News

Director of HIIT, Professor Samuel Kaski has been appointed as a member of the Advisory Board of Statistics Finland (Tilastokeskuksen neuvottelukunta) for the period 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2018. The Ministry of Finance appoints the Board which supports the strategic management of Statistics Finland. http://www.stat.fi/index_en.html

Dr. Alan McNally is an internationally renowned expert on human microbial pathogen evolution and transmission. He is a long-tern collaborator of Jukka Corander and visits HIIT week 10 in 2015 to work on a COIN flagship project about the evolution and dissemination of the globally most widespread extraintestinal pathogenic strain of E. coli.

The start of 2015 sees a flurry of visits from prominent Japanese researchers to the Genome Scale Algorithmics group (a division of HIIT's Algorithmic Data Analysis subprogramme).

Recent research article titled "Explaining the power-law distribution of human mobility through transportation modality decomposition" was accepted by Nature Scientific Reports (SREP). The 2013 Impact Factor for Scientific Reports is 5.078, according to the 2013 Journal Citation Reports Science Edition (Thomson Reuters, 2014). This places Scientific Reports a top 5 multidisciplinary science primary research journals among Nature, Science, Nature Communications and PNAS, etc.

Optimal data compression of data streams can be mathematically reduced to being able to predict a sequence of zeros and ones. This is a classical problem in probability theory which was illustrated by Laplace in the 18th century by asking ''What is the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow?''. Laplace derived a solution that is today known as Laplace's Rule of Succession.

Finnish YLE TV1's Prisma Studio programme presented and discussed computational creativity in its 30 minute show at prime time on 11 Feb 2015.

The national broadcasting company YLE interviewed Matti Nelimarkka and Salla-Maaria Laaksonen on the starting research project Digivaalit 2015. We discussed how we can analyze the publicity during the elections and what one might expect from the project once finished.

The Discovery Research Group of Prof. Hannu Toivonen has released a novel musical app for iPhone, Musicreatures.

The SciNet search engine, developed at HIIT, outperforms current ones on complicated search tasks going beyond keyword lookups. It is based on interactive intent modelling, which combines HCI and machine learning. 

Communications of the ACM article:

A premier of computationally created music took place in the Science Forum (Tieteen päivät) 2015, with contributions from the Discovery research group of Prof. Hannu Toivonen. Koodike is a cut-and-paste piece of music, the material of which was composed by the computer (according to rules specified by composer Lotta Wennäkoski) and then stitched together to a final composition by Lotta. A video recording of the premier on 10 Jan 2015 is available in Youtube.