HIIT - HIIT Update

HIIT Update 4/2008

noronen — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 22:00:00 +0000

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT Newsletter
28 Nov 08

INTERNET RESEARCHERS EXCHANGED VIEWS ON FUTURE INTERNET SOCIO-ECONOMICS AT ICT 2008
Number of European researchers got together to discuss about Future Internet Socio-Economics at ICT 2008. The networking session was organised by HIIT. ICT 2008 was Europe's biggest research event for information and communication technologies this year.
View a HIIT Newsflash and see the presentations at www.hiit.fi/events/ict2008 »

HIIT LAUNCHED A LIGHT SYSTEM FOR MOBILE USABILITY TESTING
HIIT has launched a new multicamera system for mobile usability testing. The portable device light - less than 1 kg - and durable.
www.hiit.fi/node/760 »

ACADEMY OF FINLAND AWARDS FOUR PROJECTS TO HIIT
The Academy of Finland awards four projects to HIIT and its partners in the Motive programme from 1 January 2009 onwards.
www.hiit.fi/node/759 »

NOKIA FOUNDATION AWARDED SCHOLARSHIPS TO HIIT RESEARCHERS
Nokia foundation has awarded scholarships to HIIT researchers Hannes Heikinheimo, Peter Peltonen and Jukka Suomela.
www.hiit.fi/node/771 »

BEST MSc THESIS OF THE YEAR AWARD TO VILLE TUULOS
The Finnish Association for Mathematicians, Physicists and Computer Scientists granted the award for the best MSc thesis of the year to Ville Tuulos for his thesis "Design and Implementation of a Content-Based Search Engine".
www.hiit.fi/node/767 »

OPEN POSITIONS – PhD STUDENTS
Applications are invited for (up to) four-year fully-funded PhD student positions. The selected students will be working on methods for learning networks and graphs from a variety of data and utilizing the found structures for visualization, explanation, and prediction. Closing date is 8 December.
www.hiit.fi/jobs »

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HIIT Update

HIIT Update 3/2008

noronen — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:00:00 +0000

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT Newsletter
29 Oct 08

HIIT ORGANISES NETWORKING SESSION AT ICT 2008
HIIT organizes “Future Internet Socio-Economics” networking session at ICT 2008. ICT is Europe's biggest research event for information and communication technologies. The session takes place in Lyon, France, on Tuesday, 25 November.
ICT 2008: ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/ict/2008/index_en.htm »
The session: ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/cf/item-display.cfm?id=624 »

HIIT LAUNCHED A 3D VERSION OF MULTI-TOUCH DISPLAY CITYWALL
HIIT has launched a new, 3D version of CityWall. CityWall is a large multi-touch display that supports large numbers of people interacting by touch on the display simultaneously.
www.hiit.fi/node/726 »

HIIT'S CITYWALL VIDEO DRAWS OVER 250 000 VIEWERS
HIIT's new video on the 3D CityWall multi-touch display has drawn over 250 000 viewers. Several international IT media have embedded the YouTube video on their website.
www.hiit.fi/node/736 »

HIIT ORGANISES PERVASIVE 2010
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT and the Department of Computer Science of University of Helsinki will organise Pervasive 2010, the Eight International Conference on Pervasive Computing. The conference will take place in Helsinki, Finland during four days in Mid-May 2010.
www.hiit.fi/node/733 »

TEEMU KOPONEN: A NEW NETWORK ARCHITECTURE
HIIT researcher Teemu Koponen proposes a new network architecture for the Internet in his dissertation.
www.hiit.fi/node/723 »

PEKKA RÄSÄNEN: COMMUNALITY PREVENTS SHOOTINGS
Neighbourhood and local social networks can provide resources for preventing mass-violence. HIIT Senior Researcher Pekka Räsänen has been comparing local community's recovery after a shooting incident in a school in Jokela, Finland, one year ago to ones of similar shooting incidents in the USA.
www.hiit.fi/node/716 »

DEADLINE SOON: OPEN POSITION - PRINCIPAL SCIENTIST
Applications are now also welcomed for the position of Principal Scientist. The Principal Scientist will be in charge of Future Internet research programme of HIIT. Closing date for the applications is 10 November.
www.hiit.fi/node/713 »

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HIIT Update

HIIT Update 2/2008

noronen — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:00:00 +0000

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT Newsletter
23 Sep 08

CLAUDE E. SHANNON AWARD TO JORMA RISSANEN
IEEE Information Theory Society has awarded the Claude E. Shannon Award for 2009 to HIIT Research Fellow Jorma Rissanen. Rissanen has published over 140 papers in a variety of areas including lossless and lossy compression, probability and statistics, and systems theory. He is best known for introducing and promoting the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle for model selection and statistical inference. He was an early inventor of arithmetic coding.
www.hiit.fi/node/686 »

ALMOST 800 PARTICIPANTS IN THE CONFERENCES ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Several international conferences on artificial intelligence have attracted almost 800 participants to Helsinki in July. The series of conferences was the most important international scientific event of year on machine learning.
Figures at www.hiit.fi/node/693 »
Webcasted lectures on videolectures.net »

OTASIZZLE LAUNCHED
OtaSizzle, test environment for mobile social media services, has been launched. The goal is to make OtaSizzle a "living lab" for thousands of users in Otaniemi, with extensions in greater Helsinki.
www.hiit.fi/node/698 »

NEW ARTICLES OF HIIT APPROVED
New articles of HIIT (uusi johtosääntö) have been approved by TKK and the University of Helsinki. According to the new articles, there will be one Director of HIIT who will be in charge of both HIIT TKK and HIIT University of Helsinki.
www.hiit.fi/node/677 »

OPEN POSITION: HIIT DIRECTOR
Applications are now welcomed for the position of HIIT Director. New Director will lead both HIIT TKK and HIIT University of Helsinki. Closing date for the applications is 13 October.
www.hiit.fi/node/708 »

OPEN POSITION: PRINCIPAL SCIENTIST
Applications are now also welcomed for the position of Principal Scientist. The Principal Scientist will be in charge of Future Internet research programme of HIIT. Closing date for the applications is 10 November.
www.hiit.fi/node/713 »

EVENT: NORDIC CULTURAL COMMONS, STOCKHOLM
You can register now for Nordic Cultural Commons Conference 2008. It takes place in Stockholm, Sweden, on 22-23 October. HIIT organizes the conference in co-operation with the Royal University of Technology and Creative Commons Nordic network.
www.hiit.fi/nccc »

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HIIT Update

HIIT Update 1/2008

noronen — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:00:00 +0000

19 June 2008
Headlines in this issue:

- SAB EVALUATED HIIT
- INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCES IN HELSINKI IN JULY
- SENIOR RESEARCHER AND POSTDOC POSITIONS FILLED
- ICT SHOK FUTURE INTERNET LAUNCHED
- BEAWARE EU PROJECT LAUNCHED
- HIIT BOARD MEMBER THOMAS WILHELMSSON ELECTED TO THE UH RECTOR
- ICA'S KIRKMAN MEDAL TO PETTERI KASKI
- FIPA ANNUAL DOCTORAL THESIS PRIZE TO MIKA RAENTO
- ANNUAL REPORT 2007 PUBLISHED

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SAB EVALUATED HIIT

The Scientific Advisory Board evaluated HIIT research on 26-28 May. The preliminary report was positive, but it also addressed several points for development. The SAB will publish the final report within next few weeks.

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCES IN HELSINKI IN JULY

In the beginning of July 2008, HIIT will be involved in the organization of several international conferences in Helsinki to be run partially in parallel: MLG 2008 on Mining and Learning with Graphs, ICML 2008 on Machine Learning, UAI 2008 on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, and COLT 2008 on Learning Theory.

www.hiit.fi/events/mlg-icml-uai-colt-08 >>

SENIOR RESEARCHER AND POSTDOC POSITIONS FILLED

The HIIT board has nominated D.Sc.(Tech.) Petteri Kaski (ADA), Dr.Soc.Sc Pekka Räsänen (NS), and Ph.D. Antti Oulasvirta (NS) in senior research positions. It also nominated Dr. Ruishan Zhang (FI) and Ph.D. Teemu Roos (PAS) to post-doc positions. All nominations are for three-year terms starting on 1 August, 2008.

www.hiit.fi/news/kaski-rasanen-oulasvirta >>

www.hiit.fi/news/zhang-roos >>

ICT SHOK FUTURE INTERNET LAUNCHED

ICT SHOK Future Internet research programme has officially been launched. The new programme is a joint research programme of a range of leading ICT companies and Finnish research institutions and universities. The programme website will be published on Monday.

www.futureinternet.fi (on Monday 23 June)

BEAWARE EU PROJECT LAUNCHED

The EU project BeAware has been officially launched. HIIT coordinates the consortium involving industrial and academic partners from Finland, Sweden, and Italy. The project will study how consumer's awareness of energy consumption can be facilitated by combining sensors monitoring energy use with mobile and ambient user interfaces.

HIIT BOARD MEMBER THOMAS WILHELMSSON ELECTED TO THE UH RECTOR

Professor of Civil and Commercial Law Thomas Wilhelmsson, 58, was elected to the Rector of the University of Helsinki. He will commence his term on 1 August 2008.

www.helsinki.fi/news/archive/5-2008/28-16-51-48.html >>

ICA'S KIRKMAN MEDAL TO PETTERI KASKI

The Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications (ICA) has awarded the Kirkman Medal for 2007 to Petteri Kaski. Kaski currently holds a post-doc position at HIIT.

www.hiit.fi/node/613 >>

FIPA ANNUAL DOCTORAL THESIS PRIZE TO MIKA RAENTO

The Finnish Information Processing Association FIPA (in Finnish: Tietotekniikan liitto) has awarded its Annual Doctoral Thesis Prize to Mika Raento. Raento's research was a part of HIIT's Context project.

www.hiit.fi/node/600 >>

ANNUAL REPORT 2007 PUBLISHED

Annual Report 2007 can be found at www.hiit.fi/research/publications/hiitpublications >>

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HIIT Update

HIIT Update 2/2007

noronen — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:00:00 +0000

Headlines in this issue:

- FOREWORD
- NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS
- NORDICHIP SEMINAR
- GOOGLE BUYS JAIKU
- CICERO-HIIT RESEARCHERS' DAY - Learning Spaces and Technologies
- FINLAND-ICSI CENTER FOR NOVEL INTERNET ARCHITECTURES LAUNCH AT ICSI
- "IN HIIT" BLOG LAUNCHED
- HIIT AUTHORS RECEIVE BEST PAPER AWARD AT MUM 2007
- HIIT ARRANGES WITH NOKIA THE WORKSHOP IMUx 2008 IN SYDNEY IN MAY 2008
- DIRECTOR OF DARPA VISITS HIIT
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

This issue of HIIT Update reports on the progress of HIIT during the second half of 2007. Once again, the institute has been successful in preparing new initiatives, securing new grants, launching international collaboration, and of course contributing to the progress of science in its fields of interest. We are especially pleased with the successful completion of the preparations of HIIT's first project in EU's 7th Framework Programme, the PSIRP project, as reported below - particularly as the project will allow us to undertake research in a novel direction. Another new form of work for HIIT is the research grant from NIH that was confirmed in Fall 2007 and will form a basis of long-term research in its domain. HIIT performed also strongly in the prestigious and competitive Open Call of Academy of Finland, with two accepted proposals. What makes this success especially satisfying was the fact that the proposals were prepared by post-doc level researchers who thus have gained a jump start for their independent research career build-up.

A large effort that occupied the second half of 2007 was related to the preparation of the national initiative Strategic Centre of Excellence in Information and Communication Technologies, or ICT SHOK for short. HIIT took lead in the planning of the Future Internet programme of the new SCoE, and participated actively in two other programmes. As a result, the institute is likely to have a central role in the SCoE when is is launched during the first half of 2008.

HIIT's outlook for 2008 is, therefore, very positive. This was reinforced with the strong commitment of the home universities to its continued success as demonstrated in the positive results of HIIT's funding negotiations for 2008 that resulted in a healthy increase of its basic funding. The new funding will make it possible to strengthen the research groups and programmes by hiring new senior and postdoc researchers, and also to maintain the research infrastructure and services at sufficiently high level.

The Government of Finland made on 21.11.2007 a decision on the principles of merging Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki School of Economics, and Helsinki University of Arts and Design from 1.8.2009. The new university will be organised as a private foundation, with endowments coming from the government and industry. This is a dramatic change in the basic infrastructure of the Finnish university system, and also for HIIT. As such, it will offer major opportunities for organising research and for facilitating research-based innovations. We believe that HIIT is well prepared to take full advantage of this new major development.

Espoo, 17 December 2007

Martti Mäntylä
martti.mantyla(a)hiit.fi
Esko Ukkonen
esko.ukkonen(a)cs.helsinki.fi
Co-directors, HIIT

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NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS

UBILIFE

TEKES has donated funding for the project UbiLife Foundations for two years from 1.7.2007. The objective of the project is to focus on the fundamental research problems of ubiquitous computing, deploy new ubi infrastructure, and to develop novel multi-modal ubi applications on selected problem domains e.g. education in the suburban area and public and commercial services of the city centre. HIIT belongs to the academic consortium coordinated by University of Oulu. For more information, please contact Dr. Sasu Tarkoma.

ADVANCED VIRTUAL ECONOMY APPLICATIONS (AVEA)

TEKES has awarded 2,5 year funding for the project Advanced Virtual Economy Applications (AVEA) from 1.10.2007. The project will study virtual economies: systems where millions of Internet users create and trade virtual items and currencies, often for real money. HIIT's industrial partners in the project are Nokia Research Center, CCP Games, Playdo, and SWelcom. The research will be carried out in co-operation with Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. For more information, please contact Vili Lehdonvirta.

PSIRP

The proposal Publish-Subscribe Internet Routing Paradigm (PSRIP), submitted in response to the first call of the ICT programme of EU's 7th Framework Programme, has completed the contract negotiations after clearing the highly competitive technical evaluation with good marks. The project will launch on 1.1.2008.

The project aims to solve present shortcomings of the Internet by proposing a fundamental reform of its paradigms and core technologies. A major flaw in the design of the Internet is its imbalance of powers in the favour of the sender of information: the network accepts anything that the sender wants to send and will make a best effort to deliver it to the receiver. This has led into increasing problems with spam mail and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, forcing companies and users to conceal their E-mail addresses and place their systems behind firewalls. The most severe consequence of this is that the possibilities offered by the Internet are not being utilized.

The project studies the use of the publish/subscribe paradigm (pub/ sub) as a remedy to these problems. In this approach, senders publish what they want to send and the receivers subscribe to the publications that they want to receive. Thus, only publishers need to have names. A new Internet architecture, derived from the pub/sub paradigm will be studied and experimented, leading into a redesign of all the layers. In the new Internet, multicast will be the norm and security and mobility are designed into the architecture, rather than added on as after-thoughts.

The new architecture is implemented and feedback from the implementation work is used to refine the architecture. We will make two different implementations: one where pub/sub is run as an overlay over IP (the evolutionary approach) and another, where also the lower layers are redesigned (the revolutionary approach). The architecture and its implementation will be validated by a red team working to break it. Also the economic drivers for the new architecture will be studied.

HIIT is the coordinator of the project. Other partners include RWTH Aachen University, British Telecom, Oy L M Ericsson Ab, Nokia Siemens Networks Oy, Institute for Parallel Processing at the Bulgarian Academy of Science and Athens University of Economics and Business. For more information, please contact Dr. Arto Karila.

USER PSYCHOLOGY AND USER-CENTRIC INTERACTION DESIGN (THESEUS)

TEKES has granted 2-year funding for the project Theseus: User psychology and user-centric interaction design. The project is coordinated by University of Jyväskylä, and its academic partners include VTT and HIIT. The main objective of the project is to raise the use of psychological user data in interaction design to a new level. The work is carried out through a series of case studies with products of participating companies. For more information, please contact Dr. Antti Oulasvirta.

WORK PRACTISES AND THE TRANSITION TO UBICOMP (AMOVEO)

Academy of Finland has granted four-year funding for the project Work Practises and the Transition to Ubicomp (AMOVEO). The consortium involves the HIIT UIx research group and VTT Systems Usability group. The goals of the project are 1) to study the transition of work practices in the face of ubiquitous computing automatization in three cases, 2) to describe social and human principles characterizing these new practices and 3) to inform the design of technology, instruction and training, and the organization of work environments. Methodologically it will be based on cross-disciplinary analysis of human practices combining psychological and ethnomethodological orientations with a technology construction goal. Apart from scientific contributions, the planned results include descriptions of new work practices, conceptual elaborations of the notion of practice, and implications to the design and organization of bicomp-oriented work. For more information, please contact Dr. Giulio Jacucci.

WHOLE GENOME ASSOCIATION ANALYSIS STRATEGIES FOR MULTIPLE PHENOTYPES

The project is part of an interdisciplinary research consortium called "Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics-Coordinating Center", which is funded by the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) for the period of 1 September 2007 - 31 August 2012. The partners are Heikki Mannila from HIIT together with Leena Peltonen-Palotie, Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland FIMM and Nelson Freimer, University of California, Los Angeles USA.

The project will apply data mining approaches to identify new phenotypes in an existing neuropsychiatric database (the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966). This aim will involve analysis of an extensive phenotype database to identify previously unexplored correlations between different phenotypic features (both those that overtly assess neurobehavioral features and those that assess other features). We will use these composite phenotypes as complements of the initial phenotypes for whole genome association studies, and develop methods for the analysis of large numbers of novel phenotypes.

The results of the project may be used to identify genes involved in neurobehavioral features, giving additional possibilities for drug design. The computational methods can also be used in the analysis of other phenotypic databases.

COMPUTATIONAL DATA FUSION OF MULTIPLE BIOLOGICAL INFORMATION SOURCES AND BACKGROUND DATA (MULTIBIO)

TEKES has funded the project Computational data fusion of multiple biological information sources and background data (MultiBio) coordinated by Dr. Janne Nikkilä and Prof. Sami Kaski, originally submitted to Tekes open call on 28.2.2007. Other members of the consortium include Sakari Knuutila (HY), Jaakko Kangasjärvi (HY) and Alvis Brazma (European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, UK). The project will develop new probabilistic models for finding dependencies between data sources and for finding and incorporating relevant background data to focus the models. A prime application is cancer studies, where genomic structural variation and gene expression are key sources of cues. More information can be seen at http://www.cis.hut.fi/projects/mi/multibio/index.shtml.

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NORDICHIP SEMINAR

HIIT organised on 9.10.2007 the NordicHIP seminar on themes of the Host Identity Protocol and the related internetworking concepts.

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GOOGLE BUYS JAIKU

Jaiku, a popular activity stream and presence sharing service that works from the Web and mobile phones, has been bought by Google in September 2007. The basic technology of Jaiku, the ContextPhone platform, was developed at HIIT and UH DCS in the Context project during 2002-2005. Jaiku Ltd., was founded in February, 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen to commercialize the service. The service was released on the Web in July 2006.

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CICERO-HIIT RESEARCHERS' DAY - Learning Spaces and Technologies

HIIT organised together with CICERO Learning network a seminar where researchers from both HIIT and CICERO presented their research. CICERO Learning is a network for researchers and research groups on learning from different universities and research institutes in Finland. CICERO Learning network was established in 2005, and is coordinated by the University of Helsinki. The seminar has been followed-up by several internal meetings between CICERO and HIIT, where the units have been discussing co-operation possibilities in the near future.

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FINLAND-ICSI CENTER FOR NOVEL INTERNET ARCHITECTURES LAUNCH AT ICSI

The launch event of the Finland-ICSI Center for Novel Internet Architectures (FICNIA) was held in the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley, California on 27.9.2007.

The mission of the Center is to conduct fundamental research in novel Internet architectures, aiming at a significant contribution towards the future development of the Internet. The Center will combine and coordinate the research efforts at ICSI, led by Professor Scott Shenker, with those of HIIT and other Finnish reseachers, led by Professor Kimmo Raatikainen. It will operate through joint research activities, research visits, and events.

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"IN HIIT" BLOG LAUNCHED

A small (but probably growing) group of HIIT researchers have initiated a joint blog called "In HIIT". It is intended to offer a "non-official" and more personal platform for the interaction of HIIT and the wide world around it, discussing not just research but also the ethical, political, and societal issues raised by it. The blog will be written mostly in Finnish language, but occasionally also in English, and perhaps in other languages too. Please peek in at http://inhiit.blogspot.com/!

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HIIT AUTHORS RECEIVE BEST PAPER AWARD AT MUM 2007

The paper "Extending Large-Scale Event Participation with User- Created Mobile Media on a Public Display" by Peter Peltonen, Antti Salovaara, Giulio Jacucci, Tommi Ilmonen, Carmelo Ardito, Petri Saarikko and Vikram Batra received on 14.12.2007 the Best Paper Award in the MUM 2007 Conference. See http://www.mum2007.oulu.fi/.

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HIIT ARRANGES WITH NOKIA THE WORKSHOP IMUx 2008 IN SYDNEY IN MAY 2008

Already last year, HIIT arranged with Nokia a workshop called Improved Mobile User Experience (IMUx) in connection with the Pervasive conference. This year, the Second IMUx will be arranged in connection with Pervasive in Sydney in May 2008. The workshop brings together the following areas:
* user interaction in mobile environments,
* ubiquitous user modeling, and
* mobile user experience.
The deadline for contributions is 25 January 2008. More information is available at http://www.hiit.fi/events/imux2008.

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DIRECTOR OF DARPA VISITS HIIT

Dr. Anthony J. Tether, Director, Dr. Robert Leheny, Deputy Director, Mr. Ronald Kurjanowicz, Chief of Staff, and Ms. Kimberly Garnett, assistant to the Director, all of the Defense Advanced Projects Agency visited HIIT. A brief seminar on Future Internet research was organised.

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS

09.06.2007: HIIT researcher Teemu Roos defended his doctoral thesis "Statistical and Information-Theoretic Methods for Data Analysis" in a public debate held in the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, on June 9 2007.

11.9.2007: Emil Aaltonen Foundation awarded a young researcher grant to Dr. Antti Oulasvirta of HIIT for the project Interruptions in Human-Computer Interaction. The grant is intended to facilitate promising post-doc level researchers in the launch of their independent research career.

12.9.2007: The Board of HIIT nominated Professor Tommi Jaakkola from MIT and Dr. Wray Buntine from NICTA and Australian National University in the position of HIIT Fellow for 2007-2010. A fellowship can be awarded to an internationally recognized senior researcher who co-operates closely with HIIT through regular visits and doctoral education. Professor Jaakkola plans to work closely associated with the Algorithmic Data Analysis programme and Dr. Buntine with the Probabilistic Adaptive Systems programme. The first fellowship had been awarded in 2003 to Dr. Jorma Rissanen.

25.10.2007: A HIIT research group led by Dr. Risto Sarvas received a special grant celebrating the 125th anniversary of Elisa Corporation from the HPY Research Foundation. The topic of the succesful grant proposal was From Snapshot Photography to Everyday Social Media.

2.11.2007: HIIT researcher Oriana Riva defended her doctoral thesis "Middleware for Mobile Sensing Applications in Urban Environments" in the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. The opponent was Professor Olaf Drögehorn (University of Kassel) and the custos Professor Kimmo Raatikainen (University of Helsinki).

6.11.2007: The Scientific Council of the University of Industrial Arts and Design Helsinki (UIAH) nominated Research Scientist Giulio Jacucci as Affiliate Processor (docent) in Ubiquitous Interaction Technologies in the area of User-Centred Design.

9.11.2007: The Council of the University of Helsinki has decided to invite Senior Research Scientist, Aapo Hyvärinen in one of the floating 5-year professor positions ("pooliprofessuuri") that can be allocated on the basis of a new emerging field or a particularly prominent candidate on the basis of the individual performance, development of a succesful line of research, scientific and societal relevance, and the match with the overall strategy of the university.

