Dr Tomi Kauppinen is the head of Aalto Online Learning at Aalto University. From 2016 to 2020 he led Aalto Online Learning as a project mode resulting in educational development in the selected ranges: from blended learning to full online courses, from video production to online social interaction, from automatic assessment to interactive visual simulations, and from augmented/virtual reality to games and gamification.

From April 2014 to September 2014 he was a substitute W3 professor of Cognitive Systems at the University of Bremen, Germany.

Before joining the Department of Media Technology in 2012 (until end of 2015) at the Aalto University Tomi was a postdoctoral researcher in the Muenster Semantic Interoperability Lab (MUSIL) at the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Muenster, Germany from 2010 to 2012. His main activity was to arrange activities of the PhD program International Research Training Group on Semantic Integration of Geospatial Information. He holds a PhD from the Aalto University from 2010 with a thesis on reasoning about change and time. Further on, he holds a habilitation (2014) in geoinformatics from the University of Muenster, and a title of docent (2014) in media technology at Aalto University.

His research has focused on information usability and cognitive systems (like knowledge representation, visualization, linkage and interaction aspects--to support human-computer interaction, learning, understanding and automation). Tomi has developed methods for online and blended learning, information visualisation, spatial information, spatiotemporal and semantic modeling, digital cultural heritage, and linked open science. The aim is to facilitate human-computer interaction by providing better information retrieval results, better illustrations and visualizations of complex linkages, and to support understanding of large spatiotemporal information.