Helsinki ICT Research News

This news feed aggregates content from the Research News feeds from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Aalto University Department of Computer Science, and the University of Helsinki Department of Computer Science.

  • Financial weekly Talouselämä ranks Netmedi as one of Finland's 10 most promising startups. Netmedi team The fact that Lauri Sippola became the managing director of a health technology company was actually quite natural. 'Approximately half my family comprises doctors, the other half engineers,' he states with a laugh. 'The health technology sector has always seemed interesting, and I have also seen that technology and health care do not correlate in the optimal way; the patient's...
  • The family tree algorithm automatically searches for a child's most probable parents and creates family trees based on this. Aalto University doctoral student Eric Malmi has developed a family tree algorithm called AncestryAI. The algorithm looks for links between 5 million baptisms from the end of the 17th to the mid-19th century and partly to the beginning of the 20th century. To investigate your own family roots, you need to know about your own ancestors, because baptisms in the last...
  • Raine Kajastila, a graduate of Aalto University, has developed a technology that transforms an ordinary climbing wall into a games platform. This has become a successful product and business. The idea of an augmented reality climbing wall arose about five years ago when Raine Kajastila was working as a post-doctoral researcher at Aalto University involved in games research. Enthusiasm for climbing encouraged him to examine how technology could be used to motivate people to take exercise. The...
  • The semantic matching feature can be employed for networking and enhancing innovation ecosystems. The role of matchmaking in the establishment of VXT Research Oy is embodied in the unlikely rendezvous of the co-founders - Vincent Kuo and Tapio Auvinen. Back in 2010, professor of structural mechanics Juha Paavola found computer science researcher Tapio Auvinen, to solve the challenges with core curriculum analysis, a technique used in educational design. This collaboration resulted in "STOPS",...
  • Summer jobs in IT research groups (deadline March 16th 2017) Summer jobs in computer science research are waiting for students. Several salaried research assistant positions are available in a range of research projects. There are jobs available for computer science and information technology students. In some projects there are also jobs available for students of mathematics, statistics, language technology or linguistics. read...
  • ZDNet wrote on Feb 21st on the Ubispark project of the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. A smartphone today packs more computing power than the computers used by NASA in the Apollo space program. At the same time, the Internet of Things is bringing connectivity to a growing number of devices, from smart TVs to fridges. Now researchers at Finland's University of Helsinki want to harness all these computational resources in a project called Ubispark, which uses smart...
  • Gene transfers are particularly common in the antibiotic-resistance genes of Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria. When mammals breed, the genome of the offspring is a combination of the parents' genomes. Bacteria, by contrast, reproduce through cell division. In theory, this means that the genomes of the offspring are copies of the parent genome. However, the process is not quite as straightforward as this due to horizontal gene transfer through which bacteria can transfer fragments of their...
  • Social eMotions research project of Aalto University culminates in an interactive dance performance. How would we express emotions if we were limited to using only our bodily movements instead of facial expressions? What types of movements express pride or how do we signal sadness? How rapid is emotional contagion, and how quickly can emotions alter? In the Social eMotions project lead by Aalto University, which is just about to finish, emotional communication was studied using the means of...
  • Epistatic interactions between polymorphisms in DNA are recognized as important drivers of evolution in numerous organisms. Study of epistasis in bacteria has been hampered by the lack of densely sampled population genomic data, suitable statistical models and inference algorithms sufficiently powered for extremely high-dimensional parameter spaces. In an article published in PloS Genetics, a HIIT team introduced the first model-based method for genome-wide epistasis analysis and use two of the...
  • Twitter case study aims to minimize the controversies. A growing number of people have expressed their concern about high levels of polarization in the society. For instance, the World Economic Forum’s report on global risks lists the increasing societal polarization as a threat – and others have suggested that social media might be contributing to this phenomenon. The article that received the best student-paper award in the Tenth International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM...

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