Headlines in this issue:
- FOREWORD
- NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS
- ACADEMY OF FINLAND GRANTS ALGODAN CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE
- NEW RESEARCH GROUPS TO HIIT
- WORKSHOP ON CONTEXT-AWARE MOBILE MEDIA (CAMEDIA 2006)
- NAMING AND ADDRESSING FOR NEXT-GENERATION INTERNETWORKS
- IST 2006
- VISITORS AT HIIT
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS
- FUTURE EVENTS
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FOREWORD
The discussion on the Finnish innovation system, including the role of universities, has continued with increasing intensity during the second half of 2006. The theme is also linked with the analogous discussion of the whole EU situation under the framework of the Lisbon strategy and its implementation.
As a result, several partially overlapping ideas are being developed: the so-called "Innovation University" supposedly created by merging the Helsinki University of Technology, the Helsinki School of Economics, and the Helsinki University of Arts and Design; the new "Strategic Centres of Excellence in Science, Technology and Innovation" scheme proposed by the Science and Technology Policy Council of Finland; and the "European Institute of Technology" proposed by the European Commission. All three seem to aim at similar qualitative goals: high scientific and societal impact; better integration between various disciplines; seamless link between basic research, strategic research and innovation-oriented research; and closer co-operation between universities and industry.
HIIT subscribes to all of these objectives in its own operation, and in fact offers a blueprint of how they might be pursued. This gives us a solid basis for contributing to the ongoing discussion, and also to the implementation of the initiatives likely to start sometime during 2007.
During the second half of 2006 HIIT has continued the launch of the new organisation announced in HIIT Update 1/2006. Internal management bodies for research programmes have started their operation, thus providing a theatre for research group co-operation and joint research agenda planning. Each programme will also have its own Steering Board, providing a new interface to HIIT's work for experts in industry and academic partner sites. The full launch of these will continue in 2007.
With these developments, HIIT has effectively implemented the core of its strategy as defined nearly two years ago. Thus it is ready to take on any opportunities and challenges the fluid situation has to offer. Watch this space for information for more developments.
Helsinki 20 December 2006
Co-directors, HIIT
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NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS
TÄKY
TEKES has awarded funding for the project "Täky" which was launched in November and will end in March 2008. The project is a collaboration of HIIT's DCC and UIX groups with VTT. The industry partners in the project are Nokia, Aina Group, Profium, and Swelcom. The project studies the role of tagging in mobile applications. For further information please contact Risto Sarvas.
PAMPHLET
Pamphlet-project studies digital media communities and designs hybrid media product concepts for those communities. The project gains more understanding on the role of paper-based products in digital media communities. The project started in April 2006 and ends in October 2007. It is a co-operation project with KCL, Dynamoid, Futurice, TFIF, Myllykosken Pallo, TKK, and the National Consumer Research Center. For further information please contact Risto Sarvas.
OPTIMISING DATA GATHERING IN RESOURCE-CONSTRAINED NETWORKS
The Academy of Finland has granted funding for a research project on optimisation in sensor networks for 2007-2009. The project, led by Patrik Floréen, continues the work of the Academy project NAPS (2003-2005), which was part of the research programme on proactive computing (PROACT). For further information please contact Patrik Floréen.
FUEGOSPHERE
The FuegoSphere -project investigates the integration of HIIT's mobile Open Source service platform components with enterprise systems. The project is done in co-operation with Nokia NRC. For further information please contact Sasu Tarkoma.
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ACADEMY OF FINLAND GRANTS ALGODAN CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE
Finnish Centre of Excellence for Algorithmic Data Analysis Research (Algodan) is one of the 18 research groups selected by the Acedemy of Finland to the national centre-of-excellence programme for 2008 - 2013. HIIT/Kumpula is the main site of activity of Algodan. Professor Esko Ukkonen is the director and Academy Professor Heikki Mannila the vice-director of Algodan. More information at http://www.aka.fi/.
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NEW RESEARCH GROUPS TO HIIT
HIIT Steering Board decided to accept three new research groups into HIIT: the Computational Biology group led by Professor Esko Ukkonen from University of Helsinki, the Statistical Machine Learning and Bioinformatics group led by Professor Samuel Kaski from the Helsinki University of Technology and the Distributed Networking and Security research group led by Professor Antti Ylä-Jääski from Helsinki University of Technology. The work of Professor Ukkonen's group will mainly be focused on HIIT's Algorithmic Data Analysis (ADA) programme, while Professor Kaski's group will contribute both to ADA and the Probabilistic Adaptive Systems (PAS) programme. Professor Antti Ylä-Jääski´s group will focus on the Future Internet programme.
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WORKSHOP ON CONTEXT-AWARE MOBILE MEDIA (CAMEDIA 2006)
The DCC research group organized the Context-Aware Mobile Media (CAMedia 2006) workshop in the 8th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2006) on 12 September in Espoo.
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NAMING AND ADDRESSING FOR NEXT-GENERATION INTERNETWORKS, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany
HIIT's senior research scientist Andrei Gurtov co-organised the seminar Naming and Addressing for Next-Generation Internetworks in Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, on 29.10.-1.11.2006. The goal of the seminar was to bring together researchers and engineers experienced in current and next-generation network architectures and related research areas. The seminar allowed these participants to advance issues associated with naming and addressing in future networking and computing systems. Some 30 experts attended the seminar, including a strong team from HIIT.
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IST 2006
HIIT participated to IST 2006 Helsinki on 21 - 23 November 2006 with two separate research and technology stands: Meaning (Merkitys) and Alvis. Also number of HIIT's researchers attended the conference, exhibition, networking events and workshops, especially concerning issues of the 7. Framework Programme. More than 4,500 people were present in what was the largest IST event ever. For more information, please contact Petri Martikainen.
