News

Associate Professor Coye Cheshire from the School of Information of University of California, Berkeley, will visit HIIT in June 2012 as a Fulbright Visiting Specialist (co-funded by FuNeSoMo). The academic host of the visit is professor Niklas Ravaja, the leader of HIIT's recently formed Social Interaction and Emotion research group.

Press release in Finnish found here.

We are now back to streaming HIIT News to Twitter. For more frequent updates, follow our list of staff and alumni.

HIIT is contributing to the annual ACM CSCW conference by presenting initial results from research on privacy management and live tweeting. Both projects are conducted in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s School of Information.

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT conducts basic and strategic research on information technology. It is a joint research institute of the Aalto University and the University of Helsinki. HIIT is a leading IT institute with research ranging from fundamental methods and technologies to novel applications and their impact on other sciences, people and society. HIIT's key competences are in analysis of large sets of data, probabilistic modeling of complex phenomena, Internet architecture and technologies, mobile and human-centric computing, and user-created media.

The research group led by professor Veli Mäkinen at Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki is re-named as Genome-Scale Algorithms (previously Succinct data structures).

The web page of the group is http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/gsa/

Tenure track or tenured position in machine learning, probabilistic modelling or data mining

The position is located at Aalto University, Department of Information and Computer Science (http://ics.tkk.fi/en/), Helsinki, Finland, and is open to outstanding individuals who hold a doctorate and have excellent potential for a successful scientific career. Candidates in the areas of machine learning, probabilistic modelling and data mining are especially welcome.

Well known visitors at HIIT:

Bernardo Huberman at ICS Forum / Physics Colloquium on Thu 6 Oct 2011, giving a talk "Social Media and Attention" and visiting HIIT Innopoli on Fri 7 Oct 2011.

Jorma Rissanen at ALT/DS 2011 conference on Fri 7 Oct 2011, giving a talk "Optimal Estimation"

Dr. Gayle Leen (now at deCODE genetics, Reykjavik), Docent Jaakko Peltonen and Professor Samuel Kaski of HIIT won the Award for Best Paper in Machine Learning at ECML PKDD 2011, the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases. The winning paper, titled "Focused Multi-task Learning Using Gaussian Processes", presents a computational method for enhancing performance on a target task by asymmetrically making use of data from other tasks.

Research by Joanna Bergstrom-Lehtovirta, Antti Oulasvirta, and Stephen Brewster received the award for Best Note at MobileHCI'11 in Stockholm, Sweden. The paper studied the effect of increasing walking speed on target acquisition performance on a touchscreen device. 

Reference to the paper:

Bergstrom-Lehtovirta, J., Oulasvirta, & Brewster, S. (2011). The effect of walking on target acquisition on a touchscreen interface. Proceedings of Mobile HCI 2011, ACM Press, New York.

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