Esko Ukkonen

Esko Juhani Ukkonen (born 1950) is a Finnish theoretical computer scientist known for his contributions to string algorithms, and particularly for Ukkonen's algorithm for suffix tree construction. He is a professor emeritus of the University of Helsinki.

Biography

Ukkonen earned his PhD from the University of Helsinki in 1978, where he has been a full professor since 1985. He was the head of the computer science department at the University of Helsinki in 1998--1999 and in 2010--2013, and an Academy professor of the Academy of Finland in 1999--2004. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Nordic Journal of Computing since 1993.

Ukkonen is a First Class Knight of the Order of the White Rose of Finland (2000). He is a member of Finnish Academy of Science and Letters since 2000, and a foreign member of Estonian Academy of Sciences. A festschrift in his honour was published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series. He holds an honorary doctorate from Aalto University (2014).