News

21 Nov 2007 - TEKES has granted 2-year funding for the project Theseus: User psychology and user-centric interaction design. The project is coordinated by University of Jyväskylä, and its academic partners include VTT and HIIT. The main objective of the project is to raise the use of psychological user data in interaction design to a new level. The work is carried out through a series of case studies with products of participating companies. For more information, please contact Antti Oulasvirta.

15 Nov 2007 - TEKES has awarded 2,5 year funding for the project Advanced Virtual Economy Applications (AVEA) from 1.1.2008. The project will study virtual economies: systems where millions of Internet users create and trade virtual items and currencies, often for real money. HIIT's industrial partners in the project are Nokia Research Center, CCP Games, Playdo, and SWelcom. The research will be carried out in co-operation with Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. For more information, please contact Vili Lehdonvirta.

9 Nov 2007 - The Council of the University of Helsinki has decided to invite Senior Research Scientist, Dr. Aapo Hyvärinen in one of the floating 5-year professor positions ("pooliprofessuuri") that can be allocated on the basis of a new emerging field or a particularly prominent candidate on the basis of the individual performance, development of a succesful line of research, scientific and societal relevance, and the match with the overall strategy of the university.

6 Nov 2007 - The Scientific Council of the University of Industrial Arts and Design Helsinki (UIAH) nominated Research Scientist, Dr. Giulio Jacucci as Affiliate Processor (docent) in Ubiquitous Interaction Technologies in the Area of User-Centred Design.

30 Oct 2007 - A HIIT research group led by Dr. Risto Sarvas has received a special grant celebrating the 125th anniversary of Elisa Corporation from the HPY Research Foundation. The topic of the succesful grant proposal was From Snapshot Photography to Everyday Social Media.

9 Oct 2007 - Jaiku, a popular activity stream and presence sharing service that works from the Web and mobile phones, has been bought by Google. The basic technology of Jaiku, the ContextPhone platform, was developed at HIIT and UH DCS in the Context project during 2002-2005. Jaiku, Ltd., was founded in February, 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen to commercialize the service. The service was released on the Web in July 2006.

9 Oct 2007 - HIIT led the preparation of a STREP-type project proposal on ICT applications for energy conservation that was submitted to the second call of the ICT Programme of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union. The consortium includes eight other partners from Sweden, Italy, and Spain and also includes researchers from two TKK laboratories. If accepted in the competitive evaluation, the project will launch during the first half of 2008.

19 Sep 2007 - A small (but probably growing) group of HIIT researchers have initiated a joint blog called "In HIIT". It is intended to offer a "non-official" and more personal platform for the interaction of HIIT and the wide world around it, discussing not just research but also the ethical, political, and societal issues raised by it. The blog will be written mostly in Finnish language, but occasionally also in English, and perhaps in other languages too. Please peek in!

18 Sep 2007 - The Academy of Finland has donated 3 year funding for the project IPOS: Information Processing in Overlay Systems. The project will study information processing in overlay networks, especially probabilistic representations of sets, such as Bloom filters and their variants, run-time query and address aggregation, Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) and their variants, and various Directed-Acyclic-Graph (DAG) based structures for routing. The work will be conducted at the Telecommunications and Multimedia Laboratory (TML), TKK in co-operation with HIIT.

18 Sep 2007 - Academy of Finland has granted four-year funding for the project AMOVEO: Work Practises and the Transition to Ubicomp for a consortium involving the HIIT UIx research group and VTT Systems Usability group. The goals of the project are 1) to study the transition of work practices in the face of ubiquitous computing automatization in three cases, 2) to describe social and human principles characterizing these new practices and 3) to inform the design of technology, instruction and training, and the organization of work environments.