1.12.2007: D.Sc. Kristiina Karvonen has been nominated as the Research Manager of the Future Internet research programme, following Dr. Oriana Riva who moved to ETH for her post-doc training. Dr. Karvonen will also act as the Coordinator of the Finland-ICSI Center for Novel Internet Architectures, as well as pursue her own line of research in usable security and trust.

14.12.2007: HIIT researcher Merja Oja presented her doctoral thesis "Methods for Exploring Genomic Data Sets: Application to Human Endogenous Retroviruses" in a public dissertation at the Helsinki University of Technology. The custos of the event was professor Samuel Kaski, and the opponent Professor Hiroshi Mamitsuka from Kyoto University, Japan.

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FUTURE EVENTS

5.4.2008: HIIT co-arranges the workshop Urban Mixed Realities: Technologies, Theories and Frontiers in association with the premier conference on interaction research, CHI 2008.

26.-30.5.2008: The Scientific Advisory Board of HIIT will meet to provide expert criticism and strategic guidance of HIIT's research.

HIIT arranges ICML, UAI, and COLT conferences:
- ICML 5.-9.7.2008 (local chair: Hannu Toivonen)
- UAI 9.-12.7.2008 (programme co-chair: Petri Myllymäki)
- COLT 9.-12.7.2008 (local chair: Jyrki Kivinen)

Each of the three international scientific conferences is the leading annual conference of its field. The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the most important annual event in machine learning, attracting annually about 500 participants from all over the world. The Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) is the main conference in the field of computational learning theory, with some 100 participants annually. The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) has since 1985 been the primary international forum for presenting new results on the use of principled methods for reasoning under uncertainty within intelligent systems, attracting around 200 leading experts of the field every year. More information is available at http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/iuc2008/.

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HIIT Update

HIIT Update 1/2007

noronen — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 21:00:00 +0000

Headlines in this issue:

- FOREWORD
- NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS
- INTERNATIONAL EVALUATION OF FINNISH COMPUTER SCIENCE 2007
- CITYWALL PUBLIC MULTI-TOUCH DISPLAY IN LASIPALATSI
- PEKKA HIMANEN'S INNOVATION REPORT
- HIIT AND KTH ARRANGED JOINT SEMINAR
- HIIT RUOHOLAHTI UNIT MOVED TO SPEKTRI PILOTTI
- HIIT ANNUAL REPORT 2006
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

The programme of the new Finnish government mentions several initiatives regarding innovations, research, and universities. Perhaps the most significant one will be the proposed change of universities' legal status so that they become much more autonomous than before. The aim of the change is to facilitate their active role in creating innovations and turning them into practice.

The initiative that has been the most prominent - and controversial - in public is nevertheless the proposed merger of three universities in Helsinki to a new "innovation university" with the express mission of reaching world-class status in research. The universities concerned are Helsinki University of Technology (TKK), Helsinki School of Economics (HSE), and University of Arts and Design Helsinki (UIAH). The idea appears to be that bringing engineering, business, and design more closely together is likely to offer new possibilities and incentives for innovative research and development, and of course also cross-disciplinary educational programmes.

As a joint institute of University of Helsinki and TKK, HIIT is deeply committed to the values of high-quality basic and strategic research. Hence it welcomes the new university initiative. HIIT has a long record of co-operation with both HSE and UIAH, and is actually a scale prototype of the "innovation university" in its own domain of research. HIIT's research interests cover themes where even deeper co- operation with researches from HSE and UIAH is attractive. At the same time, HIIT's commitment to basic research remains solid.

This issue of HIIT Update summarises the developments of a very busy first half of 2007. The first call of the 7th framework programme occurred in April, and HIIT participated in no less than eight project proposals, and additionally two other initiatives. The fruits of this effort will be learned during the summer 2007; it appears that the call was extremely competitive. As the spring was also punctuated by several national calls, those HIIT personnel that must participate in proposal generation have indeed been busy.

HIIT's Ruoholahti unit moved to new premises in Spektri Business Park in April 2007, and is thus now called Spektri unit. The move took place extremely smoothly, largely thanks to the active participation of Ruoholahti personnel who took active stance in its planning and execution. Special thanks are due to the IT team of HIIT that worked long hours to create the required network facilities in Spektri. While we surely miss the sea view, the new offices are fine and fit HIIT very well.

After all this, the vacation period now looming surely feels overdue. We wish all friends and relatives of HIIT a refreshing vacation and sunny skies!

Espoo 6 July 2007

Martti Mäntylä
(mailto:martti.mantyla(a)hiit.fi)
Esko Ukkonen
(mailto:esko.ukkonen(a)cs.helsinki.fi)
Co-directors, HIIT

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NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS

InfraHIP II

TEKES has awarded 2,5 year funding for the Infrastructure for HIP II (InfraHIP II) project that continues HIIT's work on Host Identity Protocol focusing especially on engineering and deployment issues. The industrial partners of the project include Ericsson, Nokia, Elisa, TeliaSonera and Secgo. Adj. Prof. Andrei Gurtov is the leader of the project.

FINLAND-ICSI CENTER FOR NOVEL INTERNET ARCHITECTURE

As the demands on the Internet continue to grow, researchers are seeking to make the Internet more secure, reliable and flexible. Making substantial and qualitative changes in these properties may require radical, as opposed to incremental, change.

The Finland-ICSI Center for Novel Internet Architecture is devoted to exploring such radical changes. The pairing of Finnish and ICSI researchers is natural, as there is a strong history of collaboration between the two. In particular, the technical work being pursued by HIIT and ICSI complement each other very well, such as the overlap between the HIP project and various flat-naming projects at ICSI.

TEKES has awarded funding for the Finland-ICSI Center for Novel Internet Architecture covering its operation for the first three years. The funding will facilitate joint research activities, faculty and researcher exchange, and joint events to be run both in Finland and in California. For more information, please contact Prof. Martti Mäntylä (mailto:martti.mantyla(a)hiit.fi) at HIIT or Prof. Scott Shenker at ICSI.

PUPS

TEKES has awarded two-year funding for the project Personalized Ubiservices in Public Spaces (PUPS) from its Ubicom programme. The project will focus on studying proactive behaviours (related to content or its representation) informed by context-awareness and user modelling. The research consortium combines groups from three of HIIT's research programmes (FI, NS, and PAS) with VTT Oulu. For more information, please contact Dr. Patrik Floréen (mailto:patrik.floreen(a)hiit.fi), Dr. Esko Kurvinen, or Prof. Petri Myllymäki.

INNOGUARD

TEKES has donated three-year funding for the project Innoguard, a joint effort of Helsinki University of Technology (Prof. Eljas Soisalon-Soininen), Lappeenranta University of Technology (Prof. Jukka Kemppinen) and HIIT (Dr. Perttu Virtanen). The project will study the use of program run-time execution trace analysis for detecting the presence of predefined "signatures" suggesting that the program uses a method covered by a patent.

MOBILE CITY MOMENTS

TEKES has awarded 2,5 year funding for the CELTIC project Mobile City Moments (MCM). The project will study new mobile services enabled by positioning, group communication, context sensitivity, presence data, and machine-readable tags. It draws inspiration from "Web 2.0" technologies and mash-ups, aiming to identify essential customer values and business model elements driving viable services. The project will carry out user research and show prototypes in three European cities: Helsinki, Stockholm, and Barcelona. The international consortium is led by Stockholm School of Economics. The other Finnish partners are Idean Research and TeliaSonera. For more information, please contact Dr. Giulio Jacucci (mailto:giulio.jacucci(a)hiit.fi) or Dr. Risto Sarvas (mailto:risto.sarvas(a)hiit.fi).

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INTERNATIONAL EVALUATION OF FINNISH COMPUTER SCIENCE 2007

As part of the International Evaluation of Finnish Computer Science 2007 organised by the Academy of Finland, an international evaluation panel visited HIIT on 28 June 2007. HIIT researchers presented the institute and its research programmes, and the panel had the opportunity to ask questions and discuss HIIT's self evaluation report that was returned earlier this year.

The panel interviewed 27 units involved in computer science research in Finland during the week 25-29 June 2007 and will later publish an evaluation report of their findings.

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CITYWALL PUBLIC MULTI-TOUCH DISPLAY IN LASIPALATSI

HIIT demonstrates the CityWall, a large multi-touch display in Lasipalatsi (Simonkatu side) in central Helsinki. It acts as a collaborative and playful interface for the everchanging media landscape of the city. The content displayed is periodically organized into themes or events that are currently taking place in the city such as festivals, carnivals or sports events.

The CityWall is designed to support the navigation of media, specifically annotated photos and videos which are continuously gathered in realtime from public sources such as Flickr and YouTube. To contribute content to the CityWall people can send pictures and videos via MMS or email. Alternatively, tag your media on YouTube or Flickr with 'Helsinki' and we will pick up your media and display it here on the CityWall.

The touchscreen technology and applications have been developed Dr Tommi Ilmonen, John Evans, and Dr. Giulio Jacucci from the Ubiquitous Interaction research group. The development and set up has been co-funded by the 6th Framework Research Programme of the European Union (EU), through the IPCity project (FP-2004-IST-4-27571) which investigates Mixed Reality Interaction and Presence in Urban Environments. The installation in Lasipalatsi is supported by the Helsinki Cultural Office.

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PEKKA HIMANEN'S INNOVATION REPORT

Prof. Pekka Himanen's report The Finnish Dream (Suomalainen unelma), was published in an event held by the Centennary Fund of the Technology Industries of Finland.

The report (see at http://www.teknologiateollisuus.fi/files/15064_suomalainen_unelma.pdf) characterises innovation driven economy and society, and studies the underlying culture of creativity. It is a summary in Finnish of a larger monograph to be published later in English. The reported work has been performed in the 5-year project Global Network Society funded by the Centennary Fund.

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HIIT AND KTH ARRANGED JOINT SEMINAR

HIIT's Network Society programme and the department of Media Technology and Graphic Arts from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm arranged a joint research seminar in Helsinki and Stockholm. A team of 15 researchers from KTH, led by professor Nils Enlund, first visited Helsinki on March 14. Another 15 researchers from HIIT, led by professor Marko Turpeinen, joined the KTH team on voyage to Stockholm where the second part of the seminar was held on March 15.

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HIIT RUOHOLAHTI UNIT MOVED TO SPEKTRI PILOTTI

The HIIT personnel located previously in HTC Helsinki in Ruoholahti has moved to the Pilotti building in Spektri business park next to TKK campus in Espoo. The new visiting address of the unit is Metsänneidonkuja 4, Espoo. The postal address (HIIT, FI-02015 TKK, Finland) and telephone numbers remain unchanged. See location map for driving instructions and public transport connections at http://www.spektri.fi/sijainti.php .

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HIIT ANNUAL REPORT 2006

HIIT Annual Report 2006 was published June 1 2007 and can be seen here.

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS

1.6.2007: The Finnish Information Processing Association has given its award for the best doctoral thesis in computer science for 2006 to Dr. Risto Sarvas from HIIT for his dissertation Designing User-Centric Metadata for Digital Snapshot Photography. The work was done in the DCC research group. See http://www.ttlry.fi/?x23586=7049531 for more information in Finnish.

21.5.2007: The City of Helsinki Science Award was conferred to Professor Esko Ukkonen in recognition of his work on methods for processing large and complex data sets.

21.2.2007: Dr. Jukka Kemppinen was nominated as Professor in Law, especially information and technology law, from 1.3.2007 in the School of Business at Lappeenranta University of Technology. He has been professor pro tem in Lappeenranta since 2003. Dr. Kemppinen is also an adjunct professor (docent) in University of Helsinki (legal science) since 1994 and University of Turku (cultural history) since 2005.

9.6.2007: HIIT researcher Teemu Roos defended his doctoral thesis "Statistical and Information-Theoretic Methods for Data Analysis" in the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki.

8.6.2007: Jarkko Venna defended his doctoral thesis "Dimensionality reduction for visual exploration of similarity structures" in the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki.

29.5.2007: Mika Raento defended his doctoral thesis "Exploring Privacy for Ubiquitous Computing: Tools, Methods and Experiments" in the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. The opponent was Professor Kari-Jouko Räihä (University of Tampere) and the custos Professor Hannu Toivonen.

25.5.2007: HIIT and TML researcher Kristiina Karvonen defended her doctoral thesis "Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Trust" in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at TKK. The official opponent was Professor L. Jean Camp, Indiana University, USA. The custos was Professor Antti Ylä-Jääski.

4.5.2007: HIIT researcher Esko Kurvinen presented his doctoral thesis "Prototyping Social Action" at the Helsinki University of Arts and Design. The official opponent was Dr. Jack Whalen from PARC.

3.3.2007: The former HIIT researcher Aura Soininen presented her doctoral dissertation "Patents in the Information and Communications Technology Sector" at the Lappeenranta University of Technology. The custos was Professor Jukka Kemppinen and the opponent Professor Lionel Bently from University of Cambridge.

2.3.2007: HIIT researcher Antti Leino presented his doctoral thesis "On Toponymic Constructions as an Alternative to Naming Patters in Describing Finnish Lake Names" at the University of Helsinki. The opponent was Doc. Staffan Nyström from University of Stockholm and custos Professor Tapani Lehtinen.

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FUTURE EVENTS

HIIT BOARD MEETING on 12 September 2007 at 11:00 in Kumpula/ Exactum, Department of Computer Science, UH.

HIIT arranges ICML, UAI, and COLT conferences
- ICML 6.-9.7.2008 (Hannu Toivonen)
- UAI 8.-11.7.2008 (Petri Myllymäki)
- COLT 9.-12.7.2008 (Jyrki Kivinen)

More details will be given as the planning progresses.

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Newsletter:

HIIT Update

HIIT Update 2/2006

noronen — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 22:00:00 +0000

Headlines in this issue:

- FOREWORD
- NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS
- ACADEMY OF FINLAND GRANTS ALGODAN CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE
- NEW RESEARCH GROUPS TO HIIT
- WORKSHOP ON CONTEXT-AWARE MOBILE MEDIA (CAMEDIA 2006)
- NAMING AND ADDRESSING FOR NEXT-GENERATION INTERNETWORKS
- IST 2006
- VISITORS AT HIIT
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

The discussion on the Finnish innovation system, including the role of universities, has continued with increasing intensity during the second half of 2006. The theme is also linked with the analogous discussion of the whole EU situation under the framework of the Lisbon strategy and its implementation.

As a result, several partially overlapping ideas are being developed: the so-called "Innovation University" supposedly created by merging the Helsinki University of Technology, the Helsinki School of Economics, and the Helsinki University of Arts and Design; the new "Strategic Centres of Excellence in Science, Technology and Innovation" scheme proposed by the Science and Technology Policy Council of Finland; and the "European Institute of Technology" proposed by the European Commission. All three seem to aim at similar qualitative goals: high scientific and societal impact; better integration between various disciplines; seamless link between basic research, strategic research and innovation-oriented research; and closer co-operation between universities and industry.

HIIT subscribes to all of these objectives in its own operation, and in fact offers a blueprint of how they might be pursued. This gives us a solid basis for contributing to the ongoing discussion, and also to the implementation of the initiatives likely to start sometime during 2007.

During the second half of 2006 HIIT has continued the launch of the new organisation announced in HIIT Update 1/2006. Internal management bodies for research programmes have started their operation, thus providing a theatre for research group co-operation and joint research agenda planning. Each programme will also have its own Steering Board, providing a new interface to HIIT's work for experts in industry and academic partner sites. The full launch of these will continue in 2007.

With these developments, HIIT has effectively implemented the core of its strategy as defined nearly two years ago. Thus it is ready to take on any opportunities and challenges the fluid situation has to offer. Watch this space for information for more developments.

Helsinki 20 December 2006

Martti Mäntylä

Esko Ukkonen

Co-directors, HIIT

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NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS

TÄKY

TEKES has awarded funding for the project "Täky" which was launched in November and will end in March 2008. The project is a collaboration of HIIT's DCC and UIX groups with VTT. The industry partners in the project are Nokia, Aina Group, Profium, and Swelcom. The project studies the role of tagging in mobile applications. For further information please contact Risto Sarvas.

PAMPHLET

Pamphlet-project studies digital media communities and designs hybrid media product concepts for those communities. The project gains more understanding on the role of paper-based products in digital media communities. The project started in April 2006 and ends in October 2007. It is a co-operation project with KCL, Dynamoid, Futurice, TFIF, Myllykosken Pallo, TKK, and the National Consumer Research Center. For further information please contact Risto Sarvas.

OPTIMISING DATA GATHERING IN RESOURCE-CONSTRAINED NETWORKS

The Academy of Finland has granted funding for a research project on optimisation in sensor networks for 2007-2009. The project, led by Patrik Floréen, continues the work of the Academy project NAPS (2003-2005), which was part of the research programme on proactive computing (PROACT). For further information please contact Patrik Floréen.

FUEGOSPHERE

The FuegoSphere -project investigates the integration of HIIT's mobile Open Source service platform components with enterprise systems. The project is done in co-operation with Nokia NRC. For further information please contact Sasu Tarkoma.

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ACADEMY OF FINLAND GRANTS ALGODAN CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE

Finnish Centre of Excellence for Algorithmic Data Analysis Research (Algodan) is one of the 18 research groups selected by the Acedemy of Finland to the national centre-of-excellence programme for 2008 - 2013. HIIT/Kumpula is the main site of activity of Algodan. Professor Esko Ukkonen is the director and Academy Professor Heikki Mannila the vice-director of Algodan. More information at http://www.aka.fi/.

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NEW RESEARCH GROUPS TO HIIT

HIIT Steering Board decided to accept three new research groups into HIIT: the Computational Biology group led by Professor Esko Ukkonen from University of Helsinki, the Statistical Machine Learning and Bioinformatics group led by Professor Samuel Kaski from the Helsinki University of Technology and the Distributed Networking and Security research group led by Professor Antti Ylä-Jääski from Helsinki University of Technology. The work of Professor Ukkonen's group will mainly be focused on HIIT's Algorithmic Data Analysis (ADA) programme, while Professor Kaski's group will contribute both to ADA and the Probabilistic Adaptive Systems (PAS) programme. Professor Antti Ylä-Jääski´s group will focus on the Future Internet programme.

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WORKSHOP ON CONTEXT-AWARE MOBILE MEDIA (CAMEDIA 2006)

The DCC research group organized the Context-Aware Mobile Media (CAMedia 2006) workshop in the 8th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2006) on 12 September in Espoo.

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NAMING AND ADDRESSING FOR NEXT-GENERATION INTERNETWORKS, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany

HIIT's senior research scientist Andrei Gurtov co-organised the seminar Naming and Addressing for Next-Generation Internetworks in Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, on 29.10.-1.11.2006. The goal of the seminar was to bring together researchers and engineers experienced in current and next-generation network architectures and related research areas. The seminar allowed these participants to advance issues associated with naming and addressing in future networking and computing systems. Some 30 experts attended the seminar, including a strong team from HIIT.

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IST 2006

HIIT participated to IST 2006 Helsinki on 21 - 23 November 2006 with two separate research and technology stands: Meaning (Merkitys) and Alvis. Also number of HIIT's researchers attended the conference, exhibition, networking events and workshops, especially concerning issues of the 7. Framework Programme. More than 4,500 people were present in what was the largest IST event ever. For more information, please contact Petri Martikainen.

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VISITORS AT HIIT

Professor Nancy Van House from School of Information, UC Berkeley visited the Immortalidad project at HIIT on 20-21 June 2006 and co-chaired with HIIT's Risto Sarvas a workshop in the CITRIS in Europe conference. See http://www.citris-uc.org/CITRIS-in-Europe.

Dr. Johan Pouwelse from Delft University of Technology Netherlands visited HIIT on 18 September 2006. Dr. Pouwelse presented Tribler; a social peer-to-peer file sharing system based on BitTorrent. He collaborates with HIIT and the University of Art and Design Helsinki on the P2P-Fusion project, which addresses the legal creative reuse of audio and video media in the Internet.

Professor Dimitri Bertsekas from MIT visited HIIT on September 11-27 to discuss possible future collaborative research projects between MIT and HIIT. During his visit Professor Bertsekas also gave two invited talks titled "Dynamic and Neuro-Dynamic Programming: An Overview and Recent Work" and "A New Look at Convexity, Duality, and Optimization".

Professor Leo Sang-Min Whang from Department of Psychology, Yonsei University, Seoul, visited HIIT on 26 September. He gave a talk at the seminar on Massively multi-user services and virtual consumerism organised by the DCC research group. Seminar materials are available at http://virtual-economy.org/event/260906.

Professor Tatsuo Nakajima, Distributed and Ubiquitous Computing Lab, Waseda University, Tokyo, visited HIIT on 8 December. He gave a talk at the seminar on Ubiquitous consumer services & augmented reality organised by DCC and UIx research groups. Seminar materials are available at www.hiit.fi/node/89.

Dr. Walter Bender, President of One Laptop Per Child project from MIT visited HIIT on 14 December 2006. He presented the One Laptop Per Child project and demonstrated the latest beta machines.

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS

M.Sc. & MA Kai Huotari joined HIIT as Research Programme Manager of Network Society as of 1st June. In this position, he contributes in the administration of the Institute and participates in the research aiming to do his doctoral thesis. Kai's background lies in film and in computer science. After graduating from a filmschool in France, he completed his studies in Computer science department at TKK. Before joining HIIT, he led DocPoint - Helsinki Documentary Film Festival for three years.

D.Sc. Arto Karila started at HIIT on October 1 in the position of Principal Scientist. Dr. Karila is one of the best known networking experts in Finland. He received his Doctor of Science (Eng.) degree at the Helsinki University of Technology, Department of Computer Science, in 1991. He has worked previously in Technical Research Centre of Finland, Telecommunications Laboratory in 1982-1988, Helsinki University of Technology 1988-1989, Telecom Finland in 1989-1992, Wellfleet Communications (now part of Nortel Networks) in 1992-1994, Upnet Säkerhetssystem in 1994-1995, and Systems Software Partners (SSP) Oy in 1995-1997. In 1995-2001 he was Professor in Computer Networks and Network Security in the Helsinki University of Technology, Department of Computer Science. Since 2001 he has worked as an independent consultant. Dr. Karila will contribute to the Future Internet research programme of HIIT, especially HIP-related research. He plans to divide his time between HIIT and his other pursuits.

D.Sc Marko Turpeinen, the Programme Director of the Network Society research programme at HIIT, has been nominated as the Professor of Media Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden, from 1.11.2006 onwards. Professor Turpeinen will continue his work at HIIT, and plans to divide his time between KTH and HIIT.

HIIT researcher Antti Oulasvirta defended his doctoral thesis at the Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki, 10 November 2006. The title of the thesis is "Studies of Working Memory in Interrupted Human-Computer Interaction,". The opponent was Professor Deborah Boehm-Davis from the George Mason University, USA.

HIIT researcher Tommi Ilmonen defended his doctoral thesis "Tools and Experiments in Multimodal Interaction" on 14 December 2006 at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Helsinki University of Technology. His opponent was professor Michael Cohen, Computer Arts Lab, University of Aizu, Japan and the supervisor was Professor Tapio Takala.

HIIT researcher Risto Sarvas defended his doctoral thesis "Designing User-Centric Metadata for Digital Snapshot Photography" on 15 December 2006 at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Helsinki University of Technology. His opponent was professor Walter Bender from MIT Media Lab and the supervisor was Professor Reijo Sulonen.

HIIT researcher Evimaria Terzi defended her doctoral thesis "Problems and Algorithms for Sequence Segmentations" on 18 December 2006 at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. The opponent was Professor Dimitris Achlioptas, UC Santa Cruz, and kustos was Professor Esko Ukkonen.

