News

The Finnish Information Technology Association (http://www.tt-tori.fi/) gave Professor Martti Mäntylä its Information Technology Distinction for 2005 in recognition of his work in information technology and computer science both in Finland and internationally, and especially in bridging university research with R&D in information industry.

The Academy of Finland has awarded HIIT a 4-year grant for the project Context Cues: Context data derived situation cues to support meaningful interactions. The project will apply a novel social psychological approach to situation cues in ubiquitous computing environments, how can they be used to make meaningful inferences, and how these inferences to provide a basis for socially meaningful, transparent and accountable action.

TEKES has awarded two-year funding for the project Network of Mobile Context-Aware Applications and Games, aiming to create context-aware multi-user applications that can be run on any mobile phone. The applications are developed with the Multi-User Publishing Environment (MUPE), an open source application platform developed in Nokia Research Center. MUPE has been used successfully in many NRC and university projects, and this project continues this work.

The contract negotiations on the EU IST integrated project Interaction and Presence in Urban Environments (IPCity) were succesfully concluded, and hence the project is expected to launch on 1.1.2006. The project is coordinated by Fraunhofer FIT; HIIT's User Experience Research Group is one of the eleven partners from five different countries in EU. Group's research goals include anticipating change in the ways people communicate with and through technological artefacts with a particular focus on interaction. The leader of HIIT's team in IPCity is Dr. Giulio Jacucci.

The Board of HIIT nominated Prof. Martti Mäntylä and Prof. Esko Ukkonen as the directors of the Advanced Research Unit and the Basic Research Unit of HIIT, respencively, for the term 1.1.2006-31.12.2008.

The Centennary Fund of the Technology Industries of Finland has donated the Helsinki University of Technology 550 000 euros for a five-year research project on network society. The donation was published in an event held on 31.8.2005 at 9:30 where the chairman of the board of the fund, Dr. Matti Alahuhta, presented the donation to the rector of TKK, Prof. Matti Pursula.

The project proposal FUGA - Fun of Gaming: Measuring the human experience of media enjoyment, submitted to the EU NEST - PATHFINDER call "Measuring the Impossible", has been invited to contract negotiations with the European Commission and is hence likely be launched in early 2006. The scientific coordinator of the project is Dr. Niklas Ravaja from the Center of Knowledge and Innovation Research (CKIR) of the Helsinki School of Economics; HIIT will act as the administrative coordinator, in addition to participating in the research.

Two project proposals submitted to the Call for Proposals of the Presence and Interaction in Mixed-Reality Environments (Presence II) Proactive Initiative in the 6th Framework Programme have succesfully cleared the technical evaluation and have been invited for project negotiations. Therefore, the projects are likely to launch in early 2006. The projects are Integrated Project on Interaction and Presence in Urban Environments (IPCity) and Knowledge Work and Mobility (PASION). HIIT's work in these activities will be led by Dr. Giulio Jacucci and Dr.

Former HIIT researcher Mikko Välimäki defended successfully his doctoral thesis The Rise of Open Source Licensing. A Challenge to the Use of Intellectual Property in the Software Industry at the Helsinki University of Technology. The official opponent of the defence was Professor, PhD Thomas Riis from Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Professsor Juha Laine acted as the custos. Completed at the Software Business and Engineering Laboratory at TKK, Välimäki's thesis was to a considerable degree based on his work in HIIT's MobileIPR and DE Core projects.