HIIT Update 3/2004

Headlines in this issue:

- FOREWORD
- NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS
- MuseumFinland - FINNISH MUSEUMS IN SEMANTIC WEB AWARDED
- HIIT ARU PORTFOLIO SEMINAR HELD
- HIIT ORGANIZES OPENMIND 2004 SEMINAR
- DIMAS: THE BEST e-BUSINESS APPLICATION IN FINLAND
- 2ND MEETING OF THE SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD
- HIIT AND M-CULT AGREE ON CO-OPERATION, M-CULT MOVES TO HTC
- VISITORS AT HIIT
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS
- NEW PLANNING OFFICER AT HIIT
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

The third issue of the HIIT Update is prepared under the shadow of the terrible tragedy in South East Asia caused by the earthquake and the resulting tsunami. The final count of dead and injured may never be known, but already now it is apparent that the extent of the damage is very large. The loss touches almost all nations of the world as some of the areas hit were popular tourist resorts operating in full capacity.

In these conditions, reporting of HIIT's progress and successes feels almost improper. Yet, an underlying motivation of our work - that scientists and engineers typically only express vaguely or not at all - is simply to make the world a little bit better place through information technology and services that address people's true needs and the various problems plaguing our present world.

ICT cannot stop earthquakes from occurring and causing terrible losses. Still, even in the case of this catastrophy, truly accessible and inexpensive information and communication technology might have helped to give early warning to some of the people who now were caught with none. Moreover, technology might have helped to gain access and spread accurate information of the real nature of the damages sooner, and delivering help to those in need. Now, clearly, technology could not fulfill these needs.

As imperfect as our technology is, even now it is giving a little help through inventiveness and caring of its users. We hear of people being able to inform their relatives at home about their condition using text messages when no other means of communication work. We hear of people willingly lending their mobile phones to each other so they can contact their loved ones. So there is a glimmer of hope even in the shadow, even though surely much work remains.

With these thoughts in mind, we wish all HIIT Update readers a happier New Year 2005.

Helsinki 31 December 2004

Martti Mäntylä
Director of Research, Professor

Päivi Saarinen
Planning Officer

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NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS

USED

Urban Spaces and Experience Design is an arts and research interaction project focusing on participatory media and experience design in the urban and wireless context. The project was initiated by m-cult and is co-organized by HIIT Helsinki Institute for Information technology and m-cult. USED is funded by the Finnish Academy and the Arts Council of Finland in 2005-07. The project's artist-researchers are Heidi Tikka, Tapio Mkel, Susanna Koskinen and Andrew Paterson and it is co-directed by Mauri Kaipainen (CKIR) and Minna Tarkka (m-cult). USED collaborates with international networks and projects in location-based, pervasive and mobile arts and research, and hosts an interdisciplinary seminar for researchers who work in the field. USED is the first fruit of the co-operation agreement between HIIT and m-cult reported below. For more information please contact Professor Mauri Kaipainen, or Minna Tarkka.

CIVI (Cognitively inspired visual interfaces for representing multidimensional Information)

When visualizing complex multidimensional information, the solutions proposed are typically built according to purely engineering principles, even though it is known that in case of complex visualizations, immediate extraction of information is often difficult, and that people have, for example, difficulties in perceiving different data dimensions at a single glance or even under longer scrutiny. The principal goal of the CIVI project is to investigate what type of mental representations different type of visualizations of multidimensional information evoke and how these representations are formed, and then examine how these visualizations guide behaviour and how multidimensional representations affect problem solving and decision making.

CIVI is a joint project between HIIT and CKIR. The responsible leader of the project at the HIIT site is professor Petri Myllymäki.

InfraHIP

The National Technology Agency TEKES awarded first-year funding for the project InfraHIP: Infrastructure for HIP. The project aims to study the applications related aspects of the Host Identity Protocol (HIP), including APIs, rendezvous service, operating system security, multiple end-points within a single host, process migration, and issues related to enterprise-level solutions. The project is led by Professor Martti Mntyl with Professor Antti Yl-Jski from the TML laboratory at TKK. Dr. Andrei Gurtov will work as the project manager. The industrial partners of the project are Nokia, Ericsson, Elisa and Finnish Defence Forces. The work will be executed in close co-operation with Prof. Scott Shenker and Prof. Ion Stoica from the University of California at Berkeley. For more information please contact Dr. Andrei Gurtov, or peek into http://infrahip.hiit.fi

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HIIT ARU PORTFOLIO SEMINAR HELD

The HIIT ARU Portfolio Seminar was held on October 12, 2004. Nine project ideas in various stages of preparation were presented to an audience composed of industry representatives and researchers from partner institutions of HIIT. See http://www.hiit.fi/events/seminar12102004.htm for more in formation.

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HIIT ORGANIZES OPENMIND 2004 SEMINAR

HIIT organized with Centre for Open source software and Fenix Technology programme on November 11, 2004 a seminar that concentrated to challenges and solutions in open source software and open content production. OpenMind 2004 seminar was a success. It clearly showed that open production models have made a break through to software and content business. Seminar had over 150 participants who enjoyed keynotes from BBC Creative Archive's leader Paula le Dieu, ifrOSS institute's Dr. Till Jaeger and Novel's Kim Aaltonen.