HIIT researcher Antti Oulasvirta (Ubiquitous Interaction group) has received the Fulbright-Technology Industries of Finland Grant for a young scholar. The grant covers a post doctoral year in the Information School at the University of California, Berkeley, commencing on Fall 2007.

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FUTURE EVENTS

HIIT BOARD MEETING on 27 February 2007 at 10 in Ruoholahti, HTC/Pinta.

FORTHCOMING WORKSHOP: IMPROVED MOBILE USER EXPERIENCE (IMUx 2007) IN TORONTO MAY 2007

HIIT arranges together with Nokia Research Center a workshop combining user modeling, user interaction and user experience. The workshop takes place in conjunction with the conference Pervasive 2007 in Toronto in May 2007. Further information can be found on the homepage www.hiit.fi/imux. The main organizers are Patrik Floréen, Petteri Nurmi and Greger Lindén from HIIT and Péter Boda from Nokia.

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Newsletter:

HIIT Update

HIIT Update 1/2006

noronen — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 21:00:00 +0000

Headlines in this issue:

- FOREWORD
- NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS
- NEW RESEARCH PROGRAMME STRUCTURE OF HIIT
- UNIVERSAL PEER TO PEER SEMINAR
- VIRTUAL WORLDS AND VIRTUAL CONSUMERISM SEMINAR
- SEMINAR ON NEW EVERYDAY INFORMATION SOCIETY
- COLLABORATIVE VIDEO WORKSHOP
- HIIT RETREAT 2006
- SEMINAR ON FUTURE OF EUROPEAN SOCIAL MODELS
- HIIT JOINS THE DIMES CONSORTIUM
- BRU RECEIVES HIGH MARKS IN RESEARCH EVALUATION
- PROFESSOR JUKKA KEMPPINEN RECEIVES TELIASONERA FINLAND AWARD
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

The first half of 2006 has seen important and promising progress in HIIT's work.

The institute has been very successful in new research initiatives, especially EU-funded projects. No less than five new EU-projects have launched or are in the process to be launched soon. These include the Pasion, FUGA, P2P Fusion and CALLAS projects mentioned in this newsletter, and the IPCity project already mentioned in the previous issue. Also the Trustworthy Internet initiative, selected by TEKES to receive strategic research funding for next 3 years, is an important landmark for HIIT. All in all, the project portfolio of the institute is stronger than ever.

Equally important is the progress that has been made in implementing HIIT's strategy for 2006-2008 as defined by HIIT Board in 2005. The objective of the strategy is to join the present two units from 1.1.2009. To make this possible, convergence in all areas of the operative, administration, and management processes of the units is necessary precondition. During the first half of 2006, the senior researchers of both units of HIIT have designed a new research programme structure that now covers the whole institute. This structure was formally confirmed by the HIIT Board, and is in effect from 1.6.2006. The full implementation of these decisions should facilitate future growth of the institute by providing an improved basis for preparation of new research initiatives and also inclusion of new research groups.

As already commented in the Foreword of HIIT Update 1/2005 a year ago, the Finnish science and innovation policies have been under considerable scrutiny that only seems to have intensified during the recent months. HIIT has positioned itself prominently in this discussion as a multidisciplinary research institute in modern Information Technology and a central node in a competence cluster that can address the future challenges.

During the first months of 2006, HIIT had the opportunity to express its views in this regard in a report on the future information society commissioned by the Finnish Ministry of Communications and Transportation. This document offers a blueprint for future research lines that should be implemented in order to pave the path for an efficient information society that also embodies the human values according to the tradition of Nordic societies. The imminent Finnish presidency of the European Union will provide opportunities for expanding the scope of this work also to European level as part of the Seventh Framework Programme currently being developed.

With all these developments and opportunities, HIIT is in excellent position to continue progress towards its mission of becoming an internationally leading research institution in information technology, with high scientific, industrial and societal impact.

Helsinki 9 June 2006

Martti Mäntylä
Director of Research, Professor

Päivi Saarinen
Planning Officer

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NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS

TRUSTWORTHY INTERNET

The Finnish National Technology Agency TEKES has granted on 14.3.2006 funding of 1.8 million Euro for 3 years 2006-2008 to establish an excellence group Trustworthy Internet at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), the Telecommunications and Multimedia Laboratory (TML) at the Helsinki University of Technology, and the Computer Science Department (TKTL) at the University of Helsinki. The project is one of the four strategic research projects of the national GIGA research program for which TEKES has granted 100% funding.

The main objective of the project is to study the trust provisioning in the Internet. As changing the current Internet infrastructure is difficult, the project will explore the use of overlay networks to build and manage trust relationships between service providers and customers over networks. The project will proceed along research lines of overlay access, application integration, identity management, trust and session management, overlay scalability, and measurements. The project has excellent international connections to academic institutions around the globe: ICSI, Berkeley; Tsinghua, China; IIT Kanpur, India; RWTH, Germany; SICS, Sweden; USP, Brazil; CERN, Switzerland; Petrozavodsk State University, Russia.

The project will employ six full-time researchers at various stages of their postgraduate studies, as well as a postdoctoral scientist. The team will be located at the HIIT premises in Helsinki, Ruoholahti. The researchers are expected to actively publish in international forums and produce several dissertations during the project. An advisory board from the industry will follow the progress of the project. At the moment CSC, Defence Forces, Elisa, Ericsson, F-Secure, Karila A. & E., Nokia, Secgo, SSH, StoneSoft, TietoEnator, and TeliaSonera have joined the board.

Research Director, Professor Martti Mäntylä is the responsible leader and Doc. Andrei Gurtov the leading scientist of the project. The scientific board of the project includes Professor Antti Ylä-Jääski from TML, Professor Kimmo Raatikainen from TKTL, Adjunct Professor Arto Karila from HIIT and TML, and Adjunct Professor Pekka Nikander from Ericsson NomadicLab and HIIT. For more information, contact Doc. Gurtov at mailto:Andrei.Gurtov(a)hiit.fi.

NORDICHIP

The Nordunet3 Programme accepted on 22.5.2006 the project proposal NordicHIP, originally submitted in response to the programme's October 2005 call for applications. NordicHIP is a joint project by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, HIIT and the TML laboratory at TKK. Its objective is to deepen the collaboration in research and development of Host Identity Protocol (HIP) and related Internet infrastructure components between HIIT, TKK and SICS.

HIP and the related architecture form a proposal to change the TCP/IP stack to better support mobility and multi-homing. Adopting the identifier-locator split provided by HIP may prove to be a fundamental component of the next-generation Internet. The IETF working group on HIP is currently finalising the HIP base specifications. HIP is studied by multiple research organisations worldwide and is adopted as an architectural component in the EU Ambient Networks project and in a Layered Naming Internet Architecture by MIT. Both HUT and SICS have been key contributors to HIP research and standardisation efforts.

Nordunet3 is a joint program of the Joint Committee of the Nordic Natural Science Research Councils (NOS-N), NordForsk, the Nordic Council of Ministers, and NORDUnet A/S. NordicHIP is one of six projects selected for funding from 24 project applications. The selection was made by the Nordunet3 Steering Committee based on recommendations from an international panel of referees. The project is led by Doc. Andrei Gurtov. For more information, please contact him at mailto:Andrei.Gurtov(a)hiit.fi.

PASION

The contract negotiations of the project Psychologically Augmented Social Interaction Over Networks submitted to the 4th Call of Applications of EU's IST programme were concluded successfully in early 2006 and the project was launched. 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. The consortium implementing the project includes 17 partners from Europe. For more information, please contact Dr. Timo Saari at mailto:Timo.Saari(a)hiit.fi.

FUGA

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. FUGA will employ a broad variety of innovative techniques based on (a) psychophysiological recordings, (b) functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI), (c) eye movement recordings, (d) the so-called (online) implicit association test, and (e) tracking of behavioural indicators of emotion and motivation. An important objective of FUGA is to establish the construct validity, reliability, and predictive validity of the different Game Experience measures. A further objective is to develop a prototype of an emotionally adaptive game. For more information, please contact Dr. Niklas Ravaja at mailto:Niklas.Ravaja(a)hkkk.fi.

P2P FUSION

The project Peer-to-peer Fusion (P2P Fusion) concluded its negotiations successfully and was launched in the beginning of June. The P2P-FUSION project addresses the current difficulties in the legal creative reuse of audio and video media in the Internet environment. It aims to create an open, accessible, legal and economically efficient environment for creative audiovisual cultural activities that can also be based on the work of others and materials from cultural institutions, through built-in, easy-to-use support for suitable licensing schemes. The consortium consists of 7 partners from Finland, Hungary and the Netherlands. The project is co-ordinated by TAIK. For more information contact Kari-Hans Kommonen at TAIK, mailto:khk(a)uiah.fi

CALLAS

The project proposal Conveying Affectiveness in Leading-edge Living Adaptive Systems (CALLAS) was originally submitted in response to the 5th call of applications of the IST programme of the EU's 6th Framework Programme. After clearing the technical evaluation with high marks, the project enterted project negotiations with the European Commission. The negotiations are likely be concluded in the next few weeks. The project will study and develop multimodal affective interfaces in art and entertainment applications. These interfaces should support interaction with new media installations (Digital Arts, Digital Theatre, Interactive TV …) based on emotional models. As an integrated project, CALLAS will advance the state-of-the-art of affective interfaces both in terms of input processing and output/presentation; offer a software methodology for the development of Multimodal Interfaces that should make their development accessible to a wider constituency; and validate its development methodology through several research prototypes. The project will be implemented by a consortium with 19 partners. For more information, please contact Dr. Giulio Jacucci at mailto:Giulio.Jacucci(a)hiit.fi.

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NEW RESEARCH PROGRAMME STRUCTURE OF HIIT

A major milestone in the implementation of HIIT's strategy was reached on 11.5.2006 when the HIIT Board accepted the new research programme structure of HIIT that had been under preparation since the HIIT Retreat 2005. The Board also accepted the draft versions of HIIT's vision and mission statements.

The new programmes cover the activities of both units of HIIT, the ARU and the BRU. Thus the administrative division of the institute will be pushed to the background, and ceases to define the research content. The programmes are defined by their missions, stemming from the overall HIIT mission. Each programme is directed by a professor-level senior researcher. The HIIT research directors and the programme directors form a Management Board for the day-to-day joint managerial issues of the programmes, such as allocating projects to programmes and distributing HIIT base funding to the programmes. The current Industrial Advisory Board will be dissolved. Instead, each programme will have an Advisory Group consisting of industry representatives and senior researchers external to HIIT. With these changes, HIIT aims at a more transparent structure that will facilitate inclusion of new research groups and preparation of joint research initiatives with research partners.

The draft vision and mission as accepted by the Board are as follows:

HIIT vision (draft): Ubiquitous and mobile computation, communication and digital media bridge people, things and places; interweave with complex phenomena involving individuals, communities, businesses, environment, sciences and society; and produce vast amounts of data.

HIIT research mission (draft): Recognised as an internationally leading research institute in its field, HIIT's research aims at high scientific, industrial and societal impact based on deep understanding of the developments and phenomena related to modern information technology and their implications on novel theories, technologies and applications.

The new programmes, their missions, and their current senior researchers are as follows:

Algorithmic Data Analysis (ADA)

Mission: Develop useful algorithmic data analysis methods for other sciences and for industry. This work involves both basic research in computer science and applied work on problems arising from applications.

Director: Academy Professor Heikki Mannila

Other senior researchers (currently): Prof. Esko Ukkonen, Prof. Jaakko Hollmen, Prof. Juho Rousu, Prof. Hannu Toivonen, Doc. Patrik Floréen, Doc. Aristides Gionis, Doc. Kjell Lemström, Dr Juha Kärkkäinen.

Future Internet (FI)

Mission: Enhance Internet infrastructure to enable efficient, secure and trusted always-on connectivity.

Director: Prof. Kimmo Raatikainen

Other senior researchers (currently): Doc. Patrik Floréen, Doc. Andrei Gurtov, Dr Ken Rimey, Dr Sasu Tarkoma.

Network Society (NS)

Mission: Human-centric development of ubiquitous information and communication technology, which is based on deep understanding of needs and practices of our everyday life and our social relations in a network society.

Director: Dr Marko Turpeinen

Other senior researchers (currently): Prof. Martti Mäntylä, Prof. Pekka Himanen, Prof. Jukka Kemppinen, Dr Timo Saari, Dr Giulio Jacucci, Dr Olli Pitkänen, Dr Perttu Virtanen.

Probabilistic Adaptive Systems (PAS)

Mission: Study and further develop the theory of sophisticated probabilistic models and explore their applications for solving problems appearing in complex real-world stochastic systems.

Director: Prof. Petri Myllymäki

Other senior researchers (currently): Doc. Wray Buntine, Doc. Aapo Hyvärinen, HIIT Fellow Dr Jorma Rissanen

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UNIVERSAL PEER TO PEER SEMINAR

Representatives of the Peer to Peer Universal Computing Consortium (PUCC) from Japan visited HIIT on 16.12.2005 at 9.30-15.30. A seminar highlighting relevant ongoing work was held in HIIT premises at the High Tech Center Helsinki, 6th floor. For seminar presentations, please see www-old.hiit.fi/events/seminar16122005.htm.

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VIRTUAL WORLDS AND VIRTUAL CONSUMERISM SEMINAR

HIIT's MC2 project organised a special interest group session on 12.1.2006 on Virtual worlds and virtual consumerism: the buying and selling of game objects and other virtual assets and services for real money. Programme and materials are available in WWW at www-old.hiit.fi/events/vc-120106.html.

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SEMINAR ON NEW EVERYDAY INFORMATION SOCIETY

HIIT held a seminar on 1.3.2006 on New Everyday Information Society (Uusi arjen tietoyhteiskunta) related to a study on the influence of new information and communications technology on society awarded to a HIIT-led consortium by the Ministry of Communications and Transportation. Programme and materials are available through the seminar WWW page.

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COLLABORATIVE VIDEO WORKSHOP

The Collaborative Video Workshop by Erik Blankinship from MIT Medialab was held at HIIT on 31.5.2006. The workshop looked into the tools and concepts for remixing video content.

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HIIT RETREAT 2006

The annual HIIT Retreat event was held in Haukilammen toimintakeskus on 22.-23.5.2006. The prime topic discussed was be the new research programme structure of HIIT, its content and its implications to the operations of HIIT. Event materials are available in www.hiit.fi/events/retreat/retreat2006.html.

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SEMINAR ON FUTURE OF EUROPEAN SOCIAL MODELS

HIIT's Global Network Society project and the Policy Network co-arranged the seminar Future of European Social Models: Is it a tragedy play or a success story? in the Kolumbus auditorium at HTC Helsinki on June 5, 2006. Speakers of the event included Professor Anthony Giddens, Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja, and Professor Pekka Himanen. Some 200 people were in attendance.

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HIIT JOINS THE DIMES CONSORTIUM

HIIT has been accepted as the member of the DIMES ry consortium in its board meeting on 16.1.2006. For the mission and activities of DIMES, please refer to http://www.dimes.fi. HIIT plans to contribute actively to the work of DIMES, especially in the preparation of research initiatives for EU's 7th Framework Programme.

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BRU RECEIVES HIGH MARKS IN RESEARCH EVALUATION

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. It has a strong international colour."

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PROFESSOR JUKKA KEMPPINEN RECEIVES TELIASONERA FINLAND AWARD

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. Previously he served as a judge for a long time, particularly in cases related to intellectual property rights and communications, last as Justice at the Helsinki Court of Appeals. His most recent book "Digitaaliongelma" has recently been published in the publication series of Lappeenranta University.

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS

M.Sc. Petri Martikainen has been nominated as the Research Manager of HIIT from 6.2.2006. His mission to contribute to the planning, preparation and implementation of research initiatives and applications in co-operation with the Research Directors and Research Programme Directors of HIIT. This includes especially research strategy planning and implementation, networking with key stakeholders, and innovation management. Prior to HIIT, he has worked in several management positions in international IT-companies, most lately as CEO of Sofia Digital. During the initial launch stage of HIIT in 1999-2000, he worked HIIT as research coordinator.

HIIT researcher Olli Pitkänen defended his doctoral thesis Legal Challenges to Future Information Businesses in the public dissertation at the Helsinki University of Technology on 3.3.2006. The opponents were Professors Olli Martikainen and Jukka Mähönen and the custos Professor Martti Mäntylä.

HIIT researcher Sasu Tarkoma defended his doctoral thesis Efficient Content-based Routing, Mobility-aware Topologies, and Temporal Subspace Matching in the Faculty of Science at the University of Helsinki on 29.4.2006. The opponent was Professor Luís Rodrigues, Universidade de Lisboa and the custos Professor Kimmo Raatikainen.

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FUTURE EVENTS

17.-18.6.2006: The European Network of Excellence PASCAL, the University of Helsinki, Helsinki University of Technology and HIIT will co-arrange the seminar Probabilistic Modeling and Machine Learning in Structural and Systems Biology in Gustavelund, Tuusula. See http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/group/bioinfo/events/pmsb06/.

6.-8.7.2006: The IIIA - 2006: International Workshop on Intelligent Information Access will take place in the Marina Congress Center, Helsinki. HIIT is one of the co-sponsors of the event. See http://cosco.hiit.fi/search/IIIA2006/.

19.9.2006, 10:00-12:00: HIIT Board meeting, Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Kumpula.

29.10.-2.11.2006: Naming and Addressing for Next-Generation Internetworks, Schloss Dagstuhl. HIIT's Senior Research Scientist, Doc. Andrei Gurtov is co-chairing the event. For more information, see http://www.dagstuhl.de/06441/.

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Newsletter:

HIIT Update

HIIT Update 2/2005

noronen — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 22:00:00 +0000

Headlines in this issue:

- FOREWORD
- NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS
- SEMINAR ON CHALLENGE OF CREATIVE ECONOMY
- WORKSHOP ON CONTEXT AWARENESS FOR PROACTIVE SYSTEMS (CAPS 2005)
- WORKSHOP ON FUTURE MOBILE PHOTOGRAPHY
- TRANSPARENT TECHNOLOGIES FOR SPATIAL AND SOCIAL PRESENCE WORKSHOP
- DONATION TO TKK PUBLISHED
- WORKSHOP ON SOCIAL NETWORKS AND MOBILE APPLICATIONS
- ARU PORTFOLIO SEMINAR HELD
- MEETING OF THE INDUSTRIAL ADVISORY BOARD
- VISITORS FROM ICSI, UC BERKELEY
- VISITOR FROM CATR, BEIJING
- PROFESSOR ANDREW BARRON FROM YALE UNIVERSITY VISITS HIIT
- VISITOR FROM IIT HYDERABAD, INDIA
- HIIT'S DIRECTORS RE-NOMINATED FOR 2006-2008
- PROFESSOR MÄNTYLÄ RECEIVES INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DISTINCTION 2005
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

After board decisions on the HIIT's strategy for 2006-2008 and beyond, the planning of the future of HIIT has moved to execution. As a first step along the roadmap to the future, the existing research lines of the two units of HIIT will be merged from January 1, 2006. Thereafter, the research conducted in HIIT will consist of four research programmes that cover both of its units: Future Internet (Fuego), Network Society, Intelligent Systems, and Computational Data Mining. The intention is that the unit division can in practise vanish from the foreground of HIIT's public image: the research centre is the union of the four programmes. We expect that this measure will not only clarify HIIT's mission, but also facilitate further co-operation between researchers and research groups both within HIIT and outside it.

Another important step towards the future HIIT was reached on November 16, 2005, in the annual performance negotiations between HIIT and its parent universities. In the negotiations, TKK and UH confirmed their commitment to balancing their funding to HIIT by 2009, thereby removing a significant bottleneck from merging the present two units ARU and BRU.

These encouraging development give HIIT a good basis for answering the challenges of the future, and also taking advantage of the various opportunities given by the rapidly developing research policy in Finland and EU. In particular, HIIT is well positioned to take an active stance in the "competence cluster" initiative currently being discussed and planned, aiming to create national research networks in areas deemed to be vital for Finland's future development. Likewise, HIIT will be able to participate actively in the preparatory activities leading to the formation of EU's 7th framework programme, and pave its way to active participation in its activities. Last but not least, HIIT can continue to develop further its already significant international network of partner universities and research centres.

This issue of HIIT Update reports on HIIT's progress in these directions in more detail. We are especially pleased to be able to report on HIIT's considerable success in EU project proposals: three projects submitted in Spring 2005 have cleared successfully the technical evaluations and have entered the contract negotiation stage. Thus they all are likely to launch during early 2006, easily doubling the volume of HIIT's EU sponsored research. More importantly, the projects will greatly expand HIIT's European partner network by bringing us in close contact with many top research universities, research centres, and innovative companies. Also the project Immortalidad, to be executed in co-operation with KCL, the central laboratory of Finnish paper industries, bears notice. It is HIIT's first research activity geared towards "mixed media", the convergence of electronic and printed media that is likely to offer great possibilities for innovative products and services in the future.

With developments such as these, HIIT can look at the future with eager confidence. We are on the right track.

Helsinki 24 November 2005

Martti Mäntylä
Director of Research, Professor

Päivi Saarinen
Planning Officer

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NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS

SERVICES FOR ALL (E!2023 ITEA S4ALL)

The National Technology Agency (TEKES) awarded first-year funding for the ITEA project Services for All (S4ALL), which focuses on enabling a world of user-centric services that are easy to create, share and use. HIIT's particular focus is on prototyping of new, non-traditional services exploiting local wireless networks, and on the use of scripting language technology in handheld devices. S4ALL is a two-year project with a total effort of 8 person-years at HIIT. Other Finnish participants are Nokia and Capricode Oy. For more information, please contact Dr. Kenneth Rimey.

IMMORTALIDAD

The Immortalidad project in the DCC research group studies future social use of self-created media - mainly photographs. Grounding the work on literature and empirical data on domestic photo creation and sharing, the project will design future concepts that blur the boundaries between personally, socially, and professionally created media. Also, the concepts take into account the perceptions and characteristics people assign to digital and paper as format for media. Immortalidad is a 1,5 year project done in co-operation with KCL, Futurice, and UC Berkeley. The project started in August 2005. For further information please contact Risto Sarvas.

MUPE

TEKES has awarded two-year funding for the project Network of Mobile Context-Aware Applications and Games, aiming to create context-aware multi-user applications that can be run on any mobile phone. The applications are developed with the Multi-User Publishing Environment (MUPE), an open source application platform developed in Nokia Research Center. MUPE has been used successfully in many NRC and university projects, and this project continues this work. The platform enables rapid development of mobile multi-user context-aware applications and games, and it allows the new technologies in mobile phones to be easily used. MUPE already has an active developer community, and the project aims to research new and emerging technologies. The project is a joint venture of Nokia, Lappeenranta University of Technology, HIIT, Tampere University of Technology and VTT. For further information please contact Dr. Marko Turpeinen.

CONTEXT CUES

The Academy of Finland has awarded HIIT a 4-year grant for the project Context Cues: Context data derived situation cues to support meaningful interactions. The project will apply a novel social psychological approach to the computer inference and design of situation cues in ubiquitous computing environments. It will study various kinds of situation cues, how can they be used to make meaningful inferences of others, and the conditions for these inferences to provide a basis for socially meaningful, transparent and accountable action. For this, the project will combine theoretically grounded, application-independent social psychological laboratory experiments with exploratory, application-specific experiments on the field. In a parallel line of work, the project will investigate how cues can be reliably inferred from real sensor data. This will be tackled by constructing data mining models of situation data and combining them with and evaluating against laboratory experiments on human inferences of those cues. The project continues the work of the Context project (2002-2005) and will launch on January 1, 2006. For more information, contact Prof. Martti Mäntylä or Ph.Lic. Antti Oulasvirta.

