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The Academy of Finland awarded 4-year funding for the project Scalable Probabilistic Methods for Next Generation Internet Search Engines (PROSE) by professor Henry Tirri of the University of Helsinki and HIIT.

The project forms the core technical and methodological activity of a larger research effort aimed at creating a next-generation distributed Internet search engine that provides greatly enhanced service in comparison with the present state-of-the-art. See the Next Generation Search page for more information.

The opening ceremony of the Berkeley Center for the Information Society was held at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, hosted by Prof. Nelson Morgan, Director of ICSI and Dr. Pekka Himanen, Director of the Center. To honour the occasion, Jukka Valtasaari, the Finnish Ambassador to the US, decorated the Chairman of the Center’s Research Board, Prof. Manuel Castells. HIIT’s The Welfare of Nations project will be one of the first research activities associated with the new Center.

HIIT arranged a seminar describing its planned research portfolio for 2003, prepared for the coming national and European calls.

The second HIIT-UCB Summer School was held in University of California at Berkeley, with professors Kimmo Raatikainen and Randy Katz chairing the event.

Prof. Hal R. Varian, Dean of the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) at the University of California at Berkeley, visited HIIT. A seminar covering HIIT research was arranged.