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Aalto University and University of Helsinki have signed an agreement to become strategic partners of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Science of Information. The collaboration activities will be coordinated by Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, a joint research institute of the two Finnish universities. The member universities of the SoI center are Purdue (leader), Bryn Mawr, Howard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Texas A&M, UC Berkeley, UCSD and Urbana-Champaign.

Digitalization is having a tremendous effect in today's and tomorrow's industries, economics and society at large. Digitalization is a key strong area at Aalto University, and the Digi Platform will further enhance Aalto's role in the field. HIIT's role is to coordinate Aalto Digi Platform in practice, linking it to University of Helsinki, too.

In a proof of concept study, HIIT researchers have shown that it is possible to find relevant earlier research direcly based on the experimental data, better than by the standard keyword searches on annotations of the data. The results corresponded well with citations between the journal papers in which the data sets had been first publicized, to the extent of even finding errors in the data. The search is scalable, with linear complexity, given models learned separately for each data set. The work was done with European Bioinformatics Institute EBI of EMBL, and published in PLOS ONE.

Mutations and horizontal transfer of genes represent evolutionary mechanisms which have been studied extensively over decades. Until now, the role of horizontally changing gene regulatory elements at the level of population evolution has been unknown. In a study published in PNAS, professor Jukka Corander joined forces with scientists at MIT and Tel Aviv University showed that horizontal rewiring of gene regulatory elements is a ubiquitous mechanisms across different species of bacteria and holds considerable potential for their adaptation to changing environmental conditions.

Enterotoxigenic E. coli (ETEC) bacteria cause annually at least 400 million diarrheal disease cases according to WHO investigations. The ETEC bacteria are a common trouble for travelers and kill approximately 400000 small children per year in the developing countries. According to current knowledge, these bacteria evolve very rapidly such that harmless commensals turn frequently into new ETEC strains via horizontal gene transfer.

HIIT / University of Helsinki and Helsinki Region Transport (HSL) collaborated in a large-scale trial in October 2014. More than 400 volunteers participated in testing next-generation journey planning tools at Helsinki metropolitan area. These tools included mobile and web-based applications for fully multi-modal journey planning (public, private, and shared transportation modes) with additional features such as gamification to encourage more eco-friendly mobility.

The 3rd International Workhop of Symbiotic Interaction was held in Helsinki chaired by Prof Giulio Jacucci from HIIT. The workshop gathered more than 50 participants from Europe and US and proceedings are published by Springer. The workshop was opened by the greetings of the Ambassador of Italy in Finalnd His Excellency Giorgio Visetti on te 30th of October.

On 18 November, YLE (Finnish National TV) programme Prisma Studio features work by HIIT researchers (Michiel Sovijärvi-Spapé, Imtiaj Ahmed & Ville Harjunen) to explain the social and psychophysiological science behind electronic sports. 

Together with research teams in Tsinghua University and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Professor Sasu Tarkoma of HIIT (deputy head of UH computer science department, director of NODES research group) organized a successful workshop on cloud and mobile computing in Hong Kong this year.