News

Prof Hiroshi Mamitsuka (Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Japan) will start as a FiDiPro Professor at HIIT/ICS in the beginning of 2015. The host for the four year project Machine Learning for Augmented Science and Knowledge Work is Prof Samuel Kaski.

Antti Ukkonen, a postdoctoral researcher at HIIT, was awarded the Frontier Prize at the 13th International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA 2014) for his work on estimating the distribution of shortest path lengths in real-world social networks.

Prof. Hannu Toivonen of HIIT and University of Helsinki is Program Chair of IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) 2014, the world's premier research conference in data mining. The conference will be held in Shenzhen, China, on December 14-17, 2014. The call for participation is now open.

HIIT researcher Aaron Yi DING, supervised by Professor Sasu Tarkoma and senior researcher Markku Kojo, is visiting Columbia University in New York USA, from September to December 2014.

Computational creativity, in particular computational poetry, is currently being exhibited in an art installation at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2014. The installation builds on the P.O.Eticus-Apparatus poetry creation engine developed in the Discovery research group by Jukka Toivanen. Jukka is also a member of the art collective Brains on Art that produced this installation which uses the visitor's brain waves as inspiration when writing a unique poem for the visitor.

New algorithms are presented for the problem of multiple string matching of gapped patterns, where a gapped pattern is a sequence of strings such that there is a gap of fixed length between each two consecutive strings. The problem has applications in the discovery of transcription factor binding sites in DNA sequences when using generalized versions of the Position Weight Matrix model to describe transcription factor specificities.

October will see Dr. Pawel Gawrychowski (Max Plank Institute for Informatik) and Dr. Yasuo Tabei (Tokyo Institute of Technoology) visit Genome Scale Algorithmics, a subgroup of HIIT Algorithmic Data Analysis programme, led by Professor Veli Makinen.

The recent ACM MobiSys PhD workshop is a venue that provides a friendly and supportive environment for doctoral students to present and discuss their dissertation research both with their peers and with a panel of experienced researchers from academia and industry.

The running time of a distributed algorithm is commonly studied as a function of two parameters: n is the number of nodes in the network, and Δ is the maximum degree of the network. For many computational problems, it is nowadays relatively well understood how the running time depends on n. However, the dependence on Δ is still very poorly understood. This work gives the first linear-in-Δ lower bound for a natural graph problem in the standard model of distributed computing.