INTERACTION AND PRESENCE IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS (IPCITY)

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 vision is to provide citizens, visitors, as well as professionals involved in city development or the organisation of events with a set of mixed reality technologies that enable them to collaboratively envision, debate emerging developments, experience past and future views or happenings of their local urban environment. The leader of HIIT's team in IPCity is Dr Giulio Jacucci.

FUGA

The project proposal FUGA - Fun of Gaming: Measuring the human experience of media enjoyment, submitted to the EU NEST - PATHFINDER call "Measuring the Impossible", has been invited to contract negotiations with the European Commission and is hence likely be launched in early 2006. The scientific co-ordinator of the project is Dr. Niklas Ravaja from the Center of Knowledge and Innovation Research (CKIR) of the Helsinki School of Economics; HIIT will act as the administrative co-ordinator, in addition to participating in the research. For more information, contact Dr Niklas Ravaja, or Mr. Mikko Kontiainen.

PASION

The project proposal Knowledge Work and Mobility (PASION), submitted to the Call for Proposals of the Presence and Interaction in Mixed-Reality Environments (Presence II) Proactive Initiative in EU's 6th Framework Programme, has also been invited for project negotiations and is therefore likely to launch in early 2006. HIIT's work in PASION will be led by Dr Timo Saari. For more information, contact him at timo.saari(a)hiit.fi.

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SEMINAR ON CHALLENGE OF CREATIVE ECONOMY

The Committee for the Future of the Finnish Parliament and HIIT co-organised a seminar on Challenge of Creative Economy at the University of Helsinki on 1 June 2005. Speakers of the event included the Minister of Treasury Antti Kalliomäki, Professor Manuel Castells, Dr Pekka Himanen, and CEO Matti Alahuhta. The seminar was chaired by the chairman of the Committee for the Future, member of parliament Jyrki Katainen. Some 60 people attended the event. The seminar also acted as the launch event the Global Network Society research project at HIIT.

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WORKSHOP ON CONTEXT AWARENESS FOR PROACTIVE SYSTEMS (CAPS 2005)

On 15-16 June 2005, HIIT together with the Department of Computer Science (UH) and the PROACT research programme organised the Workshop on Context Awareness for Proactive Systems, CAPS 2005.

The programme consisted of 2 invited talks, 13 presentations and 5 posters/demonstrations. We also made an excursion to Suomenlinna and had dinner in the Walhalla restaurant. There were 33 participants from eight different countries. Papers and poster/demo descriptions have been published in the workshop proceedings, which is available at http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/hiit_bru/conferences/caps2005/. Paper copies of the proceedings can be ordered from Dr. Greger Linden. The workshop page also contains copies of some of the presentations and a set of pictures from the workshop.

The Second Workshop on Context Awareness for Proactive Systems will be held in Kassel, Germany, on 12-13 June 2006. See http://www.comtec.eecs.uni-kassel.de/typo3_comtec/caps2006/.

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WORKSHOP ON FUTURE MOBILE PHOTOGRAPHY

The Mobile Content Communities project (MC2) of the DCC research group arranged a workshop on 3 August 2005 under the theme of mobile photography - how camera phones have changed people's photography habits and created new social uses for the device as well as business, and now that this is happening what will the future look like.

The first half of the workshop consisted of speakers from academia and industry. The special guest and keynote speaker was Professor Nancy Van House from the School of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley, USA. The second half of the workshop was group work where three themes around mobile photos were discussed: Users and social use, Business, and Technology. The speaker slides and the group discussions can be found at http://pong.hiit.fi/dcc/futureMobile/.

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TRANSPARENT TECHNOLOGIES FOR SPATIAL AND SOCIAL PRESENCE WORKSHOP

HIIT's Digital Content Communities research group organised a workshop on Transparent technologies for spatial and social presence at HTC on 17 August 2005. The keynote presentation was given by Professor Frank Biocca from Michigan State University.

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DONATION TO TKK PUBLISHED

The Centenary Fund of the Technology Industries of Finland has donated the Helsinki University of Technology 550 000 euros for a five-year research project on global network society. The donation was published in an event held on August 31 2005 where the chairman of the board of the fund Matti Alahuhta presented the donation to the Rector of TKK Matti Pursula.

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WORKSHOP ON SOCIAL NETWORKS AND MOBILE APPLICATIONS

HIIT's Mobile Content Communities project (MC2) organised a workshop on Social Networks and Mobile Applications on 7 September 2005 at HTC. The keynote presentation was given by Dr Nathan Eagle from the MIT Media Lab.

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ARU PORTFOLIO SEMINAR HELD

The annual ARU Research Portfolio Seminar was held on 11 October 2005 in HTC. The objective of the seminar was to communicate to companies and research partners the range of new research initiatives under development at HIIT, mainly intended to be launched during 2006. A total of 24 presentations by HIIT researchers were given to an audience of some 20 people. Presentation materials of the event are available in www-old.hiit.fi/events/seminar11102005.htm.

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MEETING OF THE INDUSTRIAL ADVISORY BOARD

The Industrial Advisory Board meeting 2/2005 was held on 19 October 2005. The main topic of the meeting was to discuss HIIT's strategy and industry's commitment to HIIT's future operations.

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VISITORS FROM ICSI, UC BERKELEY

Three leading researchers Nelson Morgan, Eran Halperin and Vern Paxson from the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at UC Berkeley visited HIIT on 12 October 2005 by invitation of TEKES and HIIT. The visitors gave talks about some of the great things going on at ICSI in order to encourage further co-operation between ICSI and HIIT. This was followed by an in-depth discussion between the visitors and HIIT's senior researchers.

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VISITOR FROM CATR, BEIJING

Mr. Wang Xuefei has joined HIIT as a visiting researcher from June 1, 2005. He comes from the China Academy of Telecommunication Research of MII (CATR), the only telecom research institution of the Chinese government at the national level. Established in 1994, CATR's mission includes basic technology planning and design, developing technology standards for the Chinese national communications network, industrial development planning, regulatory policies, communication measurement as well as testing and certification of communications products are just some examples. At HIIT, Mr. Wang will partially participate in the Wireless Festival project.

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PROFESSOR ANDREW BARRON FROM YALE UNIVERSITY VISITS HIIT

Professor Andrew Barron visited HIIT on August 22-25. The purpose of his visit was to discuss about recent developments in the Minimum Description Length principle (see http://www.mdl-research.org/) with the CoSCo research group. He also gave two invited talks titled"Statistical Foundations and Properties of the Minimum Description Length Principle" and "Consequences of Minimum Description Length for Neural Nets and Gaussian Mixtures".

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VISITOR FROM IIT HYDERABAD, INDIA

Professor Vasudeva Varma visited HIIT on 9 August 2005 and was hosted by Professor Petri Myllymäki from the CoSCO group. The members of the CoSCo group demonstrated the work done in the area of intelligent information access, and Professor Varma was interested in initiating discussions about potential future collaboration between the two institutes. A return visit by some of the senior staff members of HIIT is planned for the first quarter of 2006.

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HIIT'S DIRECTORS RE-NOMINATED FOR 2006-2008

The Board of HIIT nominated on October 18, 2005 Professor Martti Mäntylä and Professor Esko Ukkonen as the directors of the Advanced Research Unit and the Basic Research Unit of HIIT, respectively, for the term 1.1.2006-31.12.2008.

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PROFESSOR MÄNTYLÄ RECEIVES INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DISTINCTION 2005

The Finnish Information Technology Association (http://www.tt-tori.fi/) gave on November 21, 2005 Professor Martti Mäntylä its Information Technology Distinction for 2005 in recognition of his work in information technology and computer science both in Finland and internationally, and especially in bridging university research with R&D in information industry.

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS

Former HIIT researcher Mikko Välimäki defended successfully his doctoral thesis "The Rise of Open Source Licensing. A Challenge to the Use of Intellectual Property in the Software Industry" on June 3, 2005 at the Helsinki University of Technology. The official opponent of the defence was Professor, PhD Thomas Riis from Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Professor Juha Laine acted as the custos. Completed at the Software Business and Engineering Laboratory at TKK, Välimäki's thesis was to a considerable degree based on his work in HIIT's MobileIPR and DE Core projects.

PhD Pekka Himanen has been nominated to the Principal Scientist for a 5-year period starting from August 1, 2005. The Centenary Fund of the Technology Industries of Finland has given a donation to establish the position. The area of the position is to study network society and its philosophy.

Dr Marko Turpeinen has been nominated a Principal Scientist from October 1, 2005. Dr Turpeinen leads HIIT's newly established Network Society research programme and its core group, the Digital Content Communities group. His work focuses especially on social and contextual media.

Dr Andrei Gurtov has been nominated a Senior Research Scientist from November 1, 2005. Dr Gurtov leads the Internet architecture thread of HIIT's Future Internet research programme, and is in particular the project manager of the InfraHIP project.

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FUTURE EVENTS

15.02.2006 at 9:30-11:30: HIIT Board meeting, Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Kumpula.

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Newsletter:

HIIT Update

HIIT Update 1/2005

noronen — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 21:00:00 +0000

Headlines in this issue:

- FOREWORD
- HIIT STRATEGY PROCESS
- HIIT RETREAT: Roadmap Towards 2009
- NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS
- HIIT RECEIVES A DONATION FROM THE TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY OF FINLAND FUND
- ALVIS-REVIEW
- DRAMA-PROJECT SEMINAR
- MEETING OF THE INDUSTRIAL ADVISORY BOARD
- HIIT CO-SPONSORS COMPUTER LAW CONFERENCE
- VISITORS AT HIIT
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

The Finnish science and innovation policy has been hailed as extremely successful, facilitating the rapid turnover of Finland from near-bankruptcy in 1992 to one of world's most competitive economies in the recent years. Its prime features - close co-operation between strategically significant industries and universities, expansion of free university-level education especially in post-graduate level, flexible yet focused national research programmes - have also fueled the development of HIIT.

Still, during the last half a year these policies have been under considerable public scrutiny and criticism. It has been questioned whether they as such are sufficient to maintain competitiveness in a global, innovation-driven economy dominated by a small number of top players with global outreach. Facing turbulent and hypercompetitive markets, companies' ability to fund long-term research seems to have diminished, leaving a bigger share of the responsibility of its funding to public sector. At the other end of the innovation pipeline, universities are charged with expanding responsibility to facilitate the industrial and societal uptake of research results - a duty that has also been formalised in the governing law of universities in Finland.

Several means intended to restore and enhance further the competitiveness and dynamism of the Finnish innovation system have been proposed. In the area of industrially relevant scientific research, a consensus seems has been reached that in key research areas Finland needs multidisciplinary research units that have the intellectual and organisational capability to define, launch and execute research activities in international research networks, aiming at highest scientific quality and industrial impact. Just how these should be set up, organised, and funded is still being discussed.

These important developments form the backdrop of the discussion of HIIT's future mission and strategy that has been ongoing since early 2004. An important milestone in this process was reached in April, 2005, when the Board of HIIT made several decisions on the future of HIIT. In particular, the Board decided that the present two units will be merged after a transition period of three years. As suggested by HIIT's Scientific Advisory Board in their meeting in October 2004, steps to homogenise the research programs, operations, funding, and administrative processes of the present units will commence immediately on the basis of a joint mission of the role of HIIT in the future. The recent HIIT Retreat meeting, also reported in this issue of HIIT Update, was an important step along the roadmap towards this future.

With this, HIIT seems to be in an extremely attractive position to make a contribution to defining and implementing the new science and innovation policies, aiming to secure the continuing role of Finnish research as a driver of progress and competitiveness in the future.

Helsinki 31 May 2005

Martti Mäntylä
Director of Research, Professor

Päivi Saarinen
Planning Officer

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HIIT STRATEGY PROCESS

HIIT was originally founded by agreement of the UH and the HUT for five years (with one-year extensions) from 1 August 1999 to 31 July 2004. As the original period run to end during 2004, the HIIT board launched an extensive strategy process in February 2004, aiming at defining HIIT's overall strategy for a next 5-year period from 1 August 2005. In June 2004, the Board accepted a baseline strategy document focusing in the institutional form and external interface of HIIT. HIIT's mission and the scope of its research were discussed in the meetings of the Industrial Advisory Board in September and the Board in October. HIIT's future was also a major topic of the Scientific Advisory Board meeting in November 2004.

The final decisions were reached in April 2005 when it was decided that the two units of the research center would be joined from January 1, 2009. During the intervening three years 2006-2008, the research programs, practical operations, formal position, and funding structure of the two units will be homogenized. Moreover, the research groups of the present ARU will be moved from the Ruoholahti offices to HUT and UH campuses, aiming at more intensive interaction between HIIT and the parent universities. The directors of the two units were charged with the mission of defining a practical roadmap towards this goal.

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HIIT RETREAT: Roadmap Towards 2009

The annual HIIT Retreat event was held on May 18-20 in Haukilammen toimintakeskus. The prime objective of the retreat was discuss and plan the overall HIIT Roadmap 2009, in light of the recent decisions of the HIIT Board on HIIT's strategy. The discussion focused especially on the research themes to be addressed in 2006-2008 and how the objectives of the strategy could in practice be reached by 2009. The desired outcome was a shared understanding of the roadmap and the next steps of its implementation.

A consensus was reached in the meeting on some of the first steps that can be taken before the end of 2005. The research programmes of the two units will be merged, so that from 2006 onwards there will be no separate programmes for ARU or BRU. A transparent process for selecting and implementing research programmes will be defined. Moreover, HIIT will prepare and launch initiatives as needed to maintain its position in the changing Finnish academic research scene.

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NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS

FUEGO CORE 2005/2007: FUTURE MOBILE MIDDLEWARE

The National Technology Agency TEKES awarded first-year funding for the project Fuego Core 2005/2007: Future Mobile Middleware. The objective of the project is to develop middleware components for reconfigurable systems that enable adaptive, context-aware and personalized applications. The project is led by Professor Kimmo Raatikainen of University of Helsinki and HIIT. For more information please contact him at kimmo.raatikainen(a)hiit.fi or peek into http://www.hiit.fi/fc.

MANAGING PRIVACY AND TRUST IN P2P (MUPPET)

The National Technology Agency TEKES awarded second-year funding for the project Managing Privacy and Trust in P2P (MUPPET). Peer-to-Peer technologies can offer radically new possibilities for communication, be it broadcast, group or person-to-person communication. At the same time, the distributed nature of this technology presents us with many trust and privacy challenges. The Muppet project studies these problems mainly from technical and economic perspectives, with cooperative studies in usability. Muppet is a 3-year research project from 1.1.2004 to 31.12.2006 with a combined effort of 11 man-years. For more information please contact Professor Martti Mäntylä or peek into https://isoveli.hiit.fi/Muppet/index.php.

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HIIT RECEIVES A DONATION FROM THE TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY OF FINLAND FUND

The Board of the Technology Industry of Finland Fund has decided to grant Helsinki University of Technology a donation of 550 000 euros, intended as the basic funding for a new Principal Scientist position in HIIT in the area of Network Society research. The position will be filled for five years from 1.8.2005 to 31.7.2010. The generous grant will strengthen considerably HIIT's capability to define, launch and execute research initiatives in information society research area, and aim at highest international outreach and impact.

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ALVIS-REVIEW

The EU 6th Framework programme IST project ALVIS (Superpeer Semantic Search Engine) held its first review on March 4th, 2005. The review was held in HIIT premises in Helsinki by the Coordinator HIIT. The review board consisted of the project officer Dr Werner Janusch and reviewers Daniele Montanari from Bologna, Italy and Dr Rudi Studer from Institut AIFB at Universitaet Karlsruhe (TH) in Germany.

The review started already at the end of the year 2004 by a virtual preliminary review of the deliverables and documentation of the project. The review meeting itself lasted the whole day, during which the results of the first year and the plans for the future were carefully and critically examined. The whole project management committee were present to clarify any questions that the reviewers might have. The Chinese partner Tsinghua University also sent four delegates to the meeting.

ALVIS received generally good remarks for its work done so far and was allowed to continue the work. Especially the P2P and linguistic processing part of the work received good reviews. The diversity of languages aimed for (Chinese, English and Slovenian) was seen as an important aspect of the project.

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DRAMA PROJECT SEMINAR 31.3.2005: "SCENES OF A RESEARCH"

The Academy of Finland funded research project Drama - Scenario Methods for UCPCD combines researchers from HIIT and the Helsinki Polytechnic Stadia to study how methods of interactive theatre can be combined with user centered product concept design. The project studies especially people over 50 who plan to retire or move to a half-pension. Various occupational groups studied include teachers, church employees, police men, and nurses.

The project held a public seminar on March 31, 2005 in Teatterikulma, Helsinki, presenting the current status of the project through theater performances for an audience of some 70 people. In particular, the Forum theater performance Satumaa was played in the seminar. This performance was developed on the basis of the user research conducted during the first year of the project, and has been presented 11 times in different work communities during 2004. Satumaa visualizes the difficulties related to retiring through the life of Satu, a dedicated office worker torn between plans for early retirement and work life complexities. Also a re-adaptation of the Amazing Race tv-sequel that presented the opportunities and difficulties of the multidisciplinary co-operation was presented.

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MEETING OF THE INDUSTRIAL ADVISORY BOARD HELD

The Industrial Advisory Board meeting was held on January 12, 2005. The main topic of the meeting was to discuss HIIT's research strategy. The deans of the Computer Science Departments of the parent universities, Professor Jukka Paakki (University of Helsinki) and Professor Olli Simula (Helsinki University of Technology) gave brief position presentations on their departments' views on HIIT's mission, which was followed by a lively discussion. Also the directors of the two units presented their suggestions on how the the HIIT-industry co-operation should be organised in the future.

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HIIT CO-SPONSORS COMPUTER LAW CONFERENCE

HIIT has agreed to act as a non-financial co-sponsor of the 2005 Computer Law Association European Conference to be held onÂ October 27-28, 2005 in Stockholm, Sweden. The conference will showcase two days of presentations, featuring over 60 speakers from around the world. The subjects to be covered include the legal aspects of Telecommunications, Information Security Governance, e-commerce (including electronic signatures and the regulation of encryption technology), software licensing agreements, patent and trademark protection of know-how and technology, and "technology-for-everyone" panels on RFID, VOIP and Internet security. Recent developments in Europe and the United States in computer law and telecommunications will be covered by leading experts, regulators and judges. Attendees will include attorneys, EU and American regulators, and general counsel of high-tech and telecom companies, as well as software and hardware suppliers who daily face the legal issues that arise in IT sales and distribution, e-commerce and the protection of intellectual property. The agenda of the event is available at www.clastockholm.com.

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VISITORS AT HIIT

VISITORS FROM THE TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY

On March 1-8, HIIT hosted four visitors from the Tsinghua University: professors Lizhu Zhou, Maosun Sun and Qiang Zhou, and Mr. Qi Guo. The visit was related to the next generation information retrieval work done by the Cosco group in the projects SIB, Alvis and Prose.

On April 30, Mr. Guo Hang from Tsinghua University returned back to China after a successful 6 month visit to HIIT, hosted by the SIB project of Cosco. A return visit by one of the Cosco members is planned for Fall 2005.

CHRISTIANO DI FLORA VISITS HIIT

PhD Cristiano di Flora from Federico II University of Naples Visited HIIT from April 13 till May 11, 2005. His research interests focus on the discovery and delivery of mobile computing services. Cristiano has been collaborating with the group of Professor Kimmo Raatikainen since September 2003.

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS

HIIT researcher Perttu Virtanen defended successfully his doctoral thesis on February 11 at Lappeenranta University of Technology in the field of information law. Professor Mads Bryde Andersen from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark was the opponent and the custos was Professor Jukka Kemppinen from Lappeenranta University of Technology and HIIT. The thesis was titled "Database rights in safe European home. The path to more rigorous protection of information". The work reported in the thesis was executed in the Digital Economy Core project of HIIT.

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FUTURE EVENTS

15 June 2005 at 14:00: HIIT Board meeting, HTC Helsinki

16-17 June 2005: Workshop on Context Awareness for Proactive Systems (CAPS 2005), Helsinki. For ore information, please see http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/hiit_bru/conferences/caps2005/.

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HIIT Update

HIIT Update 3/2004

noronen — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 22:00:00 +0000

Headlines in this issue:

- FOREWORD
- NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS
- MuseumFinland - FINNISH MUSEUMS IN SEMANTIC WEB AWARDED
- HIIT ARU PORTFOLIO SEMINAR HELD
- HIIT ORGANIZES OPENMIND 2004 SEMINAR
- DIMAS: THE BEST e-BUSINESS APPLICATION IN FINLAND
- 2ND MEETING OF THE SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD
- HIIT AND M-CULT AGREE ON CO-OPERATION, M-CULT MOVES TO HTC
- VISITORS AT HIIT
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS
- NEW PLANNING OFFICER AT HIIT
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

The third issue of the HIIT Update is prepared under the shadow of the terrible tragedy in South East Asia caused by the earthquake and the resulting tsunami. The final count of dead and injured may never be known, but already now it is apparent that the extent of the damage is very large. The loss touches almost all nations of the world as some of the areas hit were popular tourist resorts operating in full capacity.

In these conditions, reporting of HIIT's progress and successes feels almost improper. Yet, an underlying motivation of our work - that scientists and engineers typically only express vaguely or not at all - is simply to make the world a little bit better place through information technology and services that address people's true needs and the various problems plaguing our present world.

ICT cannot stop earthquakes from occurring and causing terrible losses. Still, even in the case of this catastrophy, truly accessible and inexpensive information and communication technology might have helped to give early warning to some of the people who now were caught with none. Moreover, technology might have helped to gain access and spread accurate information of the real nature of the damages sooner, and delivering help to those in need. Now, clearly, technology could not fulfill these needs.

As imperfect as our technology is, even now it is giving a little help through inventiveness and caring of its users. We hear of people being able to inform their relatives at home about their condition using text messages when no other means of communication work. We hear of people willingly lending their mobile phones to each other so they can contact their loved ones. So there is a glimmer of hope even in the shadow, even though surely much work remains.

With these thoughts in mind, we wish all HIIT Update readers a happier New Year 2005.

Helsinki 31 December 2004

Martti Mäntylä
Director of Research, Professor

Päivi Saarinen
Planning Officer

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NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS

USED

Urban Spaces and Experience Design is an arts and research interaction project focusing on participatory media and experience design in the urban and wireless context. The project was initiated by m-cult and is co-organized by HIIT Helsinki Institute for Information technology and m-cult. USED is funded by the Finnish Academy and the Arts Council of Finland in 2005-07. The project's artist-researchers are Heidi Tikka, Tapio Mkel, Susanna Koskinen and Andrew Paterson and it is co-directed by Mauri Kaipainen (CKIR) and Minna Tarkka (m-cult). USED collaborates with international networks and projects in location-based, pervasive and mobile arts and research, and hosts an interdisciplinary seminar for researchers who work in the field. USED is the first fruit of the co-operation agreement between HIIT and m-cult reported below. For more information please contact Professor Mauri Kaipainen, or Minna Tarkka.

CIVI (Cognitively inspired visual interfaces for representing multidimensional Information)

When visualizing complex multidimensional information, the solutions proposed are typically built according to purely engineering principles, even though it is known that in case of complex visualizations, immediate extraction of information is often difficult, and that people have, for example, difficulties in perceiving different data dimensions at a single glance or even under longer scrutiny. The principal goal of the CIVI project is to investigate what type of mental representations different type of visualizations of multidimensional information evoke and how these representations are formed, and then examine how these visualizations guide behaviour and how multidimensional representations affect problem solving and decision making.

CIVI is a joint project between HIIT and CKIR. The responsible leader of the project at the HIIT site is professor Petri Myllymäki.

