora.