News

Academy of Finland has awarded 3-year postdoctoral research grants to several HIIT researchers:

Antti Hyttinen, University of Helsinki, on Causal Analysis with Next Generation Graphical Models;
Eemil Lagerspetz, University of Helsinki, on UbiSpark: Harnessing the Little Big Engines of IoT;
Antti Salovaara, University of Helsinki, on Interaction-level theory for users’ creative IT appropriation; and
Markus Heinonen, Aalto University, on Next-generation statistical learning for synthetic enzyme engineering.
 

Michael Mathioudakis attended the World Wide Web conference in Montreal to present a demonstration of the GeoTopics system. The system processes Foursquare check-ins for large cities around the world and distinguishes regions of different characteristics within them.

Helsingin Sanomat, the leading newspaper in Finland, run a full page story of Digivaalit 2015 and computational tools in social science. The story is based on interview with Matti Nelimarkka (HIIT) and Salla-Maaria Laaksonen (University of Helsinki, Faculty of Social Science). They describe details of the methods used to examine agenda influencers during the 2015 elections - results which were published e.g. in Helsingin Sanomat.

Researchers in HIIT, CMU, and QCRI use deep-learning techniques and images from social-media platforms to monitor public health. More details are given in this blogpost and the research paper that will appear in CHI 2016.

One of the oldest bioinformatics problems is to reconstruct the genome of a species from short fragments, such as those produced by high-throughput sequencing. Due to various technical limitations, it is currently impossible to fully reconstruct an entire genome. State-of-the-art genome assemblers in fact produce long genomic fragments that are "guaranteed" to occur in the genome that generated the data.

The Silicon Valley wisdom says that software is eating the world. However, in major US companies women are not working on software. Facebook reports 15% of its technical workforce being female, Twitter 10% and the US national avarage is around 23%. This is known as the gender gab in technology fields.

Professor Petri Myllymäki, HIIT Director, was nominated as a chairman of Ministry of Education's collaboration forum of scientific computing. The main task of the forum is to steer the activities of CSC. Professor Keijo Heljanko, HIIT programme director, was nominated as a member of the forum. 

More information (in Finnish).