InfraHIP

The National Technology Agency TEKES awarded first-year funding for the project InfraHIP: Infrastructure for HIP. The project aims to study the applications related aspects of the Host Identity Protocol (HIP), including APIs, rendezvous service, operating system security, multiple end-points within a single host, process migration, and issues related to enterprise-level solutions. The project is led by Professor Martti Mntyl with Professor Antti Yl-Jski from the TML laboratory at TKK. Dr. Andrei Gurtov will work as the project manager. The industrial partners of the project are Nokia, Ericsson, Elisa and Finnish Defence Forces. The work will be executed in close co-operation with Prof. Scott Shenker and Prof. Ion Stoica from the University of California at Berkeley. For more information please contact Dr. Andrei Gurtov, or peek into http://infrahip.hiit.fi

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HIIT ARU PORTFOLIO SEMINAR HELD

The HIIT ARU Portfolio Seminar was held on October 12, 2004. Nine project ideas in various stages of preparation were presented to an audience composed of industry representatives and researchers from partner institutions of HIIT. See http://www.hiit.fi/events/seminar12102004.htm for more in formation.

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HIIT ORGANIZES OPENMIND 2004 SEMINAR

HIIT organized with Centre for Open source software and Fenix Technology programme on November 11, 2004 a seminar that concentrated to challenges and solutions in open source software and open content production. OpenMind 2004 seminar was a success. It clearly showed that open production models have made a break through to software and content business. Seminar had over 150 participants who enjoyed keynotes from BBC Creative Archive's leader Paula le Dieu, ifrOSS institute's Dr. Till Jaeger and Novel's Kim Aaltonen.

Herkko Hietanen, HIIT researcher and one of the organizers, is enthusiastic of the response that OpenMind 2004 received "We are happy to see that open source and open content draws this much attention in Finland. HIIT has invested much of its research energy to open productions methods. Obviously this has been a right decision." More about the seminar can be found at http://www.coss.fi/openmind/seminarprogram.htm and http://www.coss.fi/fi/

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MuseumFinland - FINNISH MUSEUMS IN SEMANTIC WEB AWARDED

The semantic portal MuseumFinland created by SeCo got the Semantic Web Challenge Award 2004 on November 11, in Hiroshima Japan at ISWC 2004.

On November 23, Prime Minister of Finland awarded MuseumFinland as the most innovative application in the national Quality on the web -competition (Laatua verkkoon).

For more information on MuseumFinland, please refer to http://museosuomi.cs.helsinki.fi/

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DIMAS: THE BEST e-BUSINESS APPLICATION IN FINLAND

The DiMaS system won the title "The Best e-Business Application in Finland" and the nomination to represent Finland in World Summit Award 2005.

The winners of the WSA National Contest, the Finnish nominees for World Summit Award 2005 in eight categories, were presented by WSA chairman Peter A. Bruck at the MindTrek Awards and WSA Finland Gala in Tampere, November 11th 2004.

The MindTrek event is the most important annual digital media competition in Finland by any standards, giving away over 40.000 euros as prize money. DiMaS as the winner of the WSA National Contest will compete against the best from 168 countries in the finals in summer 2005. The best five from each category will be summoned to present their work at the World Summit 2005 in Tunis in November 2005.

Born in the Digital Economy Core research project at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Digital Content Distribution Management System DiMaS is a novel concept and an implemented technical prototype that offers an information system for amateur and professional multimedia producers to publish their work on existing highly popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks. Importantly, the system enables to insert content descriptions, to manage intellectual property and usage rights, and to charge for the consumption using various pricing models. DiMaS enables versatile licensing, rights description and enforcing, and content encryption scenarios without introducing another multimedia or metadata file format and a respective player to read the format. The pilot implementation of DiMaS is specified for a micromovie producing community that creates short movies for handheld devices, and in this particular case for a standard HP iPAQ Pocket PC with network access and a Java run-time environment.

For more information about DiMaS peek into http://www.hiit.fi/u/reti/publications/Reti_publ.html or contact Tommo Reti.

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2ND MEETING OF THE SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD

HIIT's Scientific Advisory Board met for its second meeting on 15-17 November 2004. The members present were Randy Katz (UCB), Alberto Apostolico (Purdue Univ. and Univ. of Padua), Christos Faloutsos (Carnegie Mellon), Bengt Jonsson (Uppsala Univ.), Martin Kersten (CWI) and John-Shawe-Taylor (Univ. of Southampton). During the three days in Helsinki, the board reviewed all the research lines of HIIT. Research group leaders gave presentations and the board met with students in poster and demonstration session. The SAB also met with the research directors of HIIT and the computer science department heads of the university and TKK.

The SAB presented a written report of its findings. Each research line's research achievements and plans received comments and, in addition, the SAB had a number of general comments. The SAB called for a unified vision of HIIT to support the merging of ARU and BRU into one unit. Also better administrative transparency was called for in allocation of funds and selection of research lines. The report will be used as an element in the ongoing strategy process for HIIT.

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HIIT AND M-CULT AGREE ON CO-OPERATION, M-CULT MOVES TO HTC

The Centre for New Media Culture, m-cult and HIIT, the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology have signed a co-operation agreement on October 27, 2004. The purpose of the co-operation is to join the top research of the new media culture and of the information technology to boost the social and cultural innovations. A small seminar was arranged on October 28, 2004 in HTC, Helsinki.

In middle October, m-cult also moved to share the HTC 5th floor space with HIIT. The physical co-location is likely to bring many opportunities for joint discussions, ideas, and work as intended by the agreement.

For more information on m-cult, please refer to http://www.m-cult.org.

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VISITORS AT HIIT

PROFESSOR SHOSHANA ZUBOFF VISITS HIIT

Professor Shoshana Zuboff from Harvard Business School visited HIIT on October 27, 2004. HIIT researchers organized jointly with SITRA an informal seminar focusing on societal computing research at HIIT.

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS

HIIT researcher Giulio Iacucci defended successfully his doctoral thesis Interaction as Performance: Cases of Configuring Physical Interfaces in Mixed Media in the public dissertation event at the University of Oulu. Professor Kari Kuutti acted as the custos of the event.

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NEW PLANNING OFFICER AT HIIT

M.Sc. Päivi Saarinen joined HIIT as the new planning officer of HIIT ARU from December 1st, 2004. Her predecessor M.Sc. Mervi Rantanen moved to Head of the International Student Services at TKK.

Päivi Saarinen received her Masters degree in Land Surveying from TKK. She has also degree in French from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Before joining HIIT, Pivi Saarinen worked as a planning officer at the Software Business and Engineering Laboratory of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at TKK.

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FUTURE EVENTS

12 January 2005 at 14:00: HIIT Industrial Advisory Board (IAB), HTC Helsinki

16 February 2005, 10:00-12:00: HIIT Board meeting, Exactum (Kumpula)

16-17 June 2005: Workshop on Context Awareness for Proactive Systems (CAPS 2005), Helsinki

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HIIT Update

HIIT Update 2/2004

noronen — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 21:00:00 +0000

Headlines in this issue:

- FOREWORD
- NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS
- MOBILIFE INTEGRATED PROJECT LAUNCHED
- PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC TARJA HALONEN VISITS HIIT
- PROFESSOR ESKO UKKONEN NOMINATED THE DIRECTOR OF HIIT BASIC RESEARCH UNIT
- HIIT RESEARCHERS CO-ORGANISE WORKSHOP ON HCI ISSUES IN PROACTIVE COMPUTING
- WEB INTELLIGENCE SYMPOSIUM 2-3 SEPTEMBER
- HIIT ORGANISES MOBILE MEDIA WORKSHOP WITH PROFESSOR MARC DAVIS (UC BERKELEY)
- FOURTH HELSINKI-BERKELEY SUMMER SCHOOOL HELD
- SUMMER VISITORS AT HIIT
- PROFESSOR ANTHONY JOSEPH VISITS HIIT
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS
- HIIT INDUSTRIAL ADVISORY BOARD TO MEET IN SEPTEMBER
- HIIT SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD TO MEET IN NOVEMBER
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

On 1 August 2004, HIIT had its fifth anniversary. Having thus completed the initial 5-year cycle specified in the original collaboration agreement between the Helsinki University of Technology and the University of Helsinki that founded HIIT, it is now time to begin evaluating its accomplishments and planning for its future.

During its life span so far, HIIT has grown from nearly nothing to an organisation with well over 100 researchers and staff. It has built a strong research portfolio and a growing collaboration network nationally and worldwide. It has close relations with key industrial companies and research funding organisations. Most importantly, the impact of its work has become increasingly visible both scientifically and industrially.

This issue of HIIT Update bears witness to these accomplishments in several ways. We are especially pleased to be able to report on increasing visitor traffic at HIIT and the launching of new international research activities. HIIT is clearly on the right path towards its goals.

Yet HIIT is still far from mature, and there is plenty of room for improvement in all areas of its work - scientific impact, industrial impact, and societal impact. The coming months will be crucial in setting the agenda for the next five years 2005-2010. The planned meetings of the Industrial and Scientific Advisory Boards of HIIT are key steps in this discourse. Stay tuned for the results of these meetings.

Helsinki 27 September 2004

Martti Mäntylä
Director of Research, Professor

Mervi Rantanen
Planning Officer

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NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS

The National Technology Agency Tekes awarded first-year funding for the project E!3187 CELTIC Db - Wireless Woodstock Services in Finland. Professor Martti Mäntylä will lead the project which forms a part of the international Wireless Festival Eureka/CELTIC project led by Ericsson Research, Sweden. TeliaSonera Finland also participates in the project that focuses on user-centric, economic, and technical issues related to providing digital services tailored for large-scale events. For more information, please contact Program Coordinator Olli Pitkänen or peek into http://www.hiit.fi/wf/index.html.

Tekes awarded funding for the project RISE: Rich Semantic Media for Personal and Professional Users. The project is coordinated by VTT Information Technology; HIIT's Digital Content Communities Group participates in the project led by Dr. Marko Turpeinen. Industrial partners of the project are SanomaWSOY, Alma Media and Finnish broadcasting corporation YLE. For more information, contact Senior Research Scientist Marko Turpeinen).

Tekes also decided to fund the project Dynamos: Dynamic Composition and Sharing of Context-aware Mobile Services coordinated by VTT Information Technology. HIIT's Mobile Computing Group participates in the project. The industrial partners include ICT Turku, Suunto and TeliaSonera Finland. Professor Kimmo Raatikainen leads HIIT's part of the work.

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MOBILIFE INTEGRATED PROJECT LAUNCHED

The project MobiLife started on 1 September 2004 and will go on until the end of 2006. Both units of HIIT participate in this large EU IST integrated project, which aims at bringing advances in mobile applications and services within the reach of users in their everyday life. HIIT/ARU participates in the work on user-centricity, as well as trust and security. HIIT/BRU participates in the work on context management.

MobiLife belongs to the Wireless World Initiative (WWI), as one of four ongoing Integrated Projects. The project is coordinated by Nokia. For more information on MobiLife, please refer to http://www.ist-mobilife.org/ or contact Research Coordinator Patrik Floréen).

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PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC TARJA HALONEN VISITS HIIT

President of the Republic Tarja Halonen visited HIIT on June 8, 2004. A seminar covering a selection of HIIT's research topics with special societal relevance was arranged. The topics included research into open mobile application platforms, open search, community-based media and information society research.

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PROFESSOR ESKO UKKONEN NOMINATED THE DIRECTOR OF HIIT BASIC RESEARCH UNIT

Professor Esko Ukkonen has been nominated the Director of HIIT Basic Research Unit (BRU) as of 1 September. The change of director became mandatory due to a recent decision of the University of Helsinki, prohibiting Academy Professors from holding managerial posts that include administrative responsibilities. The former director of the BRU, Professor Heikki Mannila, received the nomination for an Academy Professor recently.

Esko Ukkonen is since 1985 Professor of Computer Science of the University of Helsinki, during 1999-2004 Academy Professor, and since 2002 Director of From Data to Knowledge research unit, a Center-of-Excellence of the Academy of Finland. He has had visiting positions at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Freiburg (Alexander von Humboldt Grant), and the University of Bielefeld. He has published more than 100 original scientific articles. His research interests include algorithms and data structures, combinatorial pattern matching, machine learning, and computational biology. Dr. Ukkonen is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Nordic Journal of Computing. In 1999-2001 he was the chairman of the Finnish Society for Computer Science.

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HIIT RESEARCHERS CO-ORGANISE WORKSHOP ON HCI ISSUES IN PROACTIVE COMPUTING

HIIT researchers Antti Oulasvirta and Antti Salovaara (jointly with Peter Ljungstrand from Interactive Institute, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden) will organise a workshop on HCI Issues in Proactive Computing 24 October, 2004 in connection with the NordiCHI Conference in Tampere, Finland. NordiCHI is a biannial conference functioning as the main Nordic forum for human-computer interaction research. The workshops aims at 1) eliciting critical conditions and requirements for successful proactivity, 2) exploring its design implications, 3) bringing together people in different disciplines to discuss and address the issue, and 4) bringing together researchers and practitioners to better inform both research and practice. See http://www.hiit.fi/uerg/nordichi04-proactive/ for more information.

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WEB INTELLIGENCE SYMPOSIUM 2-3 SEPTEMBER

HIIT was one of the co-organisers of the Web Intelligence Symposium held 2-3 September at the Finnish Artifical Intelligence Conference at Heureka Science Centre, Vantaa, Finland. The symposium was organised by the Finnish AI Society, World Wide Web Consortium W3C, XML Finland Association, Tekes FENIX-program, University of Helsinki, Finnish Science Centre Heureka and HIIT. The themes of the symposium included all aspects of intelligent systems on the web. Please see http://www.step2004.1colony.com/. For more information on the Web Intelligence Symposium, contact Professor Eero Hyvönen).

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HIIT ORGANISES MOBILE MEDIA WORKSHOP WITH PROFESSOR MARC DAVIS (UC BERKELEY)

HIIT's Mobile Content Communities (MC2) project organised a Mobile Media Workshop 23 August at HTC with Professor Marc Davis from University of California, Berkeley. The workshop explored the growing possibilites of mobile technology as a new infrastructure for creating, sharing and finding content describing metadata for mobile multimedia. The themes and questions discussed were future applications for mobile media metadata, design methods for mobile media, acquiring and using metadata as well as discussing what metadata would be useful. Also, the legal, social, and business issues in mobile media and metadata were touched upon. More about the workshop results can be found at http://www.cs.hut.fi/~rsarvas/workshop/

Marc Davis is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) at the UC Berkeley where he directs Garage Cinema Research. His work is focused on creating the technology and applications that will enable daily media consumers to become daily media producers. See http://garage.sims.berkeley.edu/marc.cfm, and on SIMS http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/.

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FOURTH HELSINKI-BERKELEY SUMMER SCHOOOL HELD

The fourth Berkeley-Helsinki Ph.D. Student Workshop on Telecommunication Software Architectures was held at the University of California at Berkeley 21-24 June. The workshop was led by Professor Kimmo Raatikainen of HIIT and Professor Randy Katz of UC Berkeley. See http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kraatika/Courses/berkeley04s.html for more information on the workshop.

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SUMMER VISITORS AT HIIT

Several visitors representing HIIT's foreign research partners participated in its work during Summer 2004.

Jens Grossklags from SIMS, UC Berkeley (Prof. John Chuang's group) visited the Muppet project 27 June - 1 July, largely in preparation of future planned co-operation.

Visiting Researchers Simon Lacoste-Julien (20.5.-20.6.2004) and Guillaume Obozinski (1.8.-5.9.2004) from UC Berkeley (Prof. Michael Jordan's group) worked together with the members of the CoSCo research group on the mathematical modelling techniques required for next generation search engines. The co-operation between the two groups will also continue in the future.

Rudi Cilibrasi from CWI (the Netherlands) visited CoSCo 16.8.-29.8.2004. Rudi is doing his Ph.D. for Peter Grunwald and Paul Vitanyi at CWI on the theory and applications of the normalized compression distance (NCD) method. The visit was also a kick-off of a joint research project funded by the EU through the Pascal Network of Excellence.

In addition, Profesor Christos Faloutsos from Carnegie Mellon University visited University of Helsinki and HIIT in August. His trip to Finland was connected to the distinguished lecture series of HeCSE (Helsinki Graduate School in Computer Science and Engineering, http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/hecse/). Professor Faloutsos is a member of HIIT Scientific Advisory Board. For more information on Professor Faloutsos, see http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~christos/.

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PROFESSOR ANTHONY JOSEPH VISITS HIIT

Professor Anthony Joseph from the Computer Science Department of the UC Berkeley is visiting HIIT until mid-November 2004 as a part of his sabbatical leave from UCB. The scope of the visit is in mobile computing, especially advanced topics in mobile middleware. For more information on Professor Joseph, please refer to http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~adj/ .

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS

As of August 2004, professor Petri Myllymäki is the new Principal Scientist of the Intelligent Systems research area at HIIT.

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HIIT INDUSTRIAL ADVISORY BOARD TO MEET IN SEPTEMBER

After a longish break the Industrial Advisory Board of HIIT will meet 29 September at HTC. The objective of the meeting is to discuss HIIT's future strategy especially with reference to the institute's industrial impact, HIIT's research portfolio, its partner relations, international cooperation, and interface with the industry in general. IAB is an advisory board appointed by the HIIT Board. It consists of representatives from companies that work closely with HIIT.

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HIIT SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD TO MEET IN NOVEMBER

The Scientific Advisory Board of HIIT will meet for second time 15-17 November in Helsinki. The meeting will focus especially on HIIT's research strategy, including its research areas, their desired scientific impact, and research networks. The input of the SAB is especially timely as a contribution to the presently active strategy process aiming at defining HIIT's agenda for the next 5-year period 2005-2010 of its operation.

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FUTURE EVENTS

29 September 2004, 14:00-17:00: HIIT Industrial Advisory Board meeting, HTC Helsinki 12 October 2004, 13:00-17:00: HIIT ARU Research Portfolio 2005 seminar, HTC Helsinki 26 October 2004, 12:00-14:00: HIIT Board meeting, Exactum (Kumpula), Helsinki 15-17 November 2004: HIIT Scientific Advisory Board meeting, Helsinki 14 December 2004, 12:00-14:00: HIIT Board meeting, HTC Helsinki (tbc)

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HIIT Update

HIIT Update 1/2004

noronen — Sun, 29 Feb 2004 22:00:00 +0000

Headlines in this issue:

- FOREWORD
- NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS
- MOBILIFE INTEGRATED PROJECT IN NEGOTIATION WITH CEC
- WIRELESS WOODSTOCK SERVICES PROJECT GETS CELTIC LABEL
- CO-OPERATION WITH TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY, CHINA
- HIIT SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD MET FOR THE FIRST TIME
- PROFESSOR LAWRENCE LESSIG VISITS HIIT: CREATIVE COMMONS AND HIIT PUBLISH FINNISH VERSIONS OF CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSES
- TEKES PUBLISHES THE REPORT OF THE WELFARE OF NATIONS PROJECT
- HIIT RETREAT: MOBILE COMPUTING @ HIIT HELD AT SJÖKULLA, KIRKKONUMMI
- HIIT STRATEGY PROCESS LAUNCHED
- PROFESSOR ANTHONY JOSEPH TO VISIT HIIT IN AUG-NOV 2004
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS: DR. MARKKU STENBORG JOINS HIIT
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

After a longer break than originally intended, this new issue of HIIT Update has a lot of activities and news to report of. After the previous update, HIIT has launched its first EU-funded research activities; HIIT's Scientific Advisory Board had its first meeting; new projects, co-operation activities, and inititiatives have been launched. More importantly, the scientific, industrial, and societal impact of HIIT's research has made continuous progress, thus keeping HIIT steadily on its chosen path towards a leading international research institute. This issue reports of many of these developments, and invites the readers to study further information available on HIIT's WWW pages or directly from HIIT researchers. Enjoy!

Martti Mäntylä
Director of Research, Professor

Mervi Rantanen
Planning Officer

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NEW PROJECTS AND GRANTS

The Academy of Finland awarded four-year funding for the project DRAMA: Scenario Methods for User Centric Product Concept Development from its Industrial Design Programme. Launched on January 1, 2004, the project studies how the methods of narrative theatre can be applied to study interactively scenarios embodying the use of technology in a future setting. The project is executed in co-operation with the dramaturgy unit of the Stadia Polytechnic and it is led by Professor Martti Mäntylä. For more information, contact the Project Manager Vesa Kantola or see project's WWW page in http://www.hiit.fi/drama/.

The Academy of Finland awarded HIIT a grant of 50,000€ from its Infrastructure Program 2004 for the acquisition of a grid-type computational server, mainly needed for research in probabilistic modelling in the Complex System Computation Group led by professor Henry Tirri. The cluster will find immediate use in Next Generation Search project cluster of HIIT, but is likely to be used also in other research activities of HIIT involving intensive computation. The cluster currently consists of a master node, disk space in HIIT's disk array and nine calculation nodes. Hardware specifications are:

Master node
Hewlett-Packard Proliant DL380 G3
- dual 2,8 GHz Intel Xeon prosessors
- 3,5 GB of RAM
- two 36 GB Ultra320 SCSI disks (RAID-0)
- two fibre channel host bus adapter's

Two calculation nodes
Hewlett-Packard Proliant DL380 G3
- dual 2,8 GHz Intel Xeon prosessors
- 3,5 GB of RAM
- two 146 GB Ultra320 SCSI disks (RAID-0)

Seven calculation nodes
Hewlett-Packard Proliant DL360 G3
- dual 3,06 GHz Intel Xeon prosessors
- 4 GB of RAM
- two 72 GB Ultra320 SCSI disks (RAID-0)

All nodes are connected to Hewlett-Packard ProCurve 2848 gigabit switch through two gigabit NICs. The cluster was installed succesfully in March 2004, and it's been in production since then. For more information, contact High Performance Cluster management team (mailto:hpc-info(a)HIIT.FI).

The National Technology Agency Tekes awarded first-year funding for the project Muppet: Managing Privacy and Trust in P2P Communication. Professor Martti Mäntylä leads the project. Its industrial partners are Nokia, Ericsson, Finnish Broadcasting Corporation and Leiki Oy. The project will focus in trust and reputation management especially in mobile P2P systems. After an intensive preparation stage, the project was lauched 1 April 2004. For more information, contact Muppet's Project Manager Juho Heikkilä.

Tekes has also awarded HIIT a grant for preparation of joint research activities with Tsinghua University, Beijing, China and with Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. The aim of this work is to prepare and launch new bilateral research activities between HIIT and these universities to launch in late 2004 or 2005. For more information, contact professor Martti Mäntylä or professor Kimmo Raatikainen.

After a project planning stage, the European Commission signed the contract for the project Alvis: Superpeer Semantic Search Engine in late 2003. Hence, the project was launched 1 January 2004. HIIT is the coordinator of an effort involving ten other partners, including Tsinghua University, Beijing. The project aims to build a next-generation search engine and infrastructure based on full-document retrieval and a distributed architecture. The system will be made available to Internet community in open source. The project is led by professor Henry Tirri and managed by Dr. Wray Buntine. Mikko Kontiainen is the administrative coordinator of the project. For more information, see http://cosco.hiit.fi/search/alvis.html.

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MOBILIFE INTEGRATED PROJECT IN NEGOTIATION WITH CEC

Since August 2002, HIIT has participated in the preparation of the Wireless World Initiative (WWI), ultimately planned to consist of five Integrated Projects (IP) and a coordination action all belonging to the IST priority of EU's 6th Framework Programme. Three of the planned IPs were accepted for funding in the first call of the IST priority. Both units of HIIT participate in the Nokia-coordinated IP application MobiLife – Mobile Life, which concentrates on ubiquitous mobile applications and services from a user-centric point of view. Its application was submitted to the second call of the IST priority in October 2003. The evaluation of the proposal was favourable and MobiLife has commenced the contract negotiations with CEC in February 2004. The project itself is likely to commence 1 September 2004. For more information on WWI, please refer to http://www.wireless-world-initiative.org/.