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VISITORS AT HIIT
Professor Nancy Van House from School of Information, UC Berkeley visited the Immortalidad project at HIIT on 20-21 June 2006 and co-chaired with HIIT's Risto Sarvas a workshop in the CITRIS in Europe conference. See http://www.citris-uc.org/CITRIS-in-Europe.
Dr. Johan Pouwelse from Delft University of Technology Netherlands visited HIIT on 18 September 2006. Dr. Pouwelse presented Tribler; a social peer-to-peer file sharing system based on BitTorrent. He collaborates with HIIT and the University of Art and Design Helsinki on the P2P-Fusion project, which addresses the legal creative reuse of audio and video media in the Internet.
Professor Dimitri Bertsekas from MIT visited HIIT on September 11-27 to discuss possible future collaborative research projects between MIT and HIIT. During his visit Professor Bertsekas also gave two invited talks titled "Dynamic and Neuro-Dynamic Programming: An Overview and Recent Work" and "A New Look at Convexity, Duality, and Optimization".
Professor Leo Sang-Min Whang from Department of Psychology, Yonsei University, Seoul, visited HIIT on 26 September. He gave a talk at the seminar on Massively multi-user services and virtual consumerism organised by the DCC research group. Seminar materials are available at http://virtual-economy.org/event/260906.
Professor Tatsuo Nakajima, Distributed and Ubiquitous Computing Lab, Waseda University, Tokyo, visited HIIT on 8 December. He gave a talk at the seminar on Ubiquitous consumer services & augmented reality organised by DCC and UIx research groups. Seminar materials are available at www.hiit.fi/node/89.
Dr. Walter Bender, President of One Laptop Per Child project from MIT visited HIIT on 14 December 2006. He presented the One Laptop Per Child project and demonstrated the latest beta machines.
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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS
M.Sc. & MA Kai Huotari joined HIIT as Research Programme Manager of Network Society as of 1st June. In this position, he contributes in the administration of the Institute and participates in the research aiming to do his doctoral thesis. Kai's background lies in film and in computer science. After graduating from a filmschool in France, he completed his studies in Computer science department at TKK. Before joining HIIT, he led DocPoint - Helsinki Documentary Film Festival for three years.
D.Sc. Arto Karila started at HIIT on October 1 in the position of Principal Scientist. Dr. Karila is one of the best known networking experts in Finland. He received his Doctor of Science (Eng.) degree at the Helsinki University of Technology, Department of Computer Science, in 1991. He has worked previously in Technical Research Centre of Finland, Telecommunications Laboratory in 1982-1988, Helsinki University of Technology 1988-1989, Telecom Finland in 1989-1992, Wellfleet Communications (now part of Nortel Networks) in 1992-1994, Upnet Säkerhetssystem in 1994-1995, and Systems Software Partners (SSP) Oy in 1995-1997. In 1995-2001 he was Professor in Computer Networks and Network Security in the Helsinki University of Technology, Department of Computer Science. Since 2001 he has worked as an independent consultant. Dr. Karila will contribute to the Future Internet research programme of HIIT, especially HIP-related research. He plans to divide his time between HIIT and his other pursuits.
D.Sc Marko Turpeinen, the Programme Director of the Network Society research programme at HIIT, has been nominated as the Professor of Media Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden, from 1.11.2006 onwards. Professor Turpeinen will continue his work at HIIT, and plans to divide his time between KTH and HIIT.
HIIT researcher Antti Oulasvirta defended his doctoral thesis at the Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki, 10 November 2006. The title of the thesis is "Studies of Working Memory in Interrupted Human-Computer Interaction,". The opponent was Professor Deborah Boehm-Davis from the George Mason University, USA.
HIIT researcher Tommi Ilmonen defended his doctoral thesis "Tools and Experiments in Multimodal Interaction" on 14 December 2006 at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Helsinki University of Technology. His opponent was professor Michael Cohen, Computer Arts Lab, University of Aizu, Japan and the supervisor was Professor Tapio Takala.
HIIT researcher Risto Sarvas defended his doctoral thesis "Designing User-Centric Metadata for Digital Snapshot Photography" on 15 December 2006 at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Helsinki University of Technology. His opponent was professor Walter Bender from MIT Media Lab and the supervisor was Professor Reijo Sulonen.
HIIT researcher Evimaria Terzi defended her doctoral thesis "Problems and Algorithms for Sequence Segmentations" on 18 December 2006 at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. The opponent was Professor Dimitris Achlioptas, UC Santa Cruz, and kustos was Professor Esko Ukkonen.
HIIT researcher Antti Oulasvirta (Ubiquitous Interaction group) has received the Fulbright-Technology Industries of Finland Grant for a young scholar. The grant covers a post doctoral year in the Information School at the University of California, Berkeley, commencing on Fall 2007.
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FUTURE EVENTS
HIIT BOARD MEETING on 27 February 2007 at 10 in Ruoholahti, HTC/Pinta.
FORTHCOMING WORKSHOP: IMPROVED MOBILE USER EXPERIENCE (IMUx 2007) IN TORONTO MAY 2007
HIIT arranges together with Nokia Research Center a workshop combining user modeling, user interaction and user experience. The workshop takes place in conjunction with the conference Pervasive 2007 in Toronto in May 2007. Further information can be found on the homepage www.hiit.fi/imux. The main organizers are Patrik Floréen, Petteri Nurmi and Greger Lindén from HIIT and Péter Boda from Nokia.
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Last updated on 10 Feb 2009 by WWW administrator - Page created on 1 Nov 2006 by Visa Noronen