Aapo Kyr ol a - Curriculum Vitae

Updated: September 14, 2012

abo4y6@r.postjobfree.com

Information

Mobile: +1-412-***-****

Home Address: **** **** ******, ***** **********, PA, USA

Work Address: 5000 Forbes Avenue, 15213 Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Briefly

Founder of one of the biggest virtual world services (founded year 2000, still go-

ing strong) with very strong experience in developing distributed systems with

huge number of concurrent users. I started my Ph.D. studies at the Carnegie

Mellon University in Fall 2009, and I am focusing on large-scale machine learn-

ing and graph computation. I am advised by professors Guy Blelloch and Carlos

Guestrin. My main research project isGraphChi, a disk-based graph compu-

tation system that can process as big problems as current distributed systems

very e ciently. GraphChi was covered by the MIT Technology Review in July

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2012 .

Publications

Y. Low, Aapo Kyrola, J. Gonzalez, D. Bickson, and C. Guestrin. Machine

Learning in the Cloud with GraphLab (NIPS Workshop 2010 + preprint).

Y. Low, J. Gonzalez, Aapo Kyrola, D. Bickson, and C. Guestrin. GraphLab:

A New Framework for Parallel Machine Learning. Presented in the confer-

ence for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, Catalina Island, 2010.

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http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428497/

your-laptop-can-now-analyze-big-data/.

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Education

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science (started September 2009)

Advisors: Prof. Carlos Guestrin, Prof. Guy Blelloch.

Research areas:

Large-scale machine learning, graph computation and optimization; distributed

and parallel computing.

Graduate-level Courses:

Machine Learning (A), Computer Architecture (A-), Optimization (A-), Sta-

tistical Machine Learning (A), Algorithms in the Real World (A), Advanced

Operating Systems (A), Semantics of Programming Languages (B), Gradu-

ate Algorithms(A-).

Teaching Assistant:

CS-210: Sequential and Parallel Data Structures and Algorithms, (Fall 2011,

lectured by Guy Blelloch)

University of Helsinki, Finland

Bachelor of Social Sciences, Economics, September 2007

All courses (including several graduate level courses which are not part of

the degree):

economics (101 credits): GPA 4.25/5.0.

- my bachelor's thesis studied the technology spill-over effects of foreign

direct investment in developing countries.

mathematics and statistics (128 credits): GPA 4.4/5.0

- Includes several graduate level courses, such asComputationally inten-

sive statistical methods (5.0/5.0)andNumerical methods and C-programming

language (5.0/5.0).

theoretical physics (76 credits): GPA 4.0/5.0

- includes several advanced courses of mathematics for physicists.

Note: I conducted my studies while working part-time at my own company.

Internships

Internship at Microsoft Research Asia, Systems Group. Mentored by Feng

Zhao and Lidong Zhou. Worked on large-scale almost-realtime social net-

work mining, resulting in an Eurosys 2012 paper. Summer 2011.

Internship at Twitter Inc, Fall 2012 (ongoing).

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Software

GraphChi, a disk-based large-scale graph computation engine: http://

graphchi.org

GraphLab, distributed graph computation system: http://graphlab.org

Shotgun, parallel coordinate descent algorithm for solving L1-regularized

problems: http://www.select.cs.cmu.edu/projects/shotgun/

Work

experience

Chief Scientist and Board Member, Sulake Corporation, 2001 - 2011

Managing Director (co-founder), Sulake Corporation2000 - 2001

Senior Programmer, Satama Interactive (web-agency), 1998 - 2000

Programmer (multimedia software), To the Point Oy, 1994 - 1998Habbo Hotel / Sulake

I am the co-founder of Sulake Corporation Inc., which is best known for

its very successful Habbo Hotel (http://www.habbo.com) virtual world and

community. Since the founding of the company in May 2000 (when I was 21

years old), over 185 million users have registered to our service. As of writing

this, we attract close to 15 million unique visitors each month. Sulake has o ces

in 18 countries in five continents and employs over 300 professionals. Sulake was

selected as one of the fastest growing technology companies in EMEA region by

Deloitte in 2006.

The original server and client softwares of Habbo were written by myself. I

had also a strong influence into our business model and product planning. I

was also the first managing director of the company before hiring a professional

management. Before starting my Ph.D. studies, I was a leading developer in

our new product team. I am a member of the company board. My passion has

always been to write great software, solve challenging technological problems in

novel ways and find the best practices to facilitate e cient and creative devel-

opment. I have always enjoyed working in a multidisciplinary team consisting

of technology, creative and business professionals.

Early career

I started working as a computer programmer already as a 15-year old, in a

pioneering multimedia company To the Point Oy in Helsinki, Finland. The

company produced mostly large multimedia CD-ROMs, which were used as

marketing material or sold directly to customers. We used Macromedia Di-

rector software and its Lingo scripting language to create these projects, and

I was quickly the leading programmer in the company, although I was simul-

taneously studying in high school. Although the projects were not technically

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very advanced, the huge size of them made the projects complicated. To enable

designers to do their work e ciently, I had to write many kinds of tools and

frameworks to facilitate the building of the projects. Here I learned that a good

guiding principle for a programmer is to "learn hate manual work". Instead, try

to automate everything and eliminate repetitive work, as it is prone to recurring

mistakes.

After four years in To the Point, a team of us leaped to a prominent new web-

agency Satama. In Satama I started doing mostly Java programming for work

and learned about internet and database technologies. Many of the skills I

learned in Satama enabled us to found Sulake in year 2000.

Special

expertise

massive graphs

large-scale machine learning, parallel algorithms, optimization

massively multiuser online services, distributed architectures,

concurrent systems

message-driven architectures, object-relational database mapping and data

access patterns

API design, object-oriented design patterns

agile software development processes

Awards

Nokia Foundation Recognition Award (2008) for contributions in

collaborative media and social networking

Finnish Engineering Award (2006) for the development of theHabbo

Hotel internet community, the Finnish Association of Graduate Engineers.

Finland prize (2005) for theHabbo Hotel internet community, the Min-

istry of Education, Finland

Programming

languages &

Java (very fluent, since 1996)

Systems

C, C++, Objective-C (very good)

Python, Scala, Standard ML, Matlab

Hadoop (MapReduce), MPI

CUDA (GPU programming)

other scripting languages: Lingo, ActionScript, JavaScript, Ruby

others: HTML, CSS, Unix shell scripting

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Languages

Finnish (mother tongue)

English (fluent)

Swedish (good)

Chinese (moderate speaking skills, learning)

German (workable)

Hobbies

Go / "Weiqi" board game (ancient Chinese chess-like board game), rank:

2 kyu

hiking in nature and bicycle trekking

reading: literature, popular science, politics, current affairs

Chinese language and culture

Military

Service

Finnish armed forces, 6 months, infantry, Karelian Brigade, fall 2007.

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