HIIT News

Open Postdoctoral Position in Machine Learning for Inferring Chemical Toxicity

mmmietti — Tue, 08 May 2018 07:52:11 +0000

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher with expertise in machine learning to work on a collaboration project between Professor Samuel Kaski’s team in Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence FCAI at Aalto University and Janssen Pharmaceutica. The exciting research problem is to learn to infer toxicity of chemicals based on the chemical structure, and the great opportunity is that we have unique data for the learning.

The successful candidate will be employed by Aalto University and work in Otaniemi campus (Helsinki, Finland) for the 1st year of the 2-year contract. During the 2nd year, the work will be performed at Janssen Pharmaceutica premises in Beerse, Belgium.

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International collaboration on AI powered systems for mental health

gjacucci — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 09:11:18 +0000

Thanks to community support provided HIIT in 2017 a series of workshops and invited talks have initiated a collaboration on using AI for mental health in partiuclar considering workplaces.

Invited talks included Professor Kai Vogeley , University of Cologne | UOC · Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, who gave a talk in December 2017 on Neural Mechanisms of Intersubjectivity - From “Detached” Cognitive to “Truly” Social Neuroscience.

A concrete outcome of a workshop by invitation held in August 2017 , has been joint supervision of a PhD candidate now sucecssfully admitted at the Faculty of Medicine in the area of conversational agents for menatl health , Isaac Moshe joint supervised by

- Niklas Ravaja professor of eHealth and wellbeing, Faculty of Medicine at UH,

- Professor Giulio Jacucci, Computer Science, UH

- Professor Giuseppe Riccardi from the University of Trento,

- Heleen Riper, PhD Professor eMental-Health/ clinical psychology.

These developments mark an important progress in interfaculty collaboration inside University of helsinki and strong collaboration with important and recognised experts in Europe on applying advanced technologies for menatl health.

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Collaboration with Aris Anagnostopoulos continues

mmmietti — Thu, 05 Apr 2018 16:35:24 +0000

Aris Anagnostopoulos was a visiting professor in the department of Computer Science of Aalto University from 21 July to 31 July 2017. Aris Anagnostopoulos is an associate professor in Computer Science/Engineering at Sapienza University of Rome. During his visit, he collaborated with the group of Aristides Gionis on the definition and analysis of models for inconsistent planning in decision making. The problem of inconsistent planning in decision making, which leads to undesirable effects such as procrastination, has been studied in the behavioral-economics literature, and more recently in the context of computational behavioral models. People, however, do not function in isolation, and successful projects most often rely on team work. Team performance does not depend only on the skills of the individual team members, but also on other collective factors, such as team spirit and cohesion. It is not an uncommon situation that a hard-working individual has the capacity to give a good example to her team-mates and motivate them to work harder.

During the collaboration the team designed models for time-inconsistent planning, which account for the influence of procrastination within the members of a team. They model collaborative work so that the relative progress of the team members, with respect to their respective subtasks, motivates (or discourages) them to work harder, and they show that communication can either increase or decrease the total cost, depending on the parameters of the model.

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Leading trends in AI - a new weekly minisymposium

mmmietti — Wed, 21 Mar 2018 08:12:07 +0000

Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence FCAI launches a series of minisymposia on leading trends in Finnish AI research.

Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence FCAI launches a series of minisymposia on leading trends in Finnish AI research in conjunction with the weekly Machine Learning Coffee Seminars. The FCAI symposium series will provide an opportunity to catch up with the latest AI research and also for researchers already working on the field a chance to get to know what their colleagues are working on.

The first minisymposium themed Agile probabilistic AI takes place on 26 March at 9 AM in Otaniemi, CS Building, room T6. The symposium includes addresses of Professor Aki Vehtari, Professor Arto Klami and Dr. Henri Vuollekoski discussing recent development of Stan, automated variational inference and likelihood-free inference among others themes. See the abstracts and full program of the symposium: hiit.fi/mlseminar.

The future minisymposia will include sessions on simulator-based inference, privacy-preserving and secure AI as well as on interactive AI. Visit FCAI website for the full minisymposium series programme of spring 2018.

The FCAI minisymposia are a part of the weekly Machine Learning Coffee Seminar series held jointly by the Aalto University and the University of Helsinki. The seminars aim to gather people from different fields of science with interest in machine learning. Seminars will be held weekly on Mondays. The location alternates between Aalto University and the University of Helsinki.

More information:

Kaisa Pekkala

Coordinator, FCAI

tel. +358 50 3020 921

kaisa.pekkala@aalto.fi

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FCAI Ecosystem Get-together

mmmietti — Mon, 19 Mar 2018 11:40:59 +0000

FCAI arranges an event for companies, AI startups, students, investors, accelerators, public sector etc. at A Grid (Otakaari 5) on Thursday 5 April.

Matchmaking, pitches and stands. For further information and registration, please see http://www.fcai.fi/events/.

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Interactive AI to address gestational diabetes

gjacucci — Thu, 15 Mar 2018 11:55:22 +0000

A new HIIT project co-funded by Business Finalnd has started where machine learning and HCI researchers are contributing to address gestational diabetes.

Teh project is originated from the CleverHealth Network, an ecosystem coordinated by the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS). The main partners in the gestational diabetes project are HUS, Aalto University, the University of Helsinki, Elisa and Fujitsu.

The project aims to improve the treatment and monitoring of gestational diabetes by developing a mobile application for measuring the mother’s blood glucose levels, physical activity, nutrition, pulse and daily weight and storing it in the cloud in real time.

‘By improving lifestyle during pregnancy, we can probably reduce the number of mothers who will develop type 2 diabetes as well as the health risks to the child, thereby also improving the health of future generations. The application will help the patient to learn how her diet, activity and sleep affect blood glucose levels and weight gain and, consequently, the course of the pregnancy and the newborn’s health,’ says Saila Koivusalo, research director of the project and specialist in obstetrics and gynaecology.

The application will forward the lifestyle and glucose data in real time to health care personnel, who can provide guidance and support as needed.

The project will make use of machine learning to provide guidance and treatment that are in line with the patient’s risk profile and meet her individual needs. Artificial intelligence also makes it possible to draw up predictions of both the mother’s and the child’s future health.

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Contact person:

giulio.jacucci@helsinki.fi

HIIT Call 2018-5 Proposals to Support the Helsinki ICT Community

suominn2 — Mon, 12 Mar 2018 08:45:05 +0000

In these calls, we wish to support initiatives that support HIIT's mission. Next deadline in 2018 is 15.5.2018. The following dealine after that is 7.6.2018 and the calls will also continue in the autumn. Please note that there are changes to the call text 22.2.2018. The changes are underlined.

In these calls, we are looking for proposals related to following activities:

events - organization of events
collaboration - initiating new university-company, cross-university and/or multi-disciplinary scientific collaboration
invite post-docs - inviting potential talented postdoc candidates to visit Finland
visit abroad - sponsoring of longer research visits abroad
career - boosting the career of highly successful doctoral students

The idea is that in these open calls the target is to support activities with clear added value and high potential impact, in cases where no existing funding instrument is easily available or the available funding is not sufficient.

In case you have an excellent idea that you feel does not fit well to any of the categories below, please send email to Patrik Floréen.

Note that this call is NOT limited to the HIIT research programmes, but OPEN to the whole Helsinki ICT community, defined for this purpose as the HICT network: the main applicant / contact person needs to be listed as a HICT supervisor at www.hict.fi/supervisors. Younger researchers or even students are encouraged to apply (when applicable), and listed as co-applicants, as long as their supervisor / the main applicant is a member of HICT. Please make sure that the main applicant is informed, as the main applicant will be the contact person, also responsible for the reporting.

Prepare your application online via Webropol

Call target

The mission of HIIT is to enhance the quality, visibility and impact of research on information technology, and we are looking for initiatives that support this mission. Our longer-term (over one year) commitments are channeled through postdoctoral researcher positions in the strategic HIIT research programmes; in this call we focus on shorter-term funding and support activities that take place during the calendar year of 2018 - these activities may continue even further in the future, but the requested funding needs to be spent by the end of this year (31.12.2018). Activities to be funded may have started earlier, before submitting a funding request. We expect typical funding requests to be between 1.000 and 20.000 euros (with the lower end for example for sponsoring a workshop, and higher end for funding MSc thesis work (e.g., a few person-months) on a topic supporting new collaborative research. In exceptional cases, we may consider even larger grants.

Decision criteria

As already stated above, the objective of HIIT is to enhance the quality, visibility and impact of the Helsinki region research on information technology, so successful applications are expected to clearly support one or more of these objectives. In addition, as a joint research institute of Aalto University and University of Helsinki, priority is given to applications initiating or enhancing collaboration between the two universities, supporting common focus areas in ICT and the strategies of both universities, and demonstrating clear added value by supporting activities that might not take place without this support.

There is no restriction on the number of the proposals a professor can submit, but in the funding decisions, we may also consider the overall balance between the various fields of ICT (in Helsinki).

Decision process

The funding decisions will be made by the HIIT Steering Group on 18th of January 2018, and for the forthcoming calls, in the following HIIT Steering Group meetings.

Funding categories

EVENTS - Support for organizing of events

The target of this funding category is to provide support for organizing workshops, conferences, hackathons, bootcamps, summer schools or other events in Finland or abroad. In the application, please explain who is the targeted audience, how you plan to market your event, and how this event will increase the visibility, impact or quality of Helsinki ICT. In marketing, HIIT expects to be acknowledged for sponsoring the event. The event may take place abroad, for example, as a satellite workshop of a major conference, but the main applicant needs to be a HICT supervisor, and in charge of the organization of the event. HIIT provides typically only partial support (e.g., covering traveling expenses of one or two invited speakers). In addition to financial support, we can also help in acquiring a "university neutral" web site for the event (under www.hiit.fi), if the event is jointly organized by the two universities, and the organizers do not wish to use the default web templates of Aalto or University of Helsinki. HIIT currently does not maintain its own administrative staff, so the practical arrangements need to be handled by the applicants themselves together with their local service organizations.

COLLABORATION - Support for initiating new university-company, cross-university and/or multi-disciplinary scientific collaboration

HIIT is willing to support new research initiatives that involve at least two research groups interested in common potentially high-impact research challenges that require collaboration of several research groups. Such collaboration is often multi-disciplinary and cross-university: strengthening collaboration within a single department is not totally out of the picture, but not our first priority. However, note that the proposals do NOT have to include research groups both from the Aalto and UH CS departments: for example, new collaboration between an Aalto CS professor and another professor at University of Helsinki (not necessarily CS), or perhaps another school in Aalto, makes a good candidate for this funding. Concretely, such an initiative could be, for example, funding for a MSc thesis work supervised by a HICT professor, on a multidisciplinary topic agreed upon with the new potential collaborator (and utilizing their expert knowledge or data).
HIIT is also willing to support new research initiatives that involve on the one hand one or several research groups in Aalto University or University of Helsinki and on the other hand one or several companies or public organizations. Please note that it says "university-company" in the headline to be short, but the counterpart can also be public organizations. The objective of these new research initiatives is to explore grounds for further collaboration. Ideally, this would be a seed for planning a new research project, which would seek separate external funding.

Visits abroad are generally not supported by this instrument, unless the visit is directly linked to a concrete project proposal: for example, travel funding related to planning of a new EU project proposal is OK (but the purpose of the trip has to be clearly explained in the application).

