The Faculty of Technology welcomed four new assistant professors during the autumn of 2025. At the Department of Computing, Shaoxiong Ji, Jens Lundell, Kaitai Liang, and Widhi Atman began in assistant and associate professor positions.
The recruitment of the new assistant and associate professors strengthens education and research in areas that are critically important to society: the professorships are focused on artificial intelligence, robotics, and cybersecurity.
“We are very pleased with these new appointments. All of the new professors have an impressive international research profile and are regarded as leading experts in their respective fields,” says Jaakko Järvi, Dean of the Faculty of Technology.
Shaoxiong Ji, Assistant Professor, Data Analytics
Shaoxiong Ji received his doctoral degree from Aalto University and has built an international research career at the University of Helsinki, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Shanghai AI Lab, Nanyang Technological University and Silo.AI, among others. Before moving to Turku, he led a research group at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany. Ji has a strong background in large language models, multilingual NLP, multimodal artificial intelligence and AI applications in health technology.
This new assistant professorship is one of thirteen AI professorships established in Finland with the support of a significant donation from the Foundation PS, founded by Peter Sarlin.
Kaitai Liang, Associate Professor, Cyber Security Engineering
Kaitai Liang earned his PhD in Computer Science and has since built an extensive academic career in cybersecurity and secure systems. Following his doctorate, he served as a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University and later as a Lecturer in Secure Systems at the University of Surrey. Prior to joining the University of Turku, he held a tenured professorship in cybersecurity at TU Delft. Liang’s research centers on applied cryptography, security and privacy in machine learning, and the development of application-driven secure systems.
Widhi Atman, Assistant Professor, Robotics and Autonomous Systems
Widhi Atman completed his doctoral studies at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and has since worked as a researcher in Finland. Before his appointment as assistant professor, Atman was a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University and at the TIERS research group at the University of Turku. There, he developed distributed approaches for multi-robot systems with targeted application to warehouse automation and environmental monitoring. Atman’s research focuses particularly on the safe and distributed control of multi‑robot systems and its communication network.
Jens Lundell, Assistant Professor, Robotics and Autonomous Systems
Jens Lundell earned his doctoral degree from Aalto University and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at both Aalto University and the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. Lundell’s research centers on intelligent robotic motion planning, deep‑learning‑based grasping and manipulation methods and handling uncertain sensor data in robotics.
