HIIT Update 1/2004

Headlines in this issue:

- FOREWORD
- NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS
- MOBILIFE INTEGRATED PROJECT IN NEGOTIATION WITH CEC
- WIRELESS WOODSTOCK SERVICES PROJECT GETS CELTIC LABEL
- CO-OPERATION WITH TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY, CHINA
- HIIT SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD MET FOR THE FIRST TIME
- PROFESSOR LAWRENCE LESSIG VISITS HIIT: CREATIVE COMMONS AND HIIT PUBLISH FINNISH VERSIONS OF CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSES
- TEKES PUBLISHES THE REPORT OF THE WELFARE OF NATIONS PROJECT
- HIIT RETREAT: MOBILE COMPUTING @ HIIT HELD AT SJÖKULLA, KIRKKONUMMI
- HIIT STRATEGY PROCESS LAUNCHED
- PROFESSOR ANTHONY JOSEPH TO VISIT HIIT IN AUG-NOV 2004
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS: DR. MARKKU STENBORG JOINS HIIT
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

After a longer break than originally intended, this new issue of HIIT Update has a lot of activities and news to report of. After the previous update, HIIT has launched its first EU-funded research activities; HIIT's Scientific Advisory Board had its first meeting; new projects, co-operation activities, and inititiatives have been launched. More importantly, the scientific, industrial, and societal impact of HIIT's research has made continuous progress, thus keeping HIIT steadily on its chosen path towards a leading international research institute. This issue reports of many of these developments, and invites the readers to study further information available on HIIT's WWW pages or directly from HIIT researchers. Enjoy!

Martti Mäntylä
Director of Research, Professor

Mervi Rantanen
Planning Officer

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NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS

The Academy of Finland awarded four-year funding for the project DRAMA: Scenario Methods for User Centric Product Concept Development from its Industrial Design Programme. Launched on January 1, 2004, the project studies how the methods of narrative theatre can be applied to study interactively scenarios embodying the use of technology in a future setting. The project is executed in co-operation with the dramaturgy unit of the Stadia Polytechnic and it is led by Professor Martti Mäntylä. For more information, contact the Project Manager Vesa Kantola or see project's WWW page in http://www.hiit.fi/drama/.

The Academy of Finland awarded HIIT a grant of 50,000€ from its Infrastructure Program 2004 for the acquisition of a grid-type computational server, mainly needed for research in probabilistic modelling in the Complex System Computation Group led by professor Henry Tirri. The cluster will find immediate use in Next Generation Search project cluster of HIIT, but is likely to be used also in other research activities of HIIT involving intensive computation. The cluster currently consists of a master node, disk space in HIIT's disk array and nine calculation nodes. Hardware specifications are:

Master node
Hewlett-Packard Proliant DL380 G3
- dual 2,8 GHz Intel Xeon prosessors
- 3,5 GB of RAM
- two 36 GB Ultra320 SCSI disks (RAID-0)
- two fibre channel host bus adapter's

Two calculation nodes
Hewlett-Packard Proliant DL380 G3
- dual 2,8 GHz Intel Xeon prosessors
- 3,5 GB of RAM
- two 146 GB Ultra320 SCSI disks (RAID-0)

Seven calculation nodes
Hewlett-Packard Proliant DL360 G3
- dual 3,06 GHz Intel Xeon prosessors
- 4 GB of RAM
- two 72 GB Ultra320 SCSI disks (RAID-0)

All nodes are connected to Hewlett-Packard ProCurve 2848 gigabit switch through two gigabit NICs. The cluster was installed succesfully in March 2004, and it's been in production since then. For more information, contact High Performance Cluster management team (mailto:hpc-info(a)HIIT.FI).

The National Technology Agency Tekes awarded first-year funding for the project Muppet: Managing Privacy and Trust in P2P Communication. Professor Martti Mäntylä leads the project. Its industrial partners are Nokia, Ericsson, Finnish Broadcasting Corporation and Leiki Oy. The project will focus in trust and reputation management especially in mobile P2P systems. After an intensive preparation stage, the project was lauched 1 April 2004. For more information, contact Muppet's Project Manager Juho Heikkilä.

Tekes has also awarded HIIT a grant for preparation of joint research activities with Tsinghua University, Beijing, China and with Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. The aim of this work is to prepare and launch new bilateral research activities between HIIT and these universities to launch in late 2004 or 2005. For more information, contact professor Martti Mäntylä or professor Kimmo Raatikainen.

