News

21 Apr 2006 - The Research and Training Foundation of TeliaSonera Finland Oyj has granted an award for merit of EUR 10,000 to Professor Jukka Kemppinen. Professor Kemppinen serves as Professor of Business Law at the Lappeenranta University of Technology, Principal Scientist at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), Docent of Jurisprudence at Helsinki University Faculty of Law, and Docent of History of Civilizations at Turku University.

1 Apr 2006 - The project FUGA - The fun of gaming: Measuring the human experience of media enjoyment was submitted to the NEST programme of the 6th Framework Programme of EU. After clearing technical evaluation and contract negotiations, the project was launched in April, 2006. The main objective of FUGA is to create novel methods and improve existing measures in order to examine how the different dimensions of Computer Game Experience can be assessed comprehensively with high temporal resolution.

15 Mar 2006 - TEKES has granted three-year funding 2006-2008 to establish an excellence group "Trustworthy Internet" at the HIIT, the Telecommunications and Multimedia Laboratory (TML) at TKK, and the Computer Science Department (TKTL) at UH. The project is one of the four strategic research projects of national GIGA programme that receive 100% TEKES funding. The main objective of the project is to investigate overlay networks for building and managing trust relationships between service providers and customers over networks.

3 Mar 2006 - HIIT researcher Olli Pitkänen defended his doctoral thesis Legal Challenges to Future Information Businesses in the public dissertation at the Helsinki University of Technology. The opponents were Professors Olli Martikainen and Jukka Mähönen and the custos Professor Martti Mäntylä.

1 Mar 2006 - The international evaluation of the quality of research at the University of Helsinki was completed and the evaluation report published on 1.3.2006. The evaluation reports can be found at http://www.helsinki.fi/research2005/english/results.html. The Basic Research Unit of HIIT, as well as the entire Department of Computer Science, was awarded the best grade 7/7. According to the evaluation, "The unit can without hesitation be declared leading in its chosen area of research.

19 Feb 2006 - The contract negotiations of the project Psychologically Augmented Social Interaction Over Networks (PASION) submitted to the 4th Call of Applications of EU's IST programme were concluded successfully in early 2006 and the project was launched in a kick-off event in Paris held on 19.-20.2.2006. The project will study the user of an innovative shared virtual environment for conveying the social, non-verbal and contextual information required for effective communication especially in collaborative work environments.

26 Jan 2006 - HIIT has been accepted as the member of the DIMES ry consortium in its board meeting on 16.1.2006. Please refer to http://www.dimes.fi.

1 Jan 2006 - The contract negotiations on the EU IST integrated project Interaction and Presence in Urban Environments (IPCity) were successfully concluded, and hence the project is expected to launch on 1 January 2006. The project is co-ordinated by Fraunhofer FIT; HIIT's User Experience Research Group is one of the eleven partners from five different countries in EU.

The Centennary Fund of Helsingin Sanomat awarded a one-year grant to Researcher Vili Lehdonvirta, M.Sc. (Tech.), for research on virtual consumerism carried out at Waseda University, Japan. Mr. Lehdonvirta's research forms a part of the larger Virtual consumerism research project currently under development at HIIT's Network Society research program. The project is concerned with the business, legal and societal impact of game items and other "virtual assets" that users perceive as possessing real value and trade for significant sums of money.

The National Technology Agency TEKES awarded two-year funding for the project Community Media and Service-Oriented Architecture (COMSOA), originally submitted to the call of strategic research projects in the ICT domain at end of June.