INVITE POST DOCS - Support for inviting potential talented postdoc candidates to visit Finland

Recruitment of talented postdoctoral researchers is one of the key elements in advancing HIIT's mission. HIIT coordinates joint postdoc calls twice a year, but in addition to the regular calls, we now launch a new continuous call for inviting especially talented postdoctoral candidates to pay a visit to Helsinki/Espoo. The idea: in case you meet a person you think would be an excellent candidate for a postdoc position, but no suitable call is open at the moment, you can invite such a person for a short site visit, and HIIT can cover the expenses provided that the following requirements are fulfilled:
- The candidate is truly exceptional, and would strengthen the Helsinki ICT community
- The candidate is looking for a postdoctoral position
- The candidate is willing to give a guest lecture both in Otaniemi and in Kumpula
- The visit program and the candidate's CV are planned and publicly announced well before the visit
- The candidate can be interviewed by any member of the Helsinki ICT community
- If several parties are interested in making an offer, the candidate is informed jointly of all the available possibilities, and the candidate will decide with whom to start negotiations
The inviting host is responsible of all the practical arrangements (including arranging meetings with other professors willing to interview the visitor).

VISIT ABROAD - Support for longer research visits abroad

Researcher visits to high-profile universities or other organizations can be beneficial for increasing the visibility, impact or quality of Helsinki ICT, but the expenses of such visits are often quite high, and funding is typically divided among several funding organizations. HIIT will not cover all the travel expenses of such visits, but can be one of the sponsoring organizations.

CAREER - Boosting the career of highly successful doctoral students

In some cases, the last stage of doctoral studies can be somewhat problematic, as the student may have submitted the thesis already for pre-examination, and would be willing to move on in his/her career, but the funding project may "lock" the student in the old research themes and physically in Finland, while getting experiences of new environments and ideas might be better for the student at this stage of the career (and make his/her CV stronger). Moreover, the incentive to finish the PhD as early as possible is not a very good one, if it just means early termination of the contract of the student. To alleviate these problems, HIIT can provide short-term (1-6 months) "bridge funding" for selected students who have shown excellent progress in their studies, and would like to spend some time before defending the thesis in another organization (typically, a foreign university or research organization). The student may even graduate before or during the HIIT-funded period, in which case the funding provides a possibility for a short "pilot postdoc period" that may help in acquiring the actual postdoc position.
The main applicant is the HICT supervisor of the student, and the application clearly needs to explain the details of the planned visits. We only consider students whose track record is excellent and who finish the PhD in less than 4 years. In addition to completing the application, please email the summary of the track record of the student (incl. CV and list of completed courses) to Patrik Floréen. Please also indicate the start date of the doctoral studies and leave of absence periods. Estimate when the doctoral studies will be completed.

Prepare your application online via Webropol

HIIT activities handled outside of this call

The items below are just let you know of recent developments and to remind you of other activities currently supported by HIIT.

MSc student rotation program

HIIT wishes to support cross-university rotation of research-oriented MSc students. The implementation of these activities will be planned together with the new rotation programs that are currently being discussed both in Otaniemi and Kumpula.

Helsinki Distinguished Lecture Series

HIIT is coordinating a high-profile lecture series on Future Information Technologies, see http://www.hiit.fi/HelsinkiITLectures. The idea is not to run yet another series of scientific guest lectures, but to attract a more versatile audience and focus on highlighting the research challenges and solutions faced by current and future information technology, as seen by the internationally leading experts in the field. An ideal candidate is an esteemed visionary with an academic background (e.g., the CTO of an IT company, or a university professor with high societal or industrial impact). If you have a suitable candidate in mind, please contact the coordinator of the Lecture Series, Giulio Jacucci. Never initiate discussions with a potential candidate without consulting Giulio first. The final funding decisions will be made by the HIIT steering group.

Joint calls for doctoral student recruitment and evaluation

HIIT organizes through the HICT doctoral education network twice a year a recruitment and evaluation process, with the target to encourage talented students to apply for a doctoral student position in the hosting universities. The reviews produced during the evaluation process can also be used for making decisions about available doctoral student funding. The contact person regarding these activities is Aija Kukkala, email: hict-apply@hiit.fi. Presently there is a call open with deadline 31 January 2018, see https://www.hict.fi/spring_2018!

