HIIT Update 2/2004

Headlines in this issue:

- FOREWORD
- NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS
- MOBILIFE INTEGRATED PROJECT LAUNCHED
- PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC TARJA HALONEN VISITS HIIT
- PROFESSOR ESKO UKKONEN NOMINATED THE DIRECTOR OF HIIT BASIC RESEARCH UNIT
- HIIT RESEARCHERS CO-ORGANISE WORKSHOP ON HCI ISSUES IN PROACTIVE COMPUTING
- WEB INTELLIGENCE SYMPOSIUM 2-3 SEPTEMBER
- HIIT ORGANISES MOBILE MEDIA WORKSHOP WITH PROFESSOR MARC DAVIS (UC BERKELEY)
- FOURTH HELSINKI-BERKELEY SUMMER SCHOOOL HELD
- SUMMER VISITORS AT HIIT
- PROFESSOR ANTHONY JOSEPH VISITS HIIT
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS
- HIIT INDUSTRIAL ADVISORY BOARD TO MEET IN SEPTEMBER
- HIIT SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD TO MEET IN NOVEMBER
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

On 1 August 2004, HIIT had its fifth anniversary. Having thus completed the initial 5-year cycle specified in the original collaboration agreement between the Helsinki University of Technology and the University of Helsinki that founded HIIT, it is now time to begin evaluating its accomplishments and planning for its future.

During its life span so far, HIIT has grown from nearly nothing to an organisation with well over 100 researchers and staff. It has built a strong research portfolio and a growing collaboration network nationally and worldwide. It has close relations with key industrial companies and research funding organisations. Most importantly, the impact of its work has become increasingly visible both scientifically and industrially.

This issue of HIIT Update bears witness to these accomplishments in several ways. We are especially pleased to be able to report on increasing visitor traffic at HIIT and the launching of new international research activities. HIIT is clearly on the right path towards its goals.

Yet HIIT is still far from mature, and there is plenty of room for improvement in all areas of its work - scientific impact, industrial impact, and societal impact. The coming months will be crucial in setting the agenda for the next five years 2005-2010. The planned meetings of the Industrial and Scientific Advisory Boards of HIIT are key steps in this discourse. Stay tuned for the results of these meetings.

Helsinki 27 September 2004

Martti Mäntylä
Director of Research, Professor

Mervi Rantanen
Planning Officer

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NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS

The National Technology Agency Tekes awarded first-year funding for the project E!3187 CELTIC Db - Wireless Woodstock Services in Finland. Professor Martti Mäntylä will lead the project which forms a part of the international Wireless Festival Eureka/CELTIC project led by Ericsson Research, Sweden. TeliaSonera Finland also participates in the project that focuses on user-centric, economic, and technical issues related to providing digital services tailored for large-scale events. For more information, please contact Program Coordinator Olli Pitkänen or peek into http://www.hiit.fi/wf/index.html.

Tekes awarded funding for the project RISE: Rich Semantic Media for Personal and Professional Users. The project is coordinated by VTT Information Technology; HIIT's Digital Content Communities Group participates in the project led by Dr. Marko Turpeinen. Industrial partners of the project are SanomaWSOY, Alma Media and Finnish broadcasting corporation YLE. For more information, contact Senior Research Scientist Marko Turpeinen).

Tekes also decided to fund the project Dynamos: Dynamic Composition and Sharing of Context-aware Mobile Services coordinated by VTT Information Technology. HIIT's Mobile Computing Group participates in the project. The industrial partners include ICT Turku, Suunto and TeliaSonera Finland. Professor Kimmo Raatikainen leads HIIT's part of the work.

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MOBILIFE INTEGRATED PROJECT LAUNCHED

The project MobiLife started on 1 September 2004 and will go on until the end of 2006. Both units of HIIT participate in this large EU IST integrated project, which aims at bringing advances in mobile applications and services within the reach of users in their everyday life. HIIT/ARU participates in the work on user-centricity, as well as trust and security. HIIT/BRU participates in the work on context management.