Herkko Hietanen, HIIT researcher and one of the organizers, is enthusiastic of the response that OpenMind 2004 received "We are happy to see that open source and open content draws this much attention in Finland. HIIT has invested much of its research energy to open productions methods. Obviously this has been a right decision." More about the seminar can be found at http://www.coss.fi/openmind/seminarprogram.htm and http://www.coss.fi/fi/

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MuseumFinland - FINNISH MUSEUMS IN SEMANTIC WEB AWARDED

The semantic portal MuseumFinland created by SeCo got the Semantic Web Challenge Award 2004 on November 11, in Hiroshima Japan at ISWC 2004.

On November 23, Prime Minister of Finland awarded MuseumFinland as the most innovative application in the national Quality on the web -competition (Laatua verkkoon).

For more information on MuseumFinland, please refer to http://museosuomi.cs.helsinki.fi/

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DIMAS: THE BEST e-BUSINESS APPLICATION IN FINLAND

The DiMaS system won the title "The Best e-Business Application in Finland" and the nomination to represent Finland in World Summit Award 2005.

The winners of the WSA National Contest, the Finnish nominees for World Summit Award 2005 in eight categories, were presented by WSA chairman Peter A. Bruck at the MindTrek Awards and WSA Finland Gala in Tampere, November 11th 2004.

The MindTrek event is the most important annual digital media competition in Finland by any standards, giving away over 40.000 euros as prize money. DiMaS as the winner of the WSA National Contest will compete against the best from 168 countries in the finals in summer 2005. The best five from each category will be summoned to present their work at the World Summit 2005 in Tunis in November 2005.

Born in the Digital Economy Core research project at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Digital Content Distribution Management System DiMaS is a novel concept and an implemented technical prototype that offers an information system for amateur and professional multimedia producers to publish their work on existing highly popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks. Importantly, the system enables to insert content descriptions, to manage intellectual property and usage rights, and to charge for the consumption using various pricing models. DiMaS enables versatile licensing, rights description and enforcing, and content encryption scenarios without introducing another multimedia or metadata file format and a respective player to read the format. The pilot implementation of DiMaS is specified for a micromovie producing community that creates short movies for handheld devices, and in this particular case for a standard HP iPAQ Pocket PC with network access and a Java run-time environment.

For more information about DiMaS peek into http://www.hiit.fi/u/reti/publications/Reti_publ.html or contact Tommo Reti.

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2ND MEETING OF THE SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD

HIIT's Scientific Advisory Board met for its second meeting on 15-17 November 2004. The members present were Randy Katz (UCB), Alberto Apostolico (Purdue Univ. and Univ. of Padua), Christos Faloutsos (Carnegie Mellon), Bengt Jonsson (Uppsala Univ.), Martin Kersten (CWI) and John-Shawe-Taylor (Univ. of Southampton). During the three days in Helsinki, the board reviewed all the research lines of HIIT. Research group leaders gave presentations and the board met with students in poster and demonstration session. The SAB also met with the research directors of HIIT and the computer science department heads of the university and TKK.

The SAB presented a written report of its findings. Each research line's research achievements and plans received comments and, in addition, the SAB had a number of general comments. The SAB called for a unified vision of HIIT to support the merging of ARU and BRU into one unit. Also better administrative transparency was called for in allocation of funds and selection of research lines. The report will be used as an element in the ongoing strategy process for HIIT.

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HIIT AND M-CULT AGREE ON CO-OPERATION, M-CULT MOVES TO HTC

The Centre for New Media Culture, m-cult and HIIT, the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology have signed a co-operation agreement on October 27, 2004. The purpose of the co-operation is to join the top research of the new media culture and of the information technology to boost the social and cultural innovations. A small seminar was arranged on October 28, 2004 in HTC, Helsinki.

In middle October, m-cult also moved to share the HTC 5th floor space with HIIT. The physical co-location is likely to bring many opportunities for joint discussions, ideas, and work as intended by the agreement.

For more information on m-cult, please refer to http://www.m-cult.org.

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VISITORS AT HIIT

PROFESSOR SHOSHANA ZUBOFF VISITS HIIT

Professor Shoshana Zuboff from Harvard Business School visited HIIT on October 27, 2004. HIIT researchers organized jointly with SITRA an informal seminar focusing on societal computing research at HIIT.

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS

HIIT researcher Giulio Iacucci defended successfully his doctoral thesis Interaction as Performance: Cases of Configuring Physical Interfaces in Mixed Media in the public dissertation event at the University of Oulu. Professor Kari Kuutti acted as the custos of the event.

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NEW PLANNING OFFICER AT HIIT

M.Sc. Päivi Saarinen joined HIIT as the new planning officer of HIIT ARU from December 1st, 2004. Her predecessor M.Sc. Mervi Rantanen moved to Head of the International Student Services at TKK.

Päivi Saarinen received her Masters degree in Land Surveying from TKK. She has also degree in French from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Before joining HIIT, Pivi Saarinen worked as a planning officer at the Software Business and Engineering Laboratory of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at TKK.

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FUTURE EVENTS

12 January 2005 at 14:00: HIIT Industrial Advisory Board (IAB), HTC Helsinki

16 February 2005, 10:00-12:00: HIIT Board meeting, Exactum (Kumpula)

16-17 June 2005: Workshop on Context Awareness for Proactive Systems (CAPS 2005), Helsinki