HIIT Update 2/2005

Headlines in this issue:

- FOREWORD
- NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS
- SEMINAR ON CHALLENGE OF CREATIVE ECONOMY
- WORKSHOP ON CONTEXT AWARENESS FOR PROACTIVE SYSTEMS (CAPS 2005)
- WORKSHOP ON FUTURE MOBILE PHOTOGRAPHY
- TRANSPARENT TECHNOLOGIES FOR SPATIAL AND SOCIAL PRESENCE WORKSHOP
- DONATION TO TKK PUBLISHED
- WORKSHOP ON SOCIAL NETWORKS AND MOBILE APPLICATIONS
- ARU PORTFOLIO SEMINAR HELD
- MEETING OF THE INDUSTRIAL ADVISORY BOARD
- VISITORS FROM ICSI, UC BERKELEY
- VISITOR FROM CATR, BEIJING
- PROFESSOR ANDREW BARRON FROM YALE UNIVERSITY VISITS HIIT
- VISITOR FROM IIT HYDERABAD, INDIA
- HIIT'S DIRECTORS RE-NOMINATED FOR 2006-2008
- PROFESSOR MÄNTYLÄ RECEIVES INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DISTINCTION 2005
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

After board decisions on the HIIT's strategy for 2006-2008 and beyond, the planning of the future of HIIT has moved to execution. As a first step along the roadmap to the future, the existing research lines of the two units of HIIT will be merged from January 1, 2006. Thereafter, the research conducted in HIIT will consist of four research programmes that cover both of its units: Future Internet (Fuego), Network Society, Intelligent Systems, and Computational Data Mining. The intention is that the unit division can in practise vanish from the foreground of HIIT's public image: the research centre is the union of the four programmes. We expect that this measure will not only clarify HIIT's mission, but also facilitate further co-operation between researchers and research groups both within HIIT and outside it.

Another important step towards the future HIIT was reached on November 16, 2005, in the annual performance negotiations between HIIT and its parent universities. In the negotiations, TKK and UH confirmed their commitment to balancing their funding to HIIT by 2009, thereby removing a significant bottleneck from merging the present two units ARU and BRU.

These encouraging development give HIIT a good basis for answering the challenges of the future, and also taking advantage of the various opportunities given by the rapidly developing research policy in Finland and EU. In particular, HIIT is well positioned to take an active stance in the "competence cluster" initiative currently being discussed and planned, aiming to create national research networks in areas deemed to be vital for Finland's future development. Likewise, HIIT will be able to participate actively in the preparatory activities leading to the formation of EU's 7th framework programme, and pave its way to active participation in its activities. Last but not least, HIIT can continue to develop further its already significant international network of partner universities and research centres.

This issue of HIIT Update reports on HIIT's progress in these directions in more detail. We are especially pleased to be able to report on HIIT's considerable success in EU project proposals: three projects submitted in Spring 2005 have cleared successfully the technical evaluations and have entered the contract negotiation stage. Thus they all are likely to launch during early 2006, easily doubling the volume of HIIT's EU sponsored research. More importantly, the projects will greatly expand HIIT's European partner network by bringing us in close contact with many top research universities, research centres, and innovative companies. Also the project Immortalidad, to be executed in co-operation with KCL, the central laboratory of Finnish paper industries, bears notice. It is HIIT's first research activity geared towards "mixed media", the convergence of electronic and printed media that is likely to offer great possibilities for innovative products and services in the future.

With developments such as these, HIIT can look at the future with eager confidence. We are on the right track.

Helsinki 24 November 2005

Martti Mäntylä
Director of Research, Professor

Päivi Saarinen
Planning Officer

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NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS

SERVICES FOR ALL (E!2023 ITEA S4ALL)

The National Technology Agency (TEKES) awarded first-year funding for the ITEA project Services for All (S4ALL), which focuses on enabling a world of user-centric services that are easy to create, share and use. HIIT's particular focus is on prototyping of new, non-traditional services exploiting local wireless networks, and on the use of scripting language technology in handheld devices. S4ALL is a two-year project with a total effort of 8 person-years at HIIT. Other Finnish participants are Nokia and Capricode Oy. For more information, please contact Dr. Kenneth Rimey.

IMMORTALIDAD

The Immortalidad project in the DCC research group studies future social use of self-created media - mainly photographs. Grounding the work on literature and empirical data on domestic photo creation and sharing, the project will design future concepts that blur the boundaries between personally, socially, and professionally created media. Also, the concepts take into account the perceptions and characteristics people assign to digital and paper as format for media. Immortalidad is a 1,5 year project done in co-operation with KCL, Futurice, and UC Berkeley. The project started in August 2005. For further information please contact Risto Sarvas.

MUPE

TEKES has awarded two-year funding for the project Network of Mobile Context-Aware Applications and Games, aiming to create context-aware multi-user applications that can be run on any mobile phone. The applications are developed with the Multi-User Publishing Environment (MUPE), an open source application platform developed in Nokia Research Center. MUPE has been used successfully in many NRC and university projects, and this project continues this work. The platform enables rapid development of mobile multi-user context-aware applications and games, and it allows the new technologies in mobile phones to be easily used. MUPE already has an active developer community, and the project aims to research new and emerging technologies. The project is a joint venture of Nokia, Lappeenranta University of Technology, HIIT, Tampere University of Technology and VTT. For further information please contact Dr. Marko Turpeinen.

CONTEXT CUES

The Academy of Finland has awarded HIIT a 4-year grant for the project Context Cues: Context data derived situation cues to support meaningful interactions. The project will apply a novel social psychological approach to the computer inference and design of situation cues in ubiquitous computing environments. It will study various kinds of situation cues, how can they be used to make meaningful inferences of others, and the conditions for these inferences to provide a basis for socially meaningful, transparent and accountable action. For this, the project will combine theoretically grounded, application-independent social psychological laboratory experiments with exploratory, application-specific experiments on the field. In a parallel line of work, the project will investigate how cues can be reliably inferred from real sensor data. This will be tackled by constructing data mining models of situation data and combining them with and evaluating against laboratory experiments on human inferences of those cues. The project continues the work of the Context project (2002-2005) and will launch on January 1, 2006. For more information, contact Prof. Martti Mäntylä or Ph.Lic. Antti Oulasvirta.

INTERACTION AND PRESENCE IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS (IPCITY)

The contract negotiations on the EU IST integrated project Interaction and Presence in Urban Environments (IPCity) were successfully concluded, and hence the project is expected to launch on 1 January 2006. The project is co-ordinated by Fraunhofer FIT; HIIT's User Experience Research Group is one of the eleven partners from five different countries in EU. The vision is to provide citizens, visitors, as well as professionals involved in city development or the organisation of events with a set of mixed reality technologies that enable them to collaboratively envision, debate emerging developments, experience past and future views or happenings of their local urban environment. The leader of HIIT's team in IPCity is Dr Giulio Jacucci.

FUGA

The project proposal FUGA - Fun of Gaming: Measuring the human experience of media enjoyment, submitted to the EU NEST - PATHFINDER call "Measuring the Impossible", has been invited to contract negotiations with the European Commission and is hence likely be launched in early 2006. The scientific co-ordinator of the project is Dr. Niklas Ravaja from the Center of Knowledge and Innovation Research (CKIR) of the Helsinki School of Economics; HIIT will act as the administrative co-ordinator, in addition to participating in the research. For more information, contact Dr Niklas Ravaja, or Mr. Mikko Kontiainen.

PASION

The project proposal Knowledge Work and Mobility (PASION), submitted to the Call for Proposals of the Presence and Interaction in Mixed-Reality Environments (Presence II) Proactive Initiative in EU's 6th Framework Programme, has also been invited for project negotiations and is therefore likely to launch in early 2006. HIIT's work in PASION will be led by Dr Timo Saari. For more information, contact him at timo.saari(a)hiit.fi.

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SEMINAR ON CHALLENGE OF CREATIVE ECONOMY

The Committee for the Future of the Finnish Parliament and HIIT co-organised a seminar on Challenge of Creative Economy at the University of Helsinki on 1 June 2005. Speakers of the event included the Minister of Treasury Antti Kalliomäki, Professor Manuel Castells, Dr Pekka Himanen, and CEO Matti Alahuhta. The seminar was chaired by the chairman of the Committee for the Future, member of parliament Jyrki Katainen. Some 60 people attended the event. The seminar also acted as the launch event the Global Network Society research project at HIIT.

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WORKSHOP ON CONTEXT AWARENESS FOR PROACTIVE SYSTEMS (CAPS 2005)

On 15-16 June 2005, HIIT together with the Department of Computer Science (UH) and the PROACT research programme organised the Workshop on Context Awareness for Proactive Systems, CAPS 2005.

The programme consisted of 2 invited talks, 13 presentations and 5 posters/demonstrations. We also made an excursion to Suomenlinna and had dinner in the Walhalla restaurant. There were 33 participants from eight different countries. Papers and poster/demo descriptions have been published in the workshop proceedings, which is available at http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/hiit_bru/conferences/caps2005/. Paper copies of the proceedings can be ordered from Dr. Greger Linden. The workshop page also contains copies of some of the presentations and a set of pictures from the workshop.

The Second Workshop on Context Awareness for Proactive Systems will be held in Kassel, Germany, on 12-13 June 2006. See http://www.comtec.eecs.uni-kassel.de/typo3_comtec/caps2006/.

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WORKSHOP ON FUTURE MOBILE PHOTOGRAPHY

The Mobile Content Communities project (MC2) of the DCC research group arranged a workshop on 3 August 2005 under the theme of mobile photography - how camera phones have changed people's photography habits and created new social uses for the device as well as business, and now that this is happening what will the future look like.

The first half of the workshop consisted of speakers from academia and industry. The special guest and keynote speaker was Professor Nancy Van House from the School of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley, USA. The second half of the workshop was group work where three themes around mobile photos were discussed: Users and social use, Business, and Technology. The speaker slides and the group discussions can be found at http://pong.hiit.fi/dcc/futureMobile/.

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TRANSPARENT TECHNOLOGIES FOR SPATIAL AND SOCIAL PRESENCE WORKSHOP

HIIT's Digital Content Communities research group organised a workshop on Transparent technologies for spatial and social presence at HTC on 17 August 2005. The keynote presentation was given by Professor Frank Biocca from Michigan State University.

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DONATION TO TKK PUBLISHED

The Centenary Fund of the Technology Industries of Finland has donated the Helsinki University of Technology 550 000 euros for a five-year research project on global network society. The donation was published in an event held on August 31 2005 where the chairman of the board of the fund Matti Alahuhta presented the donation to the Rector of TKK Matti Pursula.

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WORKSHOP ON SOCIAL NETWORKS AND MOBILE APPLICATIONS

HIIT's Mobile Content Communities project (MC2) organised a workshop on Social Networks and Mobile Applications on 7 September 2005 at HTC. The keynote presentation was given by Dr Nathan Eagle from the MIT Media Lab.

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ARU PORTFOLIO SEMINAR HELD

The annual ARU Research Portfolio Seminar was held on 11 October 2005 in HTC. The objective of the seminar was to communicate to companies and research partners the range of new research initiatives under development at HIIT, mainly intended to be launched during 2006. A total of 24 presentations by HIIT researchers were given to an audience of some 20 people. Presentation materials of the event are available in www-old.hiit.fi/events/seminar11102005.htm.

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MEETING OF THE INDUSTRIAL ADVISORY BOARD

The Industrial Advisory Board meeting 2/2005 was held on 19 October 2005. The main topic of the meeting was to discuss HIIT's strategy and industry's commitment to HIIT's future operations.

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VISITORS FROM ICSI, UC BERKELEY

Three leading researchers Nelson Morgan, Eran Halperin and Vern Paxson from the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at UC Berkeley visited HIIT on 12 October 2005 by invitation of TEKES and HIIT. The visitors gave talks about some of the great things going on at ICSI in order to encourage further co-operation between ICSI and HIIT. This was followed by an in-depth discussion between the visitors and HIIT's senior researchers.

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VISITOR FROM CATR, BEIJING

Mr. Wang Xuefei has joined HIIT as a visiting researcher from June 1, 2005. He comes from the China Academy of Telecommunication Research of MII (CATR), the only telecom research institution of the Chinese government at the national level. Established in 1994, CATR's mission includes basic technology planning and design, developing technology standards for the Chinese national communications network, industrial development planning, regulatory policies, communication measurement as well as testing and certification of communications products are just some examples. At HIIT, Mr. Wang will partially participate in the Wireless Festival project.

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PROFESSOR ANDREW BARRON FROM YALE UNIVERSITY VISITS HIIT

Professor Andrew Barron visited HIIT on August 22-25. The purpose of his visit was to discuss about recent developments in the Minimum Description Length principle (see http://www.mdl-research.org/) with the CoSCo research group. He also gave two invited talks titled"Statistical Foundations and Properties of the Minimum Description Length Principle" and "Consequences of Minimum Description Length for Neural Nets and Gaussian Mixtures".

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VISITOR FROM IIT HYDERABAD, INDIA

Professor Vasudeva Varma visited HIIT on 9 August 2005 and was hosted by Professor Petri Myllymäki from the CoSCO group. The members of the CoSCo group demonstrated the work done in the area of intelligent information access, and Professor Varma was interested in initiating discussions about potential future collaboration between the two institutes. A return visit by some of the senior staff members of HIIT is planned for the first quarter of 2006.

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HIIT'S DIRECTORS RE-NOMINATED FOR 2006-2008

The Board of HIIT nominated on October 18, 2005 Professor Martti Mäntylä and Professor Esko Ukkonen as the directors of the Advanced Research Unit and the Basic Research Unit of HIIT, respectively, for the term 1.1.2006-31.12.2008.

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PROFESSOR MÄNTYLÄ RECEIVES INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DISTINCTION 2005

The Finnish Information Technology Association (http://www.tt-tori.fi/) gave on November 21, 2005 Professor Martti Mäntylä its Information Technology Distinction for 2005 in recognition of his work in information technology and computer science both in Finland and internationally, and especially in bridging university research with R&D in information industry.

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS

Former HIIT researcher Mikko Välimäki defended successfully his doctoral thesis "The Rise of Open Source Licensing. A Challenge to the Use of Intellectual Property in the Software Industry" on June 3, 2005 at the Helsinki University of Technology. The official opponent of the defence was Professor, PhD Thomas Riis from Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Professor Juha Laine acted as the custos. Completed at the Software Business and Engineering Laboratory at TKK, Välimäki's thesis was to a considerable degree based on his work in HIIT's MobileIPR and DE Core projects.

PhD Pekka Himanen has been nominated to the Principal Scientist for a 5-year period starting from August 1, 2005. The Centenary Fund of the Technology Industries of Finland has given a donation to establish the position. The area of the position is to study network society and its philosophy.

Dr Marko Turpeinen has been nominated a Principal Scientist from October 1, 2005. Dr Turpeinen leads HIIT's newly established Network Society research programme and its core group, the Digital Content Communities group. His work focuses especially on social and contextual media.

Dr Andrei Gurtov has been nominated a Senior Research Scientist from November 1, 2005. Dr Gurtov leads the Internet architecture thread of HIIT's Future Internet research programme, and is in particular the project manager of the InfraHIP project.

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FUTURE EVENTS

15.02.2006 at 9:30-11:30: HIIT Board meeting, Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Kumpula.