MobiLife belongs to the Wireless World Initiative (WWI), as one of four ongoing Integrated Projects. The project is coordinated by Nokia. For more information on MobiLife, please refer to http://www.ist-mobilife.org/ or contact Research Coordinator Patrik Floréen).

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PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC TARJA HALONEN VISITS HIIT

President of the Republic Tarja Halonen visited HIIT on June 8, 2004. A seminar covering a selection of HIIT's research topics with special societal relevance was arranged. The topics included research into open mobile application platforms, open search, community-based media and information society research.

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PROFESSOR ESKO UKKONEN NOMINATED THE DIRECTOR OF HIIT BASIC RESEARCH UNIT

Professor Esko Ukkonen has been nominated the Director of HIIT Basic Research Unit (BRU) as of 1 September. The change of director became mandatory due to a recent decision of the University of Helsinki, prohibiting Academy Professors from holding managerial posts that include administrative responsibilities. The former director of the BRU, Professor Heikki Mannila, received the nomination for an Academy Professor recently.

Esko Ukkonen is since 1985 Professor of Computer Science of the University of Helsinki, during 1999-2004 Academy Professor, and since 2002 Director of From Data to Knowledge research unit, a Center-of-Excellence of the Academy of Finland. He has had visiting positions at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Freiburg (Alexander von Humboldt Grant), and the University of Bielefeld. He has published more than 100 original scientific articles. His research interests include algorithms and data structures, combinatorial pattern matching, machine learning, and computational biology. Dr. Ukkonen is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Nordic Journal of Computing. In 1999-2001 he was the chairman of the Finnish Society for Computer Science.

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HIIT RESEARCHERS CO-ORGANISE WORKSHOP ON HCI ISSUES IN PROACTIVE COMPUTING

HIIT researchers Antti Oulasvirta and Antti Salovaara (jointly with Peter Ljungstrand from Interactive Institute, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden) will organise a workshop on HCI Issues in Proactive Computing 24 October, 2004 in connection with the NordiCHI Conference in Tampere, Finland. NordiCHI is a biannial conference functioning as the main Nordic forum for human-computer interaction research. The workshops aims at 1) eliciting critical conditions and requirements for successful proactivity, 2) exploring its design implications, 3) bringing together people in different disciplines to discuss and address the issue, and 4) bringing together researchers and practitioners to better inform both research and practice. See http://www.hiit.fi/uerg/nordichi04-proactive/ for more information.

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WEB INTELLIGENCE SYMPOSIUM 2-3 SEPTEMBER

HIIT was one of the co-organisers of the Web Intelligence Symposium held 2-3 September at the Finnish Artifical Intelligence Conference at Heureka Science Centre, Vantaa, Finland. The symposium was organised by the Finnish AI Society, World Wide Web Consortium W3C, XML Finland Association, Tekes FENIX-program, University of Helsinki, Finnish Science Centre Heureka and HIIT. The themes of the symposium included all aspects of intelligent systems on the web. Please see http://www.step2004.1colony.com/. For more information on the Web Intelligence Symposium, contact Professor Eero Hyvönen).

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HIIT ORGANISES MOBILE MEDIA WORKSHOP WITH PROFESSOR MARC DAVIS (UC BERKELEY)

HIIT's Mobile Content Communities (MC2) project organised a Mobile Media Workshop 23 August at HTC with Professor Marc Davis from University of California, Berkeley. The workshop explored the growing possibilites of mobile technology as a new infrastructure for creating, sharing and finding content describing metadata for mobile multimedia. The themes and questions discussed were future applications for mobile media metadata, design methods for mobile media, acquiring and using metadata as well as discussing what metadata would be useful. Also, the legal, social, and business issues in mobile media and metadata were touched upon. More about the workshop results can be found at http://www.cs.hut.fi/~rsarvas/workshop/

Marc Davis is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) at the UC Berkeley where he directs Garage Cinema Research. His work is focused on creating the technology and applications that will enable daily media consumers to become daily media producers. See http://garage.sims.berkeley.edu/marc.cfm, and on SIMS http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/.

