News

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT shares recent videos with you on the HIIT video channel on Youtube!

The Finnish Centre of Excellence in 
Computational Inference Research (COIN)

With an ever-increasing number of applications available for mobile devices, battery life is becoming a critical factor in user satisfaction. This practical guide provides you with the key measurement, modeling, and analytical tools needed to optimize battery life by developing energy-aware and energy-efficient systems and applications. As well as the necessary theoretical background and results of the field, this hands-on book also provides real-world examples, practical guidance on assessing and optimizing energy consumption, and details of prototypes and possible future trends.

Next generation sequencing (NGS) data sets are growing quickly and are already one of the largest instances of big data in science. We have developed SeqPig [1] a simple to use scripting framework that automatically parallelizes NGS data processing tasks using the Hadoop big data processing framework. This enables a simple way for scientists to exploit parallel cloud computing capacity for genomics data processing.

The ability to program has been highlighted as a key skill in the 21^st century. Computing has increased the data handling capability in several fields; social sciences are no exception in this trend. To help with the development of these skills, HIIT and Department of Computer Science co-organized a course "Introduction to Programming for Social Sciences". Matti Nelimarkka from HIIT explains the content and thinking behind the course:

The Helsinki Doctoral Education Network in Information and Communications Technology (HICT) is a joint initiative by Aalto University and the University of Helsinki, the two leading universities within this area in Finland. The network involves at present 54 professors and over 200 doctoral students, and the participating units graduate altogether more than 40 new doctors each year.

The activities of HICT are structured along six research area specific tracks:

Aalto University and the University of Helsinki, the two leading universities in Finland within computer science and information technology, are looking for several researchers in various areas of computer science.

Post docs are sought for fixed-term periods of at most three years and research fellows at most five years.

More detailed information on the call and the available positions at: https://www.hiit.fi/node/2856

HIIT has established multidisciplinary research including neuropsychology, machine learning and human computer interaction. The latest highlight is the research accepted in the journal Psychophysiology (Wiley) that reports how Mediated Touch (also referred as virtual touch) affects decision making in a game. Analysis of EEG and behaviour indicates that a virtual touch can affect memory functions and result in later generosity. The study shows the importance of the sense of touch in mediated communication.

Streptococcus pneumoniae i.e. the pneumococcus is one of the major human infectious disease causes worldwide, for which treatment has become increasingly difficult due to escalating levels of antibiotic resistance. Computational modeling of the genomes from thousands of pneumococcus strains sampled on the Mae La refugee camp in Myanmar/Thailand revealed that the so called nontypable strains act as a gene reservoir for the whole population, and effectively distribute genes upon selection pressure to other strains representing a wide variety of serotypes.

RNA-sequencing data analysis method BitSeq developed by Academy Research Fellow Antti Honkela's research group and University of Manchester researchers has been found to be the most accurate gene transcript expression estimation method in a large international assessment. The method is based on probabilistic modelling which can capture the uncertainty related to the measurements.

The joint work of HIIT, NODES group (lead by UH Prof. Sasu Tarkoma) and NetOS group (lead by Cambridge Prof. Jon Crowcroft) receives the best paper award - Best of CCR from ACM SIGCOMM.

The paper has been featured in the ACM Computing Review and HIIT researcher Aaron Yi DING presented the work at ACM SIGCOMM 2014, Chicago, USA.