After a project planning stage, the European Commission signed the contract for the project Alvis: Superpeer Semantic Search Engine in late 2003. Hence, the project was launched 1 January 2004. HIIT is the coordinator of an effort involving ten other partners, including Tsinghua University, Beijing. The project aims to build a next-generation search engine and infrastructure based on full-document retrieval and a distributed architecture. The system will be made available to Internet community in open source. The project is led by professor Henry Tirri and managed by Dr. Wray Buntine. Mikko Kontiainen is the administrative coordinator of the project. For more information, see http://cosco.hiit.fi/search/alvis.html.

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MOBILIFE INTEGRATED PROJECT IN NEGOTIATION WITH CEC

Since August 2002, HIIT has participated in the preparation of the Wireless World Initiative (WWI), ultimately planned to consist of five Integrated Projects (IP) and a coordination action all belonging to the IST priority of EU's 6th Framework Programme. Three of the planned IPs were accepted for funding in the first call of the IST priority. Both units of HIIT participate in the Nokia-coordinated IP application MobiLife – Mobile Life, which concentrates on ubiquitous mobile applications and services from a user-centric point of view. Its application was submitted to the second call of the IST priority in October 2003. The evaluation of the proposal was favourable and MobiLife has commenced the contract negotiations with CEC in February 2004. The project itself is likely to commence 1 September 2004. For more information on WWI, please refer to http://www.wireless-world-initiative.org/.

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WIRELESS WOODSTOCK SERVICES PROJECT GETS CELTIC LABEL

In response to the first call of proposals to the Eureka cluster programme Celtic (http://www.celtic-initiative.org/), the project proposal Wireless Woodstock Services was submitted to the Celtic organisation on November 28, 2003. The international project is coordinated by Ericsson Research, Sweden, and its Finnish participants include TeliaSonera Finland and HIIT. After a technical evaluation, the project has been accepted to the Celtic programme (i.e. given a "Celtic label") in March 2004. Currently under consideration by Tekes, the project is expected to launch immediately. Its aim is to study new service concepts, business models, and technical infrastructures for creating and launching digital services for large events such as music festivals and sports events. The Finnish part of the project plans to conduct its first user studies in the Neste Rally event in August, 2004. For more information, contact research director Martti Mäntylä or program coordinator Olli Pitkänen.

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CO-OPERATION WITH TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY, CHINA

Since late 2002, HIIT has actively prepared co-operation with the Department of Computer Science and Technology of the Tsinghua University in Beijing, China (http://www.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/EnglishVersion/Default.aspx). This preparation has made considerable progress during the recent months, with the launch of the first joint project Alvis (reported above) and several visits of HIIT personnel. Research Director Martti Mäntylä has visited Tsinghua in November 2003 and in March 2004, mainly to suggest and prepare new joint research initiatives. Professor Henry Tirri, Dr. Wray Buntine and project coordinator Mikko Kontiainen visited Tsinghua in mid-May in relation to the Alvis project. In addition, professor Kimmo Raatikainen and Dr. Pekka Nikander visited Tsinghua in February, 2004 in connection of the WWRF meeting. HIIT has also received a preparation grant from Tekes. As a result of these activities, HIIT expects a second bilateral project to launch in late 2004. We are also expecting a Chinese visitor at HIIT during autumn 2004.

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HIIT SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD MET FOR THE FIRST TIME

The first meeting of the HIIT Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) was held 16-17 October, 2003 in Helsinki. The SAB consists of internationally prominent scholars who are invited by the HIIT Board. The objective of the SAB is to provide critical guidance about HIIT’s research activities and to advise the HIIT Board on strategic planning of the future research directions of HIIT. Of the members of the board Professor Christos Faloutsos, Professor Randy Katz, Professor Martin Kersten, Professor Kari-Jouko Räihä, Professor Mart Saarma and Professor John Shawe-Taylor participated in the October meeting.

In its concluding comments the SAB focused on the scientific level of HIIT's research, as well as on the quality of graduate and postdoctoral education. Neither industrial nor societal impact was commented as it was considered hard for SAB to determine. The overall evaluation was that HIIT's research is generally of world class with impressive collaborations. The graduate and postdoctoral education was considered impressive, having excellent facilities and great projects to work on, and excellent students. The main recommendations of SAB were that collaboration between the research groups in HIIT should be further strengthened, that the strategic goals of HIIT should be clarified and that more emphasis should be put on PR-activity and publicity. Of the different research areas, the SAB especially appreciated the research done in data mining, mobile computing, intelligent systems and computational neuroscience.