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WIRELESS WOODSTOCK SERVICES PROJECT GETS CELTIC LABEL

In response to the first call of proposals to the Eureka cluster programme Celtic (http://www.celtic-initiative.org/), the project proposal Wireless Woodstock Services was submitted to the Celtic organisation on November 28, 2003. The international project is coordinated by Ericsson Research, Sweden, and its Finnish participants include TeliaSonera Finland and HIIT. After a technical evaluation, the project has been accepted to the Celtic programme (i.e. given a "Celtic label") in March 2004. Currently under consideration by Tekes, the project is expected to launch immediately. Its aim is to study new service concepts, business models, and technical infrastructures for creating and launching digital services for large events such as music festivals and sports events. The Finnish part of the project plans to conduct its first user studies in the Neste Rally event in August, 2004. For more information, contact research director Martti Mäntylä or program coordinator Olli Pitkänen.

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CO-OPERATION WITH TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY, CHINA

Since late 2002, HIIT has actively prepared co-operation with the Department of Computer Science and Technology of the Tsinghua University in Beijing, China (http://www.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/EnglishVersion/Default.aspx). This preparation has made considerable progress during the recent months, with the launch of the first joint project Alvis (reported above) and several visits of HIIT personnel. Research Director Martti Mäntylä has visited Tsinghua in November 2003 and in March 2004, mainly to suggest and prepare new joint research initiatives. Professor Henry Tirri, Dr. Wray Buntine and project coordinator Mikko Kontiainen visited Tsinghua in mid-May in relation to the Alvis project. In addition, professor Kimmo Raatikainen and Dr. Pekka Nikander visited Tsinghua in February, 2004 in connection of the WWRF meeting. HIIT has also received a preparation grant from Tekes. As a result of these activities, HIIT expects a second bilateral project to launch in late 2004. We are also expecting a Chinese visitor at HIIT during autumn 2004.

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HIIT SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD MET FOR THE FIRST TIME

The first meeting of the HIIT Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) was held 16-17 October, 2003 in Helsinki. The SAB consists of internationally prominent scholars who are invited by the HIIT Board. The objective of the SAB is to provide critical guidance about HIIT’s research activities and to advise the HIIT Board on strategic planning of the future research directions of HIIT. Of the members of the board Professor Christos Faloutsos, Professor Randy Katz, Professor Martin Kersten, Professor Kari-Jouko Räihä, Professor Mart Saarma and Professor John Shawe-Taylor participated in the October meeting.

In its concluding comments the SAB focused on the scientific level of HIIT's research, as well as on the quality of graduate and postdoctoral education. Neither industrial nor societal impact was commented as it was considered hard for SAB to determine. The overall evaluation was that HIIT's research is generally of world class with impressive collaborations. The graduate and postdoctoral education was considered impressive, having excellent facilities and great projects to work on, and excellent students. The main recommendations of SAB were that collaboration between the research groups in HIIT should be further strengthened, that the strategic goals of HIIT should be clarified and that more emphasis should be put on PR-activity and publicity. Of the different research areas, the SAB especially appreciated the research done in data mining, mobile computing, intelligent systems and computational neuroscience.

For more information on the meeting, please refer to http://www.hiit.fi/sab/2003.

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PROFESSOR LAWRENCE LESSIG VISITS HIIT: CREATIVE COMMONS AND HIIT PUBLISH FINNISH VERSIONS OF CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSES

Creative Commons (see http://creativecommons.org/) and HIIT's DE Core project have published on 24 May the official Finnish translations of Creative Commons licenses, a set of freely available content licenses aiming at expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share. The initiator of Creative Commons, Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig (http://www.lessig.org/) gave a presentation in the publication ceremony. See http://creativecommons.fi/.

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TEKES PUBLISHES THE REPORT OF THE WELFARE OF NATIONS PROJECT

The final report of the Welfare of Nations Project, edited by PhD Pekka Himanen and titled "Globaali tietoyhteiskunta: Kehityssuuntia Piilaaksosta Singaporeen" has been published by Tekes in its series. The report is also available in WWW in http://www.tekes.fi/julkaisut/globaali_tietoyhteiskunta.pdf.

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HIIT RETREAT: MOBILE COMPUTING @ HIIT HELD AT SJÖKULLA, KIRKKONUMMI

The annual HIIT Retreat event took place at Sjökulla Education Center, Kirkkonummi, 1 - 2 June under the theme "HIIT Retreat: Mobile Computing at HIIT". The event brought together representatives from industry, universities and HIIT senior researchers to review the present research at HIIT and to discuss its future directions. The objective of the 2004 Retreat was especially to look into the future of the Fuego research programme and some related research lines.

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HIIT STRATEGY PROCESS LAUNCHED

By agreement of the University of Helsinki and the Helsinki University of Technology, HIIT was originally founded for a period of five years from 1.8.1999 to 31.7.2004, with possible one-year extensions. As the initial five-year period is now drawing to its close, the Board of HIIT has launched a strategy process, aiming at a revised research agenda of HIIT with related institutional changes. The objective is to draft a new agreement to enter into force as of 1.8.2005. At this stage, a first draft of the new strategy has been presented to the Board by the appointed working group in May 2004. The objective is to further revise the draft to be presented to the Scientific and Industrial Advisory Boards in autumn 2004, and subsequently to have the new agreement 2005 - 2010 formally accepted by the two parent universities in spring 2005. For more information, please contact either of the research directors Martti Mäntylä or Heikki Mannila).

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PROFESSOR ANTHONY JOSEPH TO VISIT HIIT IN AUG-NOV 2004

With help of a grant from Nokia Foundation, Professor Anthony Joseph from the Computer Science Department of the University of California at Berkeley will visit HIIT from mid-August to mid-November 2004 as a part of his sabbatical leave from UCB. The scope of the planned visit will be in mobile computing, especially advanced topics in mobile middleware. In preparation of the visit, Professor Joseph visited Finland in May 2004, and met several researchers from HIIT and the CS departments of UH and HUT. For more information, please contact Professor Joseph's host at HIIT, professor Kimmo Raatikainen.

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS: DR. MARKKU STENBORG JOINS HIIT

Dr Markku Stenborg from ETLA (The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy) has joined HIIT as a part-time Senior Research Scientist from April 1, 2004. He will be sharing his time between ETLA and HIIT. At HIIT, he will participate in the recently launched MUPPET project.

Markku Stenborg has a PhD in Economics from the Pennsylvania State University. His 1993 doctoral thesis dealt with incentive contracts and game theory. His research focus at HIIT is on incentives and economics aspects of trust and privacy in mobile peer-to-peer communication. At ETLA, his research topics include competition policy and open source software. Previously, he has been Assistant Professor with the Turku Business School, Senior Adviser at the Finnish Competition Authority and Senior Manager at KPMG Transaction Services. He also works as a part-time consultant providing advice on, e.g., competition policy issues.

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FUTURE EVENTS

21.-24.6.2004: The 4th Helsinki-Berkeley Summer School on Telecommunication Software Architecture will be held at University of California at Berkeley, USA. For more information, see http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kraatika/Courses/berkeley04s.html.

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Newsletter:

HIIT Update

HIIT Update 2/2003

noronen — Fri, 31 Oct 2003 22:00:00 +0000

Headlines in this issue:

- FOREWORD
- HIIT LAUNCHES THREE PROJECTS IN THE FENIX PROGRAMME OF TEKES
- SEARCH-INA-BOX (SIB)
- MOBILE CONTENT COMMUNITIES (MC2)
- INTELLIGENT WEB SERVICES
- WIRNE PROJECT LAUNCHED WITH EKAHAU
- ALVIS CEC PROPOSAL CLEARS TECHNICAL EVALUATION, ENTERS CONTRACT NEGOTIATION
- HIIT ORGANIZES INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON MOBILE IPR
- THIRD HELSINKI-BERKELEY SUMMER SCHOOL HELD
- JUKKA KEMPPINEN BECOMES PROFESSOR AT LUT
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS: DR. JAN LINDSTRÖM AND DR. TIMO SAARI JOIN HIIT
- MERVI RANTANEN NOMINATED AS PLANNING OFFICER AT HIIT
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

This issue of HIIT Update can report in commencing several important new projects. A major feature of the new projects is networking: they will mainly be executed by consortia where HIIT joins forces with research groups from other universities in Finland and internationally.

I am especially pleased to be able to report that HIIT can start project co-operation with the Department of Computer Science and Technology of the high reputed Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. It is equally satisfying that two of the projects include co-operation with out long-term partner, the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) at the University of California at Berkeley.

HIIT also participated actively in the highly competitive first call of applications of the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Union. The ALVIS proposal, coordinated by HIIT, has now cleared the technical evaluation with high marks and has presently entered project negotiations. The project is expected to launch in January 2004, thus becoming the first major CEC research project of HIIT. Further proposals are presently being prepared for the second call due in October 2003.

These and other important developments keep HIIT on the path of becoming an internationally recognized research centre. They also mean that we will be facing new types of challenges, such as learning how to orchestrate and coordinate research networks so that the objectives of the new research activities can be met while combining the talents and competences of each partner in a most fruitful way.

Martti Mäntylä
Director of HIIT, Advanced Research Unit

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HIIT LAUNCHES THREE PROJECTS IN THE FENIX PROGRAMME OF TEKES

The new TEKES programme FENIX was launched during the Spring 2003, with the first call of research projects closing on 31.3.2003. HIIT submitted several proposals to the call. Three of them were eventually successful, and have been launched during the Summer 2003.

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SEARCH-INA-BOX (SIB)

The project Search-ina-Box (SIB) is intended to form a central part of the next-generation Internet search research area at HIIT, already commenced with the support of the Academy of Finland in the PROSE project. SIB will study especially topic-specific search engines for intranets. Besides researchers from the Complex System Computation group at HIIT, the research consortium also includes research groups from the University of Tampere, the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. The project was launched on March 1st, 2003.

For more information, please contact Professor Henry Tirri, University of Helsinki and HIIT, or Program Coordinator Mikko Kontiainen, or see the project WWW page at http://cosco.hiit.fi/sib/.

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MOBILE CONTENT COMMUNITIES (MC2)

The Mobile Content Communities project investigates communities that create and distribute digital content amongst themselves, with special emphasis on mobile game communities. The multi-disciplinary research consortium also includes researchers from the Software Business and Engineering Institute (SoberIT) at HUT, the Center for Knowledge and Innovation Research (CKIR) at the Helsinki School of Economics, the University of Tampere, the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) at the University of California at Berkeley, and the MIT Media Labs both from Boston and Dublin. The project was launched on June 1st, 2003.

For more information, please contact Senior Research Scientist Marko Turpeinen, HIIT, or Program Coordinator Anton Puolakka, or see the project's WWW pages at http://pong.hiit.fi.

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INTELLIGENT WEB SERVICES

The project Intelligent Web Services investigates how Semantic Web techniques can be used to add content and intelligent features to Web Services based on open standards such as UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP. The project is planned to be one of the activities in a group of independent but closely aligned projects studying different aspects of next-generation digital service creation and deployment. The project was launched on August 1st, 2003.

For more information, please contact Professor Eero Hyvönen, University of Helsinki and HIIT, or Program Coordinator Anton Puolakka, or see the project's WWW pages at http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/group/seco/webservices/.

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WIRNE PROJECT LAUNCHED WITH EKAHAU

The project WIRNE: Personalized Location-Dependent Services in Wireless Networks, was launched on March 1st, 2003, with funding from Ekahau Oy. The project's research will focus on developing intelligent technologies that can be used in future location-aware applications.

For more information, please contact Professor Petri Myllymäki.

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ALVIS CEC PROPOSAL CLEARS TECHNICAL EVALUATION, ENTERS CONTRACT NEGOTIATION

HIIT coordinated and submitted the proposal ALVIS: European Search Engine for the first call of applications of the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Union on April 24, 2003. The proposal cleared the technical evaluation conducted during May and June, 2003, with high marks, and entered project negotiation stage in July, 2003. The official "go/no-go" decision will be given on 15th October. If the decision is positive, the project is likely to be launched in January, 2004. In addition to leading European research groups, the project's consortium also includes the data base research group from the Department of Computer Science and Technology of the Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

The project belongs to the Next Generation Search cluster of HIIT, together with the existing PROSE and SIB projects. ALVIS complements their research by focusing on the development of a distributed, Europe-wide search service making use of grid computing facilities.

Please contact Senior Research Scientist Wray Buntine, or Program Coordinator Mikko Kontiainen, for more information, or see the Next Generation Search page at http://cosco.hiit.fi/search/.

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HIIT ORGANIZES INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON MOBILE IPR

With support of TEKES through the Mobile IPR project, HIIT organized The First International Mobile IPR Workshop: Rights Management of Information Products on the Mobile Internet in Helsinki on August 27-28, 2003. Keynote speakers of the event included Professor Hal Varian (UC Berkeley, USA) and Professor Ross Anderson (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom). Proceedings of the event are available in the report series of HIIT.

For more information, please contact Program Coordinator Olli Pitkänen or see the home page of the workshop at http://www.hiit.fi/de/mobileipr/workshop/.

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THIRD HELSINKI-BERKELEY SUMMER SCHOOL HELD

The 3rd Helsinki-Berkeley Summer School on Telecommunications Software Architectures organized by HIIT and the University of California at Berkeley was held in Berkeley, California on August 18-20. Main organisers of the Summer School were Professor Kimmo Raatikainen and Professor Randy Katz. See http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kraatika/Courses/BerkeleyAugust2003/program.html for more information.

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JUKKA KEMPPINEN BECOMES PROFESSOR AT LUT

Dr. Jukka Kemppinen, Principal Scientist and head of the Digital Economy research area at HIIT, has been nominated as Professor at the Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) from 1.9.2003 until 31.8.2005. He will also continue his work at HIIT on a part-time basis, sharing his time between LUT and HIIT. This will obviously provide a sound basis for extended co-operation between HIIT and LUT in the future.

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS: DR. JAN LINDSTRÖM AND DR. TIMO SAARI JOIN HIIT

Dr. Jan Lindström from the University of Helsinki has joined HIIT as Research Scientist (post-doc) from August 1, 2003. Dr. Lindström's research interests focus on transaction processing and concurrency control, physical data structures in databases, database design, and programming languages. His 1993 doctoral thesis from the University of Helsinki dealt with Optimistic Concurrency Control Methods for Real-Time Database Systems.

Dr. Lindström's research will be closely aligned with the objectives of the Fuego research area at HIIT, with emphasis on issues related to mobile data.

Dr. Timo Saari from the Center of Knowledge and Innovation Research (CKIR) at the Helsinki School of Economics has joined HIIT as Senior Research Scientist from August 1, 2003. He is also associate director of M.I.N.D. Lab, Michigan State University and heads the local M.I.N.D. Lab Finland based in CKIR.

Dr. Saari´s area of expertise is experiments and theoretical work on emotion, cognition, meaning, and involvement with information, user interfaces and technology. Dr. Saari has been a visiting scholar in Stanford University, in the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) in 1998-1999 and 2000-2001 with Social Responses to Communication Technology (SRCT) group headed by professor Clifford Nass. Dr. Saari has worked as Director of Research in the holding company of Alma Media Corporation in 1995-2002. He is also an accomplished journalist in television and newspapers, and has edited several commercial new media titles. Saari has a degree of Doctor of Social Sciences in Media Studies from the University of Tampere, Finland. His thesis dealt with mind-based media and communications technologies.

Dr. Saari will participate in the recently launched Mobile Media Communities (MC2) as coordinator and researcher of the user research part of the project.

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MERVI RANTANEN NOMINATED AS PLANNING OFFICER AT HIIT

M.Sc. Mervi Rantanen has been nominated as the Planning Officer at the HIIT Advanced Research Unit from October 1, 2003. She received her Master's degree in Political Science from the Åbo Akademi University and also has a Master of International Law degree from the University of Lund.

Ms. Rantanen will take a central role in the administrative processes of HIIT, including preparation of HIIT Board meetings and internal management team meetings, facilitation of the various planning processes, and coordination of external and internal reporting and publicity. Before joining HIIT, Ms. Rantanen worked as a coordinator for international relief with the Finnish Red Cross.

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FUTURE EVENTS

2.10.2003 at 9.00-12.30: ARU Research Portfolio seminar at High Tech Center. The seminar will present project ideas to be developed further for submission to various funding organisations during 2003. Attendance by invitation only. Inquiries: Research Director Martti Mäntylä, mailto:Martti.Mantylahiit.fi

~~3.10.2003 at 15.00-16.30: ARU Friday Seminar at High Tech Center. Program TBA.~~ Event cancelled!

16.-17.10.2003: The first HIIT Scientific Advisory Board meeting will be held in BRU premises at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, and ARU premises in High Tech Center, Ruoholahti.

23.10.2003: The SIMS-BCIS-HIIT Seminar on Information Society Research will be held in Berkeley, California. The seminar is co-sponsored by the School of Information Management and Systems, the Berkeley Center for the Information Society, and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. Speakers include Prof. Hal Varian, Prof. Annalee Saxenian, and Prof. Marc Davis from UCB; Dr. Pekka Himanen from BCIS and HIIT; and Prof. Henry Tirri and Dr. Marko Turpeinen from HIIT.

31.10.2003 at 15.00-16.30: ARU Friday Seminar at High Tech Center. Program TBA.

7.11.2003 at 15.00-16.30: ARU Friday Seminar at High Tech Center. Pekka Himanen will present latest news from the Berkeley Center for the Information Society (http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/BCIS/)

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Newsletter:

HIIT Update

HIIT Update 1/2003

noronen — Wed, 30 Apr 2003 21:00:00 +0000

Headlines in this issue:

- FOREWORD
- HIIT LAUNCHES THREE PROJECTS IN THE PROACTIVE COMPUTING PROGRAM OF THE ACADEMY OF FINLAND
- NEXT GENERATION INTERNET SEARCH ENGINE PROJECT STARTED
- PERSONAL DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION STORAGE PROJECT STARTED
- THE BERKELEY CENTER FOR THE INFORMATION SOCIETY COMMENCES OPERATION
- HIIT TO START CO-OPERATION WITH TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY, BEIJING, CHINA
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS: DR. MARKO TURPEINEN JOINS HIIT
- DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS BY HIIT PERSONNEL: JAN BLOM AND ANU KANKAINEN
- PROF. MANUEL CASTELLS RECEIVES A HONORARY DOCTORATE FROM HUT
- HIIT RETREAT TO BE HELD ON MAY 26-28
- NEW TELEPHONE NUMBERS
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

More than half a year has passed since the publication of the previous issue of HIIT Update, and a lot has happened since.

This issue is rich with news on new projects starting, new co-operation arrangements bearing fruit or being planned, and new people joining our work or progressing with their scientific career with us. Many - if not all - of the leads reported in the previous issue have been successful, and the work along their lines has now started.

The year 2003 will provide many further opportunities for challenging and interesting work, and HIIT is well positioned to make use of them - even in the cruel economic climate of today. This makes me confident that we can inform you of good news also in the next issue of HIIT Update - which I hope will reach you a bit sooner than the present one.

Martti Mäntylä

Director of HIIT, Advanced Research Unit

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HIIT LAUNCHES THREE PROJECTS IN THE PROACTIVE COMPUTING PROGRAM OF THE ACADEMY OF FINLAND

The Academy of Finland awarded on October 14, 2002 funding for three projects with HIIT research groups in the Proactive Computing program. The funding was awarded for three years commencing on January 1, 2003.

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The project "Context Recognition by User Situation Data Analysis" (CONTEXT) studies characterization and analysis of information about the user's context and its use in proactive adaptivity. The project adopts a multidisciplinary approach and focuses on the utilization of user context: What is the user's understanding of her current context? How are automatic inferences made about the context? How is context characterized to users and how is user interaction about context designed? These questions are considered in the framework of an example application: instant mobile messaging, a representative ubiquitous application whose usability greatly depends on how context-sensitively messages are handled and filtered.

For more information, please contact Professor Hannu Toivonen, University of Helsinki, Hannu.Toivonen(a)cs.helsinki.fi, Professor Martti Mäntylä, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), Martti.Mantyla(a)hiit.fi, or peek into the WWW pages of the project at http://www.hiit.fi/context/.

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The project "Proactive Information Retrieval by Adaptive Models of Users' Attention and Interests" (PRIMA)is a joint effort by Academy Research Fellow Petri Myllymäki of HIIT/ARU jointly with Professor Samuel Kaski of HUT and Dr. Ilpo Kojo of Helsinki School of Economics. The goal of the project is to build probabilistic and neural computing based models that learn from the actions of people to model their intentions and expectations, and use the models for disambiguating the user's vague commands and anticipate their expectations. The actions and interests are monitored by measuring eye fixations and movements that exhibit both voluntary and involuntary signs of both the cognitive state of the user and his intentions. The models will be implemented and incorporated into a software tool offering a platform for applications in a prototype area, proactive information retrieval.

For more information, please contact Academy Research Fellow, Dr. Petri Myllymäki, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Petri.Myllymaki(a)hiit.fi.

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The consortium of the project "Networking and Architecture for Proactive Systems" (NAPS) includes docent, research coordinator Patrik Floréen, Professor Pekka Orponen from the Laboratory for Theoretical Computer Science at HUT, and Professor Jorma Virtamo of the Networking Laboratory of HUT. NAPS studies dynamically organized wireless ad hoc networks. Problems related to the infrastructure of proactive systems will be addressed from the point of view of modern algorithmics. Some of the topics are network clustering, network management as a multiobjective optimization problem and variational routing constraints. Other problems studied in the project are the new challenges of energy constrained routing, the decreasing goodput per node as the number of nodes increases, and the robustness requirements that may require redundant connectivity from the network.

For more information, please contact Research Coodinator, Doc. Patrik Floréen, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), Patrik.Floreen(a)hiit.fi, or refer to the project's WWW page at http://www.hiit.fi/naps.

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NEXT GENERATION INTERNET SEARCH ENGINE PROJECT STARTED

The Academy of Finland awarded in November, 2002 4-year funding for the project "Scalable Probabilistic Methods for Next Generation Internet Search Engines" (PROSE) by professor Henry Tirri of the University of Helsinki and HIIT.

The project forms the core technical and methodological activity of a larger research effort aimed at creating a next-generation distributed Internet search engine that provides greatly enhanced service in comparison with the present state-of-the-art. Further projects presently being planned include a national project "Search-ina-Box" focusing on topic-specific search engines for intranets, and a CEC project "European Search Engine" aiming at a distributed, Europe-wide search service making use of grid computing facilities.

Please see the Next Generation Search page at http://cosco.hiit.fi/search/ for more information, or contact Prof. Henry Tirri, Henry.Tirri(a)hiit.fi.

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PERSONAL DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION STORAGE PROJECT STARTED

On Feb. 6, 2003, TEKES has awarded first-year funding for the project "Personal Distributed Information Storage". The project studies a synchronization-based peer-to-peer infrastructure for storage of lightweight structured data such as calendar entries and other PIM data. It forms a part of the Fuego research theme at HIIT.

The open source research prototype to be constructed in PDIS will provide a testbed for studying algorithms for synchronization of multiple data replicas. Several of these replicas might be strongly connected to the network, while others might be weakly connected (e.g., occasionally connected via a high-latency wireless link). We require that the user experience when connected to the network be that of on-line access. We also require that the user be able to continue to access and modify personal information when disconnected. Synchronization upon reconnection will be transparent and nondisruptive.

Dr. Ken Rimey leads the project; the partners are Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, Innofactor and Creanor. For more information, please contact Dr. Ken Rimey, Ken.Rimey(a)hiit.fi or peek into http://www.rimey.com/hiit/pdis/.