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FOURTH HELSINKI-BERKELEY SUMMER SCHOOOL HELD

The fourth Berkeley-Helsinki Ph.D. Student Workshop on Telecommunication Software Architectures was held at the University of California at Berkeley 21-24 June. The workshop was led by Professor Kimmo Raatikainen of HIIT and Professor Randy Katz of UC Berkeley. See http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kraatika/Courses/berkeley04s.html for more information on the workshop.

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SUMMER VISITORS AT HIIT

Several visitors representing HIIT's foreign research partners participated in its work during Summer 2004.

Jens Grossklags from SIMS, UC Berkeley (Prof. John Chuang's group) visited the Muppet project 27 June - 1 July, largely in preparation of future planned co-operation.

Visiting Researchers Simon Lacoste-Julien (20.5.-20.6.2004) and Guillaume Obozinski (1.8.-5.9.2004) from UC Berkeley (Prof. Michael Jordan's group) worked together with the members of the CoSCo research group on the mathematical modelling techniques required for next generation search engines. The co-operation between the two groups will also continue in the future.

Rudi Cilibrasi from CWI (the Netherlands) visited CoSCo 16.8.-29.8.2004. Rudi is doing his Ph.D. for Peter Grunwald and Paul Vitanyi at CWI on the theory and applications of the normalized compression distance (NCD) method. The visit was also a kick-off of a joint research project funded by the EU through the Pascal Network of Excellence.

In addition, Profesor Christos Faloutsos from Carnegie Mellon University visited University of Helsinki and HIIT in August. His trip to Finland was connected to the distinguished lecture series of HeCSE (Helsinki Graduate School in Computer Science and Engineering, http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/hecse/). Professor Faloutsos is a member of HIIT Scientific Advisory Board. For more information on Professor Faloutsos, see http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~christos/.

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PROFESSOR ANTHONY JOSEPH VISITS HIIT

Professor Anthony Joseph from the Computer Science Department of the UC Berkeley is visiting HIIT until mid-November 2004 as a part of his sabbatical leave from UCB. The scope of the visit is in mobile computing, especially advanced topics in mobile middleware. For more information on Professor Joseph, please refer to http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~adj/ .

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS

As of August 2004, professor Petri Myllymäki is the new Principal Scientist of the Intelligent Systems research area at HIIT.

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HIIT INDUSTRIAL ADVISORY BOARD TO MEET IN SEPTEMBER

After a longish break the Industrial Advisory Board of HIIT will meet 29 September at HTC. The objective of the meeting is to discuss HIIT's future strategy especially with reference to the institute's industrial impact, HIIT's research portfolio, its partner relations, international cooperation, and interface with the industry in general. IAB is an advisory board appointed by the HIIT Board. It consists of representatives from companies that work closely with HIIT.

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HIIT SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD TO MEET IN NOVEMBER

The Scientific Advisory Board of HIIT will meet for second time 15-17 November in Helsinki. The meeting will focus especially on HIIT's research strategy, including its research areas, their desired scientific impact, and research networks. The input of the SAB is especially timely as a contribution to the presently active strategy process aiming at defining HIIT's agenda for the next 5-year period 2005-2010 of its operation.

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FUTURE EVENTS

29 September 2004, 14:00-17:00: HIIT Industrial Advisory Board meeting, HTC Helsinki 12 October 2004, 13:00-17:00: HIIT ARU Research Portfolio 2005 seminar, HTC Helsinki 26 October 2004, 12:00-14:00: HIIT Board meeting, Exactum (Kumpula), Helsinki 15-17 November 2004: HIIT Scientific Advisory Board meeting, Helsinki 14 December 2004, 12:00-14:00: HIIT Board meeting, HTC Helsinki (tbc)