For more information on the meeting, please refer to http://www.hiit.fi/sab/2003.

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PROFESSOR LAWRENCE LESSIG VISITS HIIT: CREATIVE COMMONS AND HIIT PUBLISH FINNISH VERSIONS OF CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSES

Creative Commons (see http://creativecommons.org/) and HIIT's DE Core project have published on 24 May the official Finnish translations of Creative Commons licenses, a set of freely available content licenses aiming at expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share. The initiator of Creative Commons, Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig (http://www.lessig.org/) gave a presentation in the publication ceremony. See http://creativecommons.fi/.

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TEKES PUBLISHES THE REPORT OF THE WELFARE OF NATIONS PROJECT

The final report of the Welfare of Nations Project, edited by PhD Pekka Himanen and titled "Globaali tietoyhteiskunta: Kehityssuuntia Piilaaksosta Singaporeen" has been published by Tekes in its series. The report is also available in WWW in http://www.tekes.fi/julkaisut/globaali_tietoyhteiskunta.pdf.

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HIIT RETREAT: MOBILE COMPUTING @ HIIT HELD AT SJÖKULLA, KIRKKONUMMI

The annual HIIT Retreat event took place at Sjökulla Education Center, Kirkkonummi, 1 - 2 June under the theme "HIIT Retreat: Mobile Computing at HIIT". The event brought together representatives from industry, universities and HIIT senior researchers to review the present research at HIIT and to discuss its future directions. The objective of the 2004 Retreat was especially to look into the future of the Fuego research programme and some related research lines.

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HIIT STRATEGY PROCESS LAUNCHED

By agreement of the University of Helsinki and the Helsinki University of Technology, HIIT was originally founded for a period of five years from 1.8.1999 to 31.7.2004, with possible one-year extensions. As the initial five-year period is now drawing to its close, the Board of HIIT has launched a strategy process, aiming at a revised research agenda of HIIT with related institutional changes. The objective is to draft a new agreement to enter into force as of 1.8.2005. At this stage, a first draft of the new strategy has been presented to the Board by the appointed working group in May 2004. The objective is to further revise the draft to be presented to the Scientific and Industrial Advisory Boards in autumn 2004, and subsequently to have the new agreement 2005 - 2010 formally accepted by the two parent universities in spring 2005. For more information, please contact either of the research directors Martti Mäntylä or Heikki Mannila).

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PROFESSOR ANTHONY JOSEPH TO VISIT HIIT IN AUG-NOV 2004

With help of a grant from Nokia Foundation, Professor Anthony Joseph from the Computer Science Department of the University of California at Berkeley will visit HIIT from mid-August to mid-November 2004 as a part of his sabbatical leave from UCB. The scope of the planned visit will be in mobile computing, especially advanced topics in mobile middleware. In preparation of the visit, Professor Joseph visited Finland in May 2004, and met several researchers from HIIT and the CS departments of UH and HUT. For more information, please contact Professor Joseph's host at HIIT, professor Kimmo Raatikainen.

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS: DR. MARKKU STENBORG JOINS HIIT

Dr Markku Stenborg from ETLA (The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy) has joined HIIT as a part-time Senior Research Scientist from April 1, 2004. He will be sharing his time between ETLA and HIIT. At HIIT, he will participate in the recently launched MUPPET project.

Markku Stenborg has a PhD in Economics from the Pennsylvania State University. His 1993 doctoral thesis dealt with incentive contracts and game theory. His research focus at HIIT is on incentives and economics aspects of trust and privacy in mobile peer-to-peer communication. At ETLA, his research topics include competition policy and open source software. Previously, he has been Assistant Professor with the Turku Business School, Senior Adviser at the Finnish Competition Authority and Senior Manager at KPMG Transaction Services. He also works as a part-time consultant providing advice on, e.g., competition policy issues.

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FUTURE EVENTS

21.-24.6.2004: The 4th Helsinki-Berkeley Summer School on Telecommunication Software Architecture will be held at University of California at Berkeley, USA. For more information, see http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kraatika/Courses/berkeley04s.html.