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THE BERKELEY CENTER FOR THE INFORMATION SOCIETY COMMENCES OPERATION

The Berkeley Center for the Information Society (BCIS) is a research center focused on the social impact of the information technology revolution. It is organised as a independent unit at the International Computer Science Institute http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/ closely affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley.

The center is directed by Dr. Pekka Himanen of HIIT, and its Research Board is chaired by Prof. Manuel Castells of UCB. Key research areas include: (1) challenges of the global information society and different models of responding to it; (2) the use of IT in social movements; and (3) enhancing equal social opportunities with IT. Among the current projects in the above areas are (1) HIIT's project "The Welfare of Nations" by Dr. Himanen, Prof. Castells and their group comparing the Silicon Valley, Finnish, and Singapore information society models; (2) research on the application of the open-source model to social movements by Prof. Jerry Feldman, Prof. Jeff Juris and others; and (3) the digital opportunities program called "Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in information Technology" (BFOIT), led by Orpheus Crutchfield.

The center was opened formally on Sept. 29, 2002. The opening ceremony was held at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, hosted by Prof. Nelson Morgan, Director of ICSI and Dr. Pekka Himanen, Director of the Center. To honour the occasion, Jukka Valtasaari, the Finnish Ambassador to the US, decorated Prof. Manuel Castells.

While BCIS is an independent organisation, its research interests align closely with the Digital Economy theme of HIIT. This and the happy arrangement that Dr. Himanen also continues as a Senior Research Scientist at HIIT will provide ample opportunities for co-operation beyond the existing project.

For more information on BCIS, please refer to http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/BCIS/, or contact Dr. Pekka Himanen, phimanen(a)icsi.berkeley.edu.

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HIIT TO START CO-OPERATION WITH TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY, BEIJING, CHINA

Launching some form of close co-operation with a major research university in the Far East has been a part of HIIT's long-term plans ever since its beginning. Now that HIIT has grown and matured, the time to realize these plans is drawing closer. Especially China has become a prominent developer of new technologies, not to mention its booming economy and growing importance as a market.

In October, 2002, HIIT submitted a brief co-operation proposal to the Department of Computer Science and Technology of the Tsingua University, Beijing, China. After brief negotiation with Professor Zhou Lizhu, Department Head, the plan was submitted to the Tenth Joint Session under the Scientific and Technological Cooperation Agreement between the People's Republic of China and the Republic of Finland held in Beijing on November 5, 2002 between representatives of the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology and the Finnish Ministry of Trade and Commerce. The HIIT-Tsinghua proposal was not only accepted in the co-operation programme, but also placed on so-called "priority list".

The core of the proposal is to establish co-operation on a similar basis as between HIIT and University of California at Berkeley. The work will be performed in joint or closely aligned projects, and will focus in bilateral researcher exchange mainly on postgraduate and post-doc levels. The first topics are likely to include open source software development, user-centric service design, and topics in digital economy.

To plan the co-operation further, and to facilitate its launch late 2003 or early 2004, HIIT Director, Prof. Martti Mäntylä and Digital Economy Research Group leader, Dr. Jukka Kemppinen will visit Beijing on March 15-25, 2003. In addition to Tsinghua University, they will also visit other sites of interest.

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS: DR. MARKO TURPEINEN JOINS HIIT

Dr. Marko Turpeinen, Vice President of Research and Technology at Alma Media Interactive, has joined HIIT as a part-time Senior Research Scientist from December 1, 2002. He will be sharing his time between Alma Media and HIIT on a 50-50 basis.

Dr. Turpeinen has a Ph. D. degree in Computer Science from Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) and a S. M. Degree in Media Arts and Sciences from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At HUT, he was the project manager in OtaOnline (1994-95), which was a pioneer in Finland in Web-based electronic publishing. The topic of his doctoral dissertation at HUT (2000) was media content customization. At MIT Media Lab (1996-2000) he worked in the Electronic Publishing Group on community publishing and collaborative storytelling through digital media, especially concentrating in the needs of the senior citizens. His work at Alma Media (1996-) has dealt extensively with issues related to multi-channel publishing, media customization, dynamic customer profiling, privacy, and intellectual property rights. His current research interest is in computer-mediated communities. Dr. Turpeinen can be contacted at marko.turpeinen(a)hiit.fi.

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DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS BY HIIT PERSONNEL: JAN BLOM AND ANU KANKAINEN

Jan Blom, HIIT researcher in the Between project, defended succesfully on November 29, 2002 his doctoral thesis "Psychological Implications of Personalised User Interfaces" at the Department of Psychology, University of York, under the supervision of Prof. Andrew Monk. Dr. Blom plans to continue to work at HIIT as a Research Scientist in a new project corrently under preparation.

Anu Kankainen, HIIT researcher in the Between project, defended successfully her doctoral thesis "Thinking Model and Tools for Understanding User Experience Related to Information Appliance Product Concepts" in a public defence at the Helsinki University of Technology on Dec 9, 2003. The opponent was prof. Kari-Jouko Räihä from the University of Tampere and the custos Dr. Martti Mäntylä of HIIT. The full thesis is available in http://lib.hut.fi/Diss/2002/isbn9512263076/. Dr. Kankainen's doctorate is the first earned from work largely conducted at HIIT. She continues to work at HIIT as a Research Scientist in the CONTEXT project.

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PROF. MANUEL CASTELLS RECEIVES A HONORARY DOCTORATE FROM HUT

Professor Manuel Castells from the University of California at Berkeley will receive a Doctor of Science (Engineering) degree honoris causa from the Helsinki University of Technology in the formal promotion event to be held on May 16 at HUT. HIIT is closely affiliated with Prof. Castells' work through the Welfare of Nations project, where Prof. Castells serves as the chairman of the Scientific Board, and through the Berkeley Center for the Information Society (BCIS) where he has a similar position.

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HIIT RETREAT TO BE HELD ON MAY 26-28

Building on the experience of the successful Fuego Retreat event held in Spring 2002, HIIT plans to organise the HIIT Retreat event on May 26.-28., 2003 in the Sjökulla Education Centre (http://www.hut.fi/Yksikot/Tila/sjokulla.html).

The objective of the retreat is to offer an opportunity for representatives from industry to interact with HIIT senior researchers and to get a comprehensive view of HIIT's research and its future plans. Thereby, the retreat provides a significant contribution to the strategy process of HIIT.

Tentatively, the event will commence in the late afternoon of May 26 with a plenary session and evening program, continue the full day of May 27, and end by lunchtime May 28. The program will include both prepared presentations and group work.

Attendance will be through invitation only. For more information and queries, please contact HIIT Director, Prof. Martti Mäntylä, Martti.Mantyla(a)hiit.fi.

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NEW TELEPHONE NUMBERS

The cityphone service will be discontinued on March 1, 2003. Therefore, the cityphone numbers of HIIT personnel (09 850x xxxx) have been replaced with regular GSM service.

Please refer to http://www.hiit.fi/people for the new numbers of HIIT personnel. We are sorry for the possible inconvenience.

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FUTURE EVENTS

25.3.2003 at 13.00-16.30: XML browsing technology seminar at HIIT (Ruoholahti, 6th floor). Professor Vuorimaa and his group represent results of the XML Devices project.

28.3.2003 at 14.00-15.30: Friday coffee seminar at HIIT (Ruoholahti, 6th floor). Complex System Computation group provides the program.

8.-9.4.2003: The Digital Economy Research Group organises an invitation-based workshop on Digital Divide and Digital Commons in Sjökulla, Kirkkonummi. For more information, please contact workshop coordinator Mika Rantakokko, Mika.Rantakokko(a)hiit.fi or Digital Economy Research Group leader, Dr. Jukka Kemppinen, Jukka.Kemppinen(a)hiit.fi.

25.4.2003 at 14.00-15.30: Friday coffee seminar at HIIT (Ruoholahti, 6th floor). Program TBD.

23.5.2003 at 14.00-15.30: Friday coffee seminar at HIIT (Ruoholahti, 6th floor). Program TBD.

26.-28.5.2003: HIIT Retreat at Sjökulla, Kirkkonummi. For more information, HIIT Director, Dr. Martti Mäntylä, Martti.Mantyla(a)hiit.fi.

9.-11.6.2003: The 3rd HIIT-Berkeley Summer School on Telecommunications Software Architectures organized by HIIT and the University of California at Berkeley will take place in Berkeley, California. Main organisers of the Summer School are Professor Kimmo Raatikainen and Professor Randy Katz. Attendance by invitation only; applictions MUST be sent to Prof. Martti Mäntylä (martti.mantyla(a)hiit.fi) and Prof. Kimmo Raatikainen (kimmo.raatikainen(a)hiit.fi) by April 1, 2003.

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HIIT Update

HIIT Update 2/2002

noronen — Thu, 31 Oct 2002 22:00:00 +0000

- FOREWORD
- HIIT SUBMITS THREE PROPOSALS FOR THE PROACTIVE COMPUTING PROGRAMME
- HIIT SUBMITS THREE PROPOSALS FOR THE "COUNTERSTREAM" CALL OF NETS
- HIIT SUBMITS THREE PROPOSALS TO ACADEMY OF FINLAND
- HIIT SUBMITS FIVE EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST TO CEC
- DR. PATRIK FLORÉEN APPOINTED AS THE RESEARCH COORDINATOR OF HIIT
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS: DR. KEN RIMEY JOINS HIIT
- HIIT BECOMES A MEMBER OF THE WIRELESS WORLD RESEARCH FORUM
- HIIT COMMENCES THE PUBLICATION OF THREE REPORT SERIES
- FUTURE EVENTS

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FOREWORD

This issue of HIIT Update is very big in project proposals. There have been several opportunities open to HIIT researchers during the Spring, and they have not been idle. Even while we cannot expect all proposals to be successful - competition of research funding is fierce - HIIT has every reason to expect a rewarding future on the basis of the quality of the proposals, not to mention their sheer quantity.

We are especially pleased that many of the proposals combine skills and groups in novel and unexpected ways to study interesting and important issues from angles commonly ignored by research. The Expressions of Interest submitted to CEC also display a high profile, and should give us a good basis of commencing CEC-sponsored research in 2003.

The Finnish holiday season is now imminent, and also HIIT will be a much quieter place during the next 4 or 5 weeks. HIIT Update wishes a relaxing and rewarding holiday for all its readers!

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HIIT SUBMITS THREE PREPROPOSALS FOR THE PROACTIVE COMPUTING PROGRAMME

HIIT researchers submitted three preproposals to the Proactive Computing program of the Academy of Finland, April 29, 2002. All three proposals have been invited to submit a full proposal by August 8, 2002.

CONTEXT RECOGNITION BY USER SITUATION DATA ANALYSIS

The project will study modelling and analysis of information about user's context and its use in proactive adaptivity. The sample application to be studied is context-sensitive messaging between mobile users. The research problems are approached by qualitative end user studies, data analysis algorithm development, and empirical testing in a prototype environment. For more information, contact the joint proposers Prof. Martti Mäntylä, HIIT/ARU, Martti.Mantyla(a)hiit.fi, and Prof. Hannu Toivonen, UH and HIIT/BRU, Hannu.Toivonen(a)cs.helsinki.fi, or the Fuego program coordinator Mikko Mäkelä, Mikko.Makela(a)hiit.fi.

PROACTIVE INFORMATION RETRIEVAL BY ADAPTIVE MODELS OF USERS' ATTENTION AND INTEREST

The project builds probabilistic and neural models that learn from users’ actions to model their intentions and expectations, disambiguate vague commands, and anticipate actions. The actions and interests are monitored by measuring eye fixations and movements. The models will be implemented and tested for proactive information retrieval. The proposal is a joint effort of Dr. Petri Myllymäki, CoSCo, HIIT; Dr. Ilpo Kojo, CKIR, HeSBA; and Dr. Samuel Kaski, NNRC, HUT. For more information, please contact Dr. Petri Myllymäki, Petri.Myllymaki(a)hiit.fi.

NETWORKING AND ARCHITECTURE FOR PROACTIVE SYSTEMS

The proposal consists of a consortium of three projects to develop the fundamental networking and infrastructure techniques and architecture to address the requirements of proactive computing. The Architecture and Mobility project (Prof. Hannu Kari, HUT) will define a context aware management architecture and develop a proof-of-concept implementation. The Traffic Management project (Prof. Jorma Virtamo, HUT) will focus on optimal routing algorithms and capacity/robustness issues. The Algorithmics project (Prof. Patrik Floréen, UH/HIIT, and Prof. Pekka Orponen, HUT) will perform design and analysis of algorithms for key problems in proactive computing, using the methods and algorithms developed in the (theoretical) computer science community. For more information, please contact Dr. Patrik Floréen, Patrik.Floreen(a)hiit.fi.

Inquiries on the Proactive Computing Programme can be directed to the Programme Coordinator, Dr. Greger Lindén, greger.linden(a)cs.Helsinki.fi.

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HIIT SUBMITS THREE PROPOSALS FOR THE "COUNTERSTREAM"CALL OF NETS

HIIT submitted the following proposals to the April 30, 2002 call of the NETS programme of TEKES. The call aimed to find "counterstream" projects that challenge mainstream approaches to next generation networking. While it turned out that the HIIT proposals could not be funded in the extremely competitive call, we describe them here for information and because HIIT considers the topics very worthwhile also for future matching calls.

ZENITH: HORIZONTAL SERVICE MANAGEMENT

The project will aimed at studying next-generation heterogeneous, distributed, multichannel digital service management. It will study the requirements for such service management, design a service architecture that addresses the requirements, develop open source prototype(s) of the architecture, and study the prototypes in service deployment cases. Inquiries on the project can be directed to Professor Martti Mäntylä, Martti.Mantyla(a)hiit.fi,or MC program coordinator Anton Puolakka, Anton.Puolakka(a)hiit.fi.

YDIN: OPEN SOURCE KERNEL FOR NEXT GENERATION SEARCH ENGINE

The proposal is motivated by the fact that all prime WWW search engines are American, and they are proprietary. Therefore, the project aims to develop a distributed search engine that applies advanced stochastic modelling methods for content indexing; provide the engine to community in open source format; develop a European search service that makes use of the engine. The YDIN project will develop the computational core of the system only; the work will be continued in a larger project to be defined. Inquiries on the project can be directed to Dr. Wray Buntine, Wray.Buntine(a)hiit.fi, or Dr. Petri Myllymäki, Petri.Myllymaki(a)hiit.fi.

OPEN CONTENT AND SOFTWARE PRODUCTION MODELS

The project will study the possibilities and risks of open source and open licensing techniques from the point of view of traditional development models and the general market structure of information products. Therefore, the aim is to find out relevant technical and economic issues and found a basis for larger scale research and development projects and research networks. Inquiries on the project can be directed to Dr. Pekka Nikander, Pekka.Nikander(a)hiit.fi, Mikko Välimäki, Mikko.Valimaki(a)hiit.fi, or Digital Economy program coordinator Olli Pitkänen, Olli.Pitkanen(a)hiit.fi.

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HIIT SUBMITS FOUR PROPOSALS TO ACADEMY OF FINLAND

HIIT researchers submitted three proposals to the general call of the Academy of Finland on May 15, 2002:

DRAMA: SCENARIO METHODS FOR USER CENTERED PRODUCT CONCEPT DESIGN

The project plans to exploit drama methods (theatre, movies) to develop and express use scenarios of innovative digital services, particularly mobile ubicomp –style services. The multidisciplinary project involves elements of dramaturgy, industrial design, cinematography, architecture, and technology. It is joint work of Anu Kankainen and Tomi Kankainen, HIIT; Vesa Kantola, HUT; Siri Kolu, Stadia. Inquiries can be directed to Anu Kankainen, Anu.Kankainen(a)hiit.fi, or program coordinator Mikko Mäkelä, Mikko.Makela(a)hiit.fi.

PROSE: SCALABLE PROBABILISTIC METHODS FOR NEXT GENERATION INTERNET SEARCH ENGINES

The project aims at providing the statistical computing techniques and their implementations needed to build a search engine kernel for next generation Internet search services. The focus is on novel methods such as multinomial Principal Component Analysis for very large sets (terabytes) of data. The resulting C/C++ software libraries will be published in Open Source. Inquiries can be directed to Prof. Henry Tirri, Henry.Tirri(a)hiit.fi, Dr. Wray Buntine, Wray.Buntine(a)hiit.fi, or Dr. Petri Myllymäki, Petri.Myllymaki(a)hiit.fi.

OPEN LICENSING

The project is aimed to study the impact of open licensing models to the global digital markets and theoretical foundations of intellectual property rights. Inquiries can be directed to Dr. Jukka Kemppinen, Jukka.Kemppinen(a)hiit.fi, or program coordinator Olli Pitkänen, Olli.Pitkanen(a)hiit.fi.

In addition, HIIT also submitted one proposal to the Life as Learning program call of the Academy of Finland:

OPEN SOURCE LEARNING

The project will study the theoretical and applied aspects of open source learning, i.e., collaborative computer network assisted construction of knowledge with public information sharing mechanisms. Develop tools to support the paradigm. The project involves joint work with Department of Education, University of Helsinki, the Research Centre for Vocational Education, University of Tampere, and the Berkeley Center for Information Society, University of California at Berkeley. Inquiries can be directed to Prof. Henry Tirri, Henry.Tirri(a)hiit.fi, or Dr. Petri Myllymäki, Petri.Myllymaki(a)hiit.fi.

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HIIT SUBMITS FIVE EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST TO CEC

In preparation of the Sixth Framework Programme, the European Commission published in March, 2002 a call for Expressions of Interest from the European Research community (see http://www.cordis.lu/fp6/eoi-instruments/home.html). Jointly with its European partners, HIIT prepared and submitted the following EoI's:

Integrated Project in European Virtual Testbed for Location-Sensitive Ubiquitous Services

Main proposer: Martti Mäntylä

The European Virtual Testbed for Location-Sensitive Ubiquitous Services (EVIUS) is envisioned to consist of a network of European local test sites, each focusing on certain aspects of location-based services and applications, in particular the design, implementation, and provision of location-based services in 3G/4G/future mobile networks. Other issues include user experience design of service concepts; location technologies; user, device, and service profiles; adaptation and configuration of services; novel business models; legal aspects of location services. The IP is created on the basis of the existing NAVI network and its European contacts.

Network of Excellence in Understanding Trust and Trustworthiness in the Digital Environment

Main proposer: Pekka Nikander

The purpose of the proposed Network of Excellence is to bring together active researchers of trust and trustworthiness from the research communities within social sciences, jurisprudence, computer science, computer and communications security research, and economics research. This will lead to deepened and extended understanding of trust, trustworthiness, the value of trustworthy behaviour, and related phenomena, basically creating new, interdisciplinary research results. As a more practical goal, it is anticipated that this understanding will eventually lead to a way to representing human trust relationships and past experiences on trustworthy or untrustworthy behaviour in a digital and fully secured form. The main method to achieve this will be exchange of researchers, augmented with other activities such as arranging regular open or semi-open workshops, providing post-graduate level intensive seminars and special courses, and establishing and maintaining shared information repositories.

Open Source Economy Network of Excellence

Main proposer: Jukka Kemppinen

Open source software and content development; platform management; tools and techniques contributing to open source development; open source licenses; business models and practices contributing to or based on open source software and content; legal issues of open source software and content.

Integrated Project on European Search Engine

Main proposer: Wray Buntine

Develop a distributed search engine that applies advanced stochastic modelling methods for content indexing; provide the engine to community in open source format; develop a European search service that makes use of the engine.

Network of Excellence on Mobile Youth: Discovering New Use Scenarios

Main proposers: Martti Mäntylä and Anu Kankainen

Bring together active researchers of new mobile communication scenarios and young users within the fields of social sciences, human factors, interaction design, computer science, and telecommunications. Aim to accelerate information exchange between previously distinct fields of research by organizing user data analysis and scenario creation workshops.

In addition, HIIT joined also several proposals originated by other European partners:

NoE on Reconfigurable mobile communications and Adaptable services (NEREMCAS)

NoE on Mobile Multimedia Excellence Network (MOMENT)

IP in Self-Organising Networks (SON)

IP in Business Models for Electronic Publishing (B-MEP)

IP in Trust and Contract Management for Secure and Dynamically Evolving Virtual Organisations

NoE on IST Network of Excellence in Human-Artefact Integrated Affective Design (human-ARIADNeT)

IP on Use of IST in monitoring health related quality of life and its determinants (ISTQoL)

Inquiries on HIIT's planned activities in the CEC programmes can be directed to Research Coordinator, Dr. Patrik Floréen, Patrik.Floreen(a)hiit.fi (from August 1, 2002), or the various HIIT researchers mentioned above.

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DR. PATRIK FLORÉEN APPOINTED AS THE RESEARCH COORDINATOR OF HIIT

In its June 13 meeting, the Board of HIIT appointed Dr. Patrik Floréen as the Research Coordinator of HIIT for the 3-year period of August 1, 2002 through July 31, 2005. In addition to conducting independent research, his activities will mainly be targeted to coordinating international research, particularly EU-funded activities, covering both the Advanced Research and the Basic Research units of HIIT.

Dr. Floréen received his PhD in computer science from the University of Helsinki in 1992 and was appointed docent at the same university in 1995. He worked as teacher and researcher mainly at the same university, but also at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and the Helsinki University of Technology during 1986-1994. In 1995 he was appointed the first Secretary General of the Research Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering at the Academy of Finland. He continued his career in science policy and administration on the European level, when he was appointed Scientific Officer at the European Commission, DG Research, in 1997. In the summer of 2001 he returned to Finland, acting as professor of computer science at the University of Helsinki. Dr. Floréen's research has mainly been directed towards theoretical computer science, neural networks and genetic algorithms. His more recent research interests are data mining and proactive computing. Further information can be obtained from his homepage http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/floreen.

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS: DR. KEN RIMEY JOINS HIIT

Dr. Ken Rimey received his MA in Physics in 1983 and his PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989. In 1989-1991 he worked as Acting Associate Professor at the Helsinki University of Technology, where he taught computer graphics, operating systems, and compiler construction (with an extensive course project), as well as seminars on computer algebra and advanced topics in programming language implementation. He also initiated the Kaava project investigating the design of user-extensible direct-manipulation computer algebra systems and supervised research in parallel ray tracing and radiosity. In 1992-1994 he worked as Senior Software Engineer and Project Manager with Unda Oy where he developed a new software engine for use in interactive Macintosh and Unix applications for retouching of colour images for offset printing and advanced techniques for multiresolution editing of very large images and fast screen display of CMYK data. In 1995-1998 Dr. Rimey was R&D Manager at the Nokia Research Center where he led a hands-on research group investigating new software platforms for network equipment, software architectures for IP routers, and techniques for achieving high availability in distributed systems. From late 1998 to mid 2000 he was R&D Manager with Perceptual Robotics, Inc., Chicago, USA, where he saw the company grow from 8 employees to 35. At Perceptual Robotics, Dr. Rimey designed and implemented new interfaces for interacting with pan-tilt-zoom web cameras using any Java-enabled browser and managed camera deployments in e-commerce and Internet-based marketing for several Fortune 500 companies.

Dr. Rimey joined HIIT in May 2002, initially to participate in the Fuego Core (http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/starkoma/fc/fc.html) project. His present research interests include distributed, open application architectures; network-enabling the entertainment, PIM and communication devices at home and on the move; and generally making advanced application software development easier. For more information, see http://www.iki.fi/rimey/ or contact Dr. Rimey at his permanent e-mail address rimey(a)rimey.com.

