About the Finnish A.I. Society

The Finnish A.I. Society emerged from the Finnish Artificial Intelligence Symposium (Suomen tekoälytutkimuksen päivät STeP), which was first organized at the Helsinki University of Technology in 1984. The Finnish A.I. Society was founded during the second STeP symposium in 1986, and after that the symposium series was organized biennially by FAIS from 1988 until 2010.

The founding meeting of FAIS took place during STeP-86 in Espoo, Finland on the campus of Helsinki University of Technology (now part of Aalto University) on August 21, 1986, and the society was officially registered on April 7, 1987.

A main activity of the society was in the organization of seminars and symposia related to Artificial Intelligence, the Finnish A.I. Symposium in particular, which was organized by FAIS a total of 12 times between 1988 and 2010. Here is the list of all STeP symposia.

  • 1984 Espoo
  • 1986 Espoo
  • 1988 Helsinki
  • 1990 Oulu
  • 1992 Espoo
  • 1994 Turku
  • 1996 Vaasa
  • 1998 Jyväskylä
  • 2000 Espoo
  • 2002 Oulu
  • 2004 Vantaa
  • 2006 Espoo
  • 2008 Espoo & Helsinki
  • 2010 Espoo
The 2010 symposium was the last in the series, as the 2012 event in Helsinki was part of a collocation with other computer science meetings.

FAIS has organized the Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SCAI) three times.

  • 1989 Tampere
  • 1997 Helsinki
  • 2006 Espoo
Finally, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Stockholm in 1999 was jointly organized by the Nordic AI societies, including FAIS.

The following are all chairs of FAIS from its founding until today.

  • 1986-1989 Seppo Linnainmaa
  • 1990-1993 Markku Syrjänen
  • 1993-1995 Eero Hyvönen
  • 1996-1999 Timo Honkela
  • 1999-2001 Heikki Hyötyniemi
  • 2002-2004 Pekka Ala-Siuru
  • 2005-2008 Tapani Raiko
  • 2009-2019 Jukka Kortela
  • 2020-2021 Matti Järvisalo
  • 2022-2023 Tomi Janhunen
  • 2024-2025 Jussi Rintanen