Who
I'm a researcher in computer science and bioinformatics, currently at the University of Helsinki. I go by the name Jarno in academia, but people also casually call me by my middle name Niklas.Research highlights
I'm perhaps most known for my work on indexing sets of k-mers in massive microbial reference genome databases. The main references are:
Jarno N. Alanko, Simon J. Puglisi, and Jaakko Vuohtoniemi. Small searchable k-spectra via subset rank queries on the spectral Burrows-Wheeler transform. In Proceedings of the SIAM Conference on Applied and Computational Discrete Algorithms (ACDA23), pages 225–236. SIAM, 2023.
Jarno N. Alanko, Jaakko Vuohtoniemi, Tommi Mäklin, and Simon J. Puglisi. Themisto: a scalable colored k-mer index for sensitive pseudoalignment against hundreds of thousands of bacterial genomes. Bioinformatics, 39(Supplement 1):i260–i269. Oxford University Press, 2023.
I was also involved in this foundational paper on Wheeler automata, which has turned out to be quite influential in the recent years:
Jarno Alanko, Giovanna D'Agostino, Alberto Policriti, and Nicola Prezza. Regular languages meet prefix sorting. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, pages 911–930. SIAM, 2020.
See my Google Scholar page for a full list of publications.
Personal
Music
I write chiptune-inspired music under the alias Bytenommer. I also play medieval-style music with Kirkonrotat (also featured in local news) and nerd music with Temmit.Curated list of great music albums
Electronic
- Daft Punk — Random Access Memories
- FearofDark — Motorway
- Disasterpeace — Rise of the Obsidian Interstellar
- Monomer — Labyrinth
- Kubbi — Ember
- Deadmau5 — 4x4=12
- Above and Beyond — Sirens of the Sea
Rock/Metal
- Kamelot — The Black Halo
- Sonata Arctica — Winterheart's Guild
- Sonata Arctica — Unia
- Iron Maiden — Brave New World
- CMX — Talvikuningas
- Alestorm — Captain Morgan's Revenge
- Ayreon — The Theory of Everything
- Wintersun — Time I
Folk (mostly Nordic)
- Enkel — We Are Enkel
- Enkel — Love Hurts
- Floating Sofa Quartet — The Moon We Watch Is The Same
- Väsen — Brewed
- Vesselil — Vesselil
- Tsuumi Sound System — Blinking Light
- Baltic Crossing — Baltic Crossing
- Crooked Still — Shaken by a Low Sound
- Lúnasa — The Merry Sisters of Fate
Video Game Soundtrack
- Lena Raine — Celeste (Original Sountrack)
- Gareth Coker — Ori and the Blind Forest (Original Soundtrack)
- Sean Bialo — Donut Dodo (Original Soundtrack)
- Toby Fox — Undertale (Original Soundtrack)
- Yasunori Nishiki — Octopath Traveler (Original Soundtrack)
- Kyle Gabler — World of Goo (Original Soundtrack)
Other
- Angine de Poitrine — Vol II
- VIMMA — Meri ja avaruus
- Vuokko Hovatta Kolmisin — Pysykää sängyssä sunnuntaisin
- L'Impératrice — Pulsar
- Caravan Palace — Gangbusters Melody Club
- Poets of the Fall — Temple of Thought
- Iiro Rantala — Lost Heroes
- Maija Vilkkumaa — Ei
- Syskofrenia — Minä
Views on some important things
Artificial intelligence- LLM-based AI is the single biggest thing that has happened in computer science since computers. It has a good chance to significantly accelerate science and improve quality of life overall. It also has a chance of leading to extreme concentration of power and dystopian outcomes.
- AI can create technically competent art, but it's generally uninteresting because art is a medium of human expression. All AI usage in the arts should be disclosed.
- Probabilities are a good way to model uncertainty. Uncertainty is subjective. Bayesian reasoning is the right math for updating beliefs. There is no single correct prior. All models are wrong, but some are useful.