At school I liked maths and physics, perhaps thanks to my excellent teacher, Erkki J. Rosenberg. It was a natural choice for me to study mathematics at university, and I graduated in three years. Computing was new, and I went on a programming course, where I wrote my first computer programme. It calculated the frequency of Neo-Assyrian cuneiform symbols.

Soon after graduating, I found work as a mathematician at what was then the Computing Centre of the University of Helsinki. There we solved all kinds of problems, though mostly statistical problems, brought to us by students writing their doctoral dissertations. We worked long days and didn’t count the hours. Our recreation was discussions around the coffee table, which expanded to encompass other kinds of problems, such as how to exit an area of wilderness of a certain shape in the shortest possible time without knowing the direction.

After having studied both computer science and general linguistics, I sought for solutions by combining knowledge from both fields. As a researcher, I became involved in an Academy of Finland project (1981–84), led by Fred Karlsson, which was investigating automatic recognition of the Finnish language.

After moving to the humanities and receiving a professorship, I was first chosen, presumably on the basis of my computing background, to the board of the University Computing Centre, and then I was named chairman of the University IT Management Group. I served between 1996 and 1998, after which I remained a member for the following two years. It fell to me to propose an IT management strategy for the University and the reorganisation of its IT services.

At the beginning of the 1980s, we collaborated with commercial enterprises in connection with university research projects. This provided us with significant additional funding for research. At that time the University’s central administration did not consider it possible for the University to engage in any commercial activity. Consequently, Fred Karlsson …

My challenge has been to describe phoneme alternations using a method that is as simple and easy to understand as possible while still retaining its general applicability. Phonemic alternations appear in many languages in the inflection of words. Linguists know what kinds of sounds alternate with each other and under what conditions they occur, but finding a precise formulation for these regularities and applying them by computer is far from easy.