Joint calls for recruitment of postdoctoral researchers and research fellows

HIIT coordinates joint recruitment activities postdoctoral positions, regardless of the funding source. The goal is to increase our international visibility though jointly organized marketing and evaluation processes. We aim to organize the calls twice a year. The first call for 2018 is planned to be announced in the beginning of January.

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Contact person:

Patrik Floréen

Women in Data Science brings a global phenomenon to Helsinki

troos — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 15:47:09 +0000

The Global Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference (widsconference.org) aims to inspire and educate data scientists worldwide, regardless of gender, and support women in the field. This annual one-day technical conference provides an opportunity to hear about the latest data science related research and applications in a broad set of domains.

Since the inaugural conference in 2015, WiDS has gone global with over 80 regional events worldwide from 30 countries and more than 75,000 people from 75 countries participated in 2017.

WiDS Helsinki is delighted to join force this year to contribute to this global phenomenon!

More information: WiDS Helsinki

WiDS Helsinki is supported by FCAI, the Finnish Center for AI (www.fcai.fi), and HiData, Helsinki Centre for Data Science.

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Contact person:

Teemu Roos

Social support improves the results of online courses

suominn2 — Tue, 06 Mar 2018 11:05:19 +0000

Massive open online courses (MOOC) have been considered as personal learning experiences that require strong study skills. A new study of Aalto University and the University of Helsinki used a MOOC on programming to determine whether this claim is well founded. The study is based on a survey to the students who participated in the MOOC and its analysis by statistical methods and methods of data science.

According to the study results, approximately half of the students don't get any social support for their online studies – and these independent students are the ones who most often don't finish the course. Approximately 25% of students seek help from friends who don't participate in the same course and another 25% look for help through the discussion forum of the course.

'Students who received support from their friends used superficial learning methods more often. But, on the other hand, they also usually passed the course. Perhaps they also have a need to belong to a social group, and that helps them to stick with the course. Independent students don't have a similar social bond to the course, and that can affect their motivation,' says Postdoctoral Researcher Matti Nelimarkka from Aalto University and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT).

When students received a lot of help from the course's discussion forum, it was very likely that they completed the course. When on the average less than half of the students who begin a MOOC complete the course, the percentage of those who received a lot of help was as high as 75%.

A little more than 25% of the students taking the programming course were women, and they sought more social support for their studies than men. Older students sought help from the course's discussion forum more often than average, and the younger students more often asked their friends for help.

Based on the study, skilled friends can be considered as social capital, but from the point of view of learning, Nelimarkka and Arto Hellas, university lecturer at the University of Helsinki, don't recommend using friends to support learning – despite the results.

'We don't know a lot about these friend helpers. Perhaps they are a little too helpful? This can lead to a very light and superficial approach towards learning. The students can struggle through their assignments but their understanding of programming can leave room for improvement,' emphasises Nelimarkka.

The study raises questions about how social learning could be supported more. Could we help the students by asking better defined questions? In different types of groups that support learning, it is worth considering that giving the answers straight away may not be the most useful option.

'The curriculum of basic education was reformed to emphasise phenomenon-based learning, and it would be interesting to know if the same findings hold true there as well. Can skilled friends help to achieve better learning results already during basic education?' wonders Nelimarkka.

Further information:

Matti Nelimarkka
Postdoctoral Researcher
Aalto University
matti.nelimarkka@aalto.fi
tel. +358 50 5275 920

Arto Hellas
University Lecturer
University of Helsinki
arto.hellas@cs.helsinki.fi
tel. +358 2941 51269

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Increased support and new form of activity supported by the HIIT Support Call

floreen — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 10:11:33 +0000

The HIIT Steering Group decided in its meeting 21.2.2018 to increase the maximum amount of funding from the Support Call from 10000 euro to 20000 euro and to include also collaboration between university researchers in Aalto University / University of Helsinki and companies or other organizations. For further detail, see the call text, where the changes have been underlined.

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