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HIIT BECOMES A MEMBER OF THE WIRELESS WORLD RESEARCH FORUM

The aim of the Wireless World Research Forum (http://www.wireless-world-research.org/) is formulate visions on strategic future research directions in the wireless field, among industry and academia, and to generate, identify, and promote research areas and technical trends for mobile and wireless system technologies. It is intended to constructively contribute to the work done within the UMTS Forum, ETSI, 3GPP, IETF, ITU, and other relevant bodies regarding commercial and standardisation issues derived from the research work. The WWRF was established in August, 2001.

The aims of WWRF are consistent with HIIT's objectives, particularly its Fuego programme. Therefore, HIIT submitted its application to become a member of WWRF in May, 2002, and was accepted as a full member in the WWRF Steering Board meeting of 14th June. HIIT looks forward to active participation in WWRF activities and to contributing to its aims.

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HIIT COMMENCES THE PUBLICATION OF THREE REPORT SERIES

HIIT has decided to commence the publication of three report series:

- HIIT Publications (printed), ISSN 1458-1951

- HIIT Publications (electronic), ISSN 1458-946X

- HIIT Technical Reports, ISSN 1458-????

In its two forms, HIIT Publications is intended for longer research reports originating from HIIT authors; conference and workshop proceedings held in connection with HIIT activities; project documentation; and other material as may be deemed appropriate. The printed version will appear in B5 form and the electronic version as PDF through the page www.hiit.fi/publications/publications.

The HIIT Technical Reports series is intended for rapid dissemination of articles and papers by HIIT authors submitted for publication elsewhere. It is provided only in electronic form as PDF through the page www.hiit.fi/publications/reports.

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FUTURE EVENTS

19.-23.8.2002: The 13th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML'02) and the 6th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD'02) will be simultaneously held at the Main Building of the University of Helsinki. See http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/events/ecmlpkdd/ for further information on the conferences.

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HIIT Update

HIIT Update 1/2002

noronen — Tue, 30 Apr 2002 21:00:00 +0000

- NEW RESEARCH PROJECTS: THE WELFARE OF NATIONS, DIGITAL ECONOMY CORE, FUEGO CORE, SEMANTIC WEB
- HIIT'S BASIC RESEARCH UNIT COMMENCES OPERATION
- HIIT BRU TO COORDINATE THE PROACTIVE COMPUTING PROGRAMME
- PAI JOINS THE MEDIA CONVERGENCE PROGRAMME
- HIIT JOINS TWO THEMATIC NETWORK PROPOSALS TO CEC
- MC CORE DISCONTINUED, "SON OF MC CORE" IN PREPARATION
- SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS
- FUTURE EVENTS

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NEW RESEARCH PROJECTS: THE WELFARE OF NATIONS, DIGITAL ECONOMY CORE, FUEGO CORE, SEMANTIC WEB

Four new projects have started at HIIT during early 2002:

THE WELFARE OF NATIONS

The project "The Welfare of Nations: The Interaction of Technology, Economy and Society through the Cases of Silicon Valley, Finland/EU and Singapore/China" (http://www.hiit.fi/de/wofn) constitutes the extension of HIIT's Digital Economy in information society research. Under the supervision of Dr. Jukka Kemppinen, the project team consists of Dr. Pekka Himanen, Matti Kalliokoski and Risto Sullström. The project's Scientific Board will be led by Professor Manuel Castells from the University of California at Berkeley. Other members include Professor Olli Rehn from the University of Helsinki. The project will be carried out in close co-operation with Professors Nelson Morgan and Jerry Feldman at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI, http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu), a research institute closely affiliated with UC Berkeley.

The general objective of the project is to study and understand the nature and interaction of the various forces that shape the evolution of information societies by studying in parallel the cases of Finland, Silicon Valley and Singapore. While each of these societies can be considered success, they work in quite different circumstances shaped by various constraints and the cultural/political/economical climate. While the aimed results of the work are interesting in their own right, they will also constitute a solid background for other research activities in the Digital Economy program.

Inquiries on the project can be directed to its Project Manager Matti Kalliokoski, Matti.Kalliokoski(a)hiit.fi, Dr. Pekka Himanen, phimanen(a)icsi.berkeley.edu, or program coordinator Olli Pitkänen, Olli.Pitkanen(a)hiit.fi.

FUEGO CORE: MOBILE INTERNET MIDDLEWARE

The Fuego Core project is focused on the middleware issues raised by the mobile Internet. Its aims include the definition and prototype-level implementation of selected middleware components and proof of concept demonstrations of services benefiting from the components, possibly in cooperation with other Fuego projects. The project will also pursue actively Internet standardization on forums such as IETF and W3C. The project includes co-operation with the research group of professor Randy Katz (www.cs.berkeley.edu/~randy/) at the University of California at Berkeley. Industrial partners of the project are Nokia, Sonera, Elisa, and More Magic Software.

Inquiries on the project can be directed to Research Director, Professor Kimmo Raatikainen, Kimmo.Raatikainen(a)cs.helsinki.fi or program coordinator Mikko Mäkelä, Mikko.Makela(a)hiit.fi.

SEMANTIC WEB

The Semantic Web project investigates next generation Internet technology aiming at raising the intelligence of Internet contents on the basis of ontology-based semantic metadata. The project will focus on two prime applications: semantic service catalogues and topic maps. The project belongs to the Media Convergence program. Its partners are Nokia, TietoEnator and Espoo City Museum.

Inquiries on the project can be directed to Professor Eero Hyvönen, Eero.Hyvonen(a)cs.helsinki.fi, or program coordinator Anton Puolakka, Anton.Puolakka(a)hiit.fi.

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HIIT'S BASIC RESEARCH UNIT COMMENCES OPERATION

The Basic Research Unit (http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/hiit_bru/) of HIIT is a recently established part of HIIT concentrating on long term research in selected areas of information technology. Its operation commenced officially on January 1, 2002.

The unit works in close cooperation with the departments of computer science of both universities. The unit aims to provide a stimulating research environment, with excellent facilities and connections to many application groups in sciences and in industry. Post-doc positions are available for qualified candidates; see http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/hiit_bru/bru_postdoc.html.

The first research programmes will focus on data analysis and data mining for biological sciences, energy-aware computation, and ubiquitous computing.

Inquiries on BRU can be directed to the Research Director of BRU, Professor Heikki Mannila, heikki.mannila(a)cs.Helsinki.fi or BRU amanuensis Teija Kujala, Teija.Kujala(a)cs.helsinki.fi.

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HIIT BRU TO COORDINATE THE PROACTIVE COMPUTING PROGRAMME

The Academy of Finland has decided to launch the Proactive Information Technology Research Programme aimed at multi-disciplinary basic research relevant for future ubiquitous and mobile computing environments. The programme will run for 2002-2005 and its total volume will be 5,7 MEURO.

The research programme is carried out in cooperation between the Academy of Finland, the Finnish National Technology Agency and the French Ministry of Research. Cooperation between Finnish and French researchers will therefore be of importance.

The Academy of Finland has chosen the HIIT Basic Research Unit to coordinate the programme. Prof. Heikki Mannila, director of BRU, will act as the programme director and Dr. Greger Lindén as its coordinator.

The programme will be opened for applications in March 2002. Applications will be processed in two stages: plans of intent (deadline 29 April 2002) and full proposals (deadline 9 August 2002). Further information about the contents of the programme and the application procedures will be given in the publication seminar of the programme to be held on Thursday, March 14 at the Academy of Finland (Vilhovuorenkatu 6, Helsinki), starting at 10.00 am. The information will also be published on the web pages of the Academy of Finland, http://www.aka.fi.

Inquiries on the Proactive Computing Programme can be directed to the Programme Coordinator, Dr. Greger Lindén, greger.linden(a)cs.Helsinki.fi.

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PAI JOINS THE MEDIA CONVERGENCE PROGRAMME

Personalized Adaptive Interfaces (PAI, http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/research/cosco/Projects/PAI/) is a 3-year research project started in 2000 as a part of the on User-Oriented Information Technology (USIX) program of TEKES. Its aim is to develop methods for applying probabilistic modelling techniques, such as Bayesian network models, in building and using personalized, adaptive user interfaces mainly for Internet-based applications. The industrial partners of the project are Alma Media Corporation, Ekahau Ltd and BayesIT Ltd. It is executed in co-operation with the Department of Education of the University of Helsinki. For its last year of operation, the project joins the Media Convergence program of HIIT.

Inquiries on the project can be directed to Research Director, Professor Henry Tirri, henry.tirri(a)cs.Helsinki.fi or program coordinator Anton Puolakka, Anton.Puolakka(a)hiit.fi.

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HIIT JOINS TWO THEMATIC NETWORK PROPOSALS TO CEC

Two Thematic Network proposals including HIIT were submitted to the European Commission in response to the final Call of Proposals of the Fifth Framework Programme.

The "Network of Excellence on Reconfigurable mobile communications and adaptable services" (READAPT) thematic network focuses in cross-fertilisation, dissemination and identification of integrated research results and ideas related to the area of re-configurability, adaptability, flexible service provision and the introduction of 3G and 4G systems. Other partners of the network include University of Athens (prime contractor); Ecole National Superieure des Telecommunications; Kings College London, United Kingdom; University of Cyprus; Telecommunications Research Centre University of Limerick; Telecommunications Technological Center of Catalonia; and THALES Communications. HIIT will act as the Technical Coordinator in the network. Inquiries on READAPT can be directed to Research Director, Professor Kimmo Raatikainen, Kimmo.Raatikainen(a)cs.helsinki.fi or program coordinator Mikko Mäkelä, Mikko.Makela(a)hiit.fi.

The "Adaptive Methods for Ubiquitous Intelligence" (ADMIT) thematic network aims to delineate to what extent and in what way adaptive systems technology can best address the problem of enabling users to make effective use of the enormous digital resources that are increasingly freely accessible to citizens of Europe and the World. The network membership consists of 21 research partners throughout Europe, including two Israeli universities. Inquiries on ADMIT can be directed to Research Director, Professor Henry Tirri, henry.tirri(a)cs.Helsinki.fi or program coordinator Anton Puolakka, Anton.Puolakka(a)hiit.fi.

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MC CORE DISCONTINUED, "SON OF MC CORE" IN PREPARATION

TEKES has decided to discontinue the funding of the Core project of the Media Convergence program as of January 1, 2002. This decision was caused mainly by the tight economic situation that was reflected in the level of industrial interest to the project. While lamentable, this decision is therefore understandable.

HIIT's commitment to the Media Convergence program is unchanged, however. Therefore, HIIT has commenced the preparation of a new "Son of MC Core" project that will replace the prematurely finished one, and upgrade its research agenda. Tentatively, the new project will focus on Horizontal Service Management of digital content services.

The preparation effort will be coordinated by the new MC program coordinator Anton Puolakka, Anton.Puolakka(a)hiit.fi, who joined HIIT from March 1, 2002. Inquiries on the progress of the preparation can be directed to him.

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SENIOR PERSONNEL NEWS

Several senior researchers have joined the ranks of HIIT since the previous issue of HIIT Update.

Dr. Jorma Rissanen is best known for his fundamental work on arithmetic coding and the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle. For this research, which in effect places statistics as a chapter in information theory, he has received a number of awards, including the IEEE Information Society Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation in 1998. This is one of 16 Golden Jubilee Awards, which represent the most significant innovations made during the 50-year existence of information theory. He is also the recipient of the IEEE 1993 Richard W. Hamming medal "For fundamental contributions to information theory, statistical inference, control theory, and the theory of complexity and stochastic complexity" and IBM Outstanding Innovation Award in 1988 for work in statistical inference, information theory, and the theory of complexity. Although living in Los Gatos, California, Dr. Rissanen will be spending 3 months a year at HIIT premises working together with the CoSCo research group. Dr. Rissanen’s interests lie in information theory and coding and their applications to modelling in statistics and computer science. Upon joining HIIT, Dr. Rissanen was nominated as HIIT Fellow, the most prestigious academic rank of HIIT, by the HIIT Board on November 7, 2001.

Dr. Pekka Nikander (http://www.tml.hut.fi/~pnr/) is Chief Scientist at the Ericsson Research NomadicLab located in Jorvas, Kirkkonummi and also Adjunct Professor (docent) in the Telecom Software and Multimedia Laboratory at the Helsinki University of Technology. In December, 2001, he joined HIIT as an Ericsson Visiting Senior Research Scientist. His technical interests include Security and economics; Security in distributed and mobile systems; Security architectures; Security in wearable and ubiquitous computing applications; Security and Human Factors; Distributed Object Oriented Programming; and Cryptographic protocols. At HIIT, he plans to contribute to Fuego and Digital Economy programs.

Dr. Wray Buntine moved in February, 2002 to Finland from United States to join the CoSCo research group at HIIT. A former researcher at UC Berkeley and NASA, he is internationally well-known for his theoretical and practical work in Bayesian graphical modelling (e.g., he has the most cited article "Operations for Learning with Graphical Models" in the prestigious Journal of Artificial Intelligence). In addition to his academic career, he has a strong industrial background and was a lead architect and developer responsible for complete product life-cycle: conception, development, beta testing, quality assurance and maintenance of PSE, an enterprise class 24/7-uptime, scalable, client-server internet product delivering personalization currently being used at Cisco.

Dr. Pekka Himanen, b. 1973, received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Helsinki at the age of 20. He is the author of very successful book "Hacker Ethic" where he - together with Linus Torvalds and professor Manuel Castells - articulates how hackers represent a new, opposing ethos for the information age. Underlying hackers' technical creations - such as the Internet and the personal computer, which have become symbols of our time - are the hacker values that produced them and that challenge us all. These values promoted passionate and freely rhythmed work; the belief that individuals can create great things by joining forces in imaginative ways; and the need to maintain our existing ethical ideals, such as privacy and equality, in our new, increasingly technologised society. Dr. Himanen joined HIIT in February, 2002, to co-lead the recently started Welfare of Nations project.

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FUTURE EVENTS

March 22, 2002: Dr. George Metakides, Director of Directorate E "Essential Information Society Technologies and Infrastructures" of the Information Society Directorate-General of the European Commission visits HIIT at 10:30-13:00. An invitation seminar will be organised at HIIT. Inquiries: Martti.Mantyla(a)hiit.fi.

April 3 through 5: The Fuego program of HIIT will organise a Retreat meeting in the Tvärminne Biological Station of the University of Helsinki. Intended for Fuego program researchers and industrial partners, the meeting aims to facilitate information exchange and future planning of the program. Inquiries: Mikko.Makela(a)hiit.fi.

May 22 to 25: Professor Hal Varian, Dean of the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, will visit Finland to receive an honorary doctoral degree at the University of Oulu. Tentatively, he will also visit HIIT on May 23; details of the program are being worked out. Inquiries: Martti.Mantyla(a)hiit.fi.

June 4 through 7: The second joint Summer School on Telecommunications Software Architectures organized by HIIT and by the University of California at Berkeley will take place in Berkeley, California. Main organisers of the Summer School are Professor Kimmo Raatikainen and Professor Randy Katz. Attendance by applications only; they MUST be sent to Prof. Martti Mäntylä (martti.mantyla(a)hiit.fi) and Prof. Kimmo Raatikainen (kimmo.raatikainen(a)hiit.fi) as well as to Program Coordinator Mikko Mäkelä (mikko.makela(a)hiit.fi) by March 15, 2002.

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Newsletter:

HIIT Update

HIIT Update 2/2001

noronen — Wed, 31 Oct 2001 22:00:00 +0000

Tämänkertaiset otsikot:

- HIIT MUUTTANUT HIGH TECH CENTERIIN
- UUSIA TUTKIMUSHANKKEITA KÄYNTIIN: BETWEEN, STAMI, XML DEVICES
- TEKNOLOGIAN, TALOUDEN JA YHTEISKUNNAN VUOROVAIKUTUS
- HEIKKI MANNILA HIITIN PERUSTUTKIMUSYKSIKÖN JOHTAJAKSI
- HIIT TOIMITTI NELJÄ TUTKIMUSHANKE-EHDOTUSTA
- HIITIN LÄHIAJAN TAPAHTUMIA

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HIIT MUUTTANUT HIGH TECH CENTERIIN

HIIT muutti High Tech Centerin C-taloon (nimeltään "Pinta" Kolumbuksen laivan mukaan) 17.9.2001. Kaikkiaan noin 2600 m2 tilat sijaitsevat rakennuksen 5. ja 6. kerroksessa. Perille löytää kartan http://www.htcfinland.fi/pages/kartta.html avulla.

Ensi vaiheen muuttajien joukko koostui noin 30:stä HIIT:in tutkijasta (pääasiassa Fuego- ja Digital Economy -ohjelmista), HY:n professori Henry Tirrin noin 20 hengen CoSCO-tutkimusryhmästä sekä TKK:n Informaatiotekniikan laboratorion samoin noin 20 hengen ryhmästä. Joukko on kiinnostava ja synerginen; ainekset erinomaisen tutkijayhteisön synnylle ovat olemassa.

Tämän jälkeen istumapaikkoja on vielä vapaana noin 50 tutkijalle ja opiskelijalle. Ne täyttynevät arvaamattoman nopeasti. Uusien tilojen kalustuksesta vastasi Martela Oy. Kalustuksen suunnittelulla pyrittiin synnyttämään mahdollisimman edulliset olosuhteet tutkimusryhmien toiminnalle ja vuorovaikutukselle; kokemus tulee osoittamaan missä määrin tässä onnistuttiin.

Hyvät tietoliikenneyhteydet kampuksille ovat tietenkin toinen perusedellytys HIITin työlle. Tältä osin HIIT on tehnyt palvelusopimuksen Otaverkko Oy:n kanssa, johon kuuluu 100MB kiinteä yhteys Otaniemeen, tarvittavat aktiivilaitteet, WWW- ja sähköpostipalvelut ja pisteenä i:n päällä myös langaton WLAN-verkko. Koska kiinteä yhteys on toteutettu "omalla" kuidulla, HTC:stä voidaan tarjota saumaton ja turvallinen VPN-yhteys Informaatiotekniikan laboratorion intranettiin.

HTC:n puhelinratkaisuksi valittiin Elisan Citypuhelimet; siten tavallisia pöytäpuhelimia ei ole lainkaan. Tämän mukaisesti HTC:n puhelinnumerot ovat muotoa 8501 xxxx; toistaikseksi entiset TKK:n alanumerot on käännetty ko. henkilön HTC-numeroon.

HIIT tulee olemaan edelleen TKK:n postinjakelun piirissä. Sen postiosoite on sen mukaisesti: HIIT, PL 9800, 02015 TKK.

Uskomme, että uudet tilamme herättävät uteliaisuutta. Tervetuloa katsomaan!

Hyvä tilaisuus siihen on tarjolla 24.10. kello 15 alkavassa "HTC Grand Opening Gala":ssa, joka toimii HIIT:in HCT-tupaantuliaisena. Puheiden ohella tarjolla on muutakin ohjelmaa, syötävää ja juotavaa. Ilmoittautumiset 17.10. mennessä Pirkko Miettuselle, Pirkko.Miettunen(a)hiit.fi. Tätä ennen HTC-tietoa löytyy paikasta http://www.htcfinland.fi/.

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UUSIA TUTKIMUSHANKKEITA KÄYNTIIN: BETWEEN, STAMI, XML DEVICES

Kesän 2001 aikana HIIT sai myönteiset rahoituspäätökset kolmesta uudesta tutkimushankkeesta, jotka näin voitiin muodollisestikin aloittaa.

Between jatkaa laajennetussa ja uudistetussa muodossa päättyneen UbiServices-hankkeen työtä. Sen tavoitteena on kehittää käyttäjäkeskeisin menetelmin uusia digitaalisia palveluja erityisesti ns. ubicomp-ympäristössä liikkuville käyttäjille. 1.6.2001 alkanut hanke on suunniteltu jatkumaan 31.3.2003 asti. Sen teollisuuspartnerit ovat Nokia, Sonera, Elisa ja Alma Media.

STAMI tutkii tietoturvateknologian haasteita ja mahdollisuuksia erilaisissa digitaalisen talouden mahdollistamissa liiketoimintaskenaarioissa. Sen työ painottuu ensi vaiheessa tiedon voimassaolon hallintaan digitaalisten sertifikaattien avulla. Jatkotyön painopiste tulee olemaan käyttäjien ja käyttäjäyhteisöjen oman tiedon hallinnan ja turvaamisen alueella. Hanke oli alkanut 1.3.2001 ja se on tarkoitettu kolmivuotiseksi. Sen teollisuuspartnerit ovat Nokia, Ericsson, Elisa ja Alma Media.

XML Devices jatkaa TKK:lla aiemmissa hankkeissa kehitetyn XML-selainohjemiston X-Smiles kehittämistä. Laadullisena tavoitteena on kevyt ja joustava ohjelmisto, joka voitaisiin istuttaa erilaisille laitealustoille digi-TV:n settop-boxeista erilaisiin kannettaviin laitteisiin asti. Hankkeen teollisuuspartnerit ovat Elisa, Sonera, Alma Media, Ericsson sekä Yleisradio. Se on suunniteltu kolmivuotiseksi.

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TEKNOLOGIAN, TALOUDEN JA YHTEISKUNNAN VUOROVAIKUTUS

HIIT jätti 31.8.2001 Kauppa- ja teollisuusministeriölle hakemuksen otsikolla "The Welfare of Nations: The Interaction of Technology, Economy and Society through the Cases of Silicon Valley, Finland/EU and Singapore/China".

Hankkeen suunnittelusta on vastannut FT Pekka Himanen yhdessä HIIT:in Digitaalisen talouden ohjelman tutkijoiden kanssa. Pekan ohella hankkeeseen tulevat osallistumaan myös Risto Sullström ja Matti Kalliokoski. Hankkeelle tullaan perustamaan erillinen tieteellinen seurantaryhmä, jonka puheenjohtajaksi on lupautunut prof. Manuel Castells Berkeleyn yliopistosta.

Hanke tulee nojamaan läheiseen yhteistyöhön Berkeleyn yliopiston yhteydessä toimivan International Computer Science Instituten (ICSI) kanssa, jossa siihen tulevat osallistumaan mm. professorit Nelson Morgan ja Jerry Feldman. Hankkeen tähän osuuteen tultaneen hakemaan USA:laista tutkimusrahoitusta.

Hankkeen tavoitteena on synnyttää ymmärrystä ja uusia ajatuksia tietoyhteiskuntaa muokkaavien voimien luonteesta ja vuorovaikutuksesta tarkastelemalla rinnakkain Suomen, Piilaakson ja Singaporen tarjoamia esimerkkejä. Kukin näistähän on pitkälle kehittynyt tietoyhteiskunta, mutta toimii varsin erilaisten rakenteiden ja tapojen varassa. Tätä kautta hanke tulee tarjoamaan arvokasta tietoa varsinkin Digitaalisen talouden ohjelman muille hankkeille, mutta myös HIIT:in teknologiselle tutkimukselle yleensäkin.

Hanketta koskevat kysymyset voi osoittaa FT Pekka Himaselle, phimanen(a)uclink.berkeley.edu tai tutkimuskoordinaatori Samuli Simojoelle, Samuli.Simojoki(a)hiit.fi.

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HEIKKI MANNILA HIITIN PERUSTUTKIMUSYKSIKÖN JOHTAJAKSI

Helsingin yliopiston Tietojenkäsittelytieteen laitos on tehnyt esityksen TKK:n professori Heikki Mannilan nimittämisestä HIITin perustutkimusyksikön johtajaksi 1.12.2001 alkaen 31.12.2005 asti. Siten nimitys on vain muodollista sinettiä vailla. Käytännössä prof. Mannila siirtyy tähän tehtävään syksyn 2001 aikana siten, että perustutkimustoiminta voidaan saada käyntiin vuoden 2002 alussa. Lisää tietoa perustutkimusyksiköstä löytyy sen omilta www-sivuilta paikassa http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/hiit_bru/.

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HIIT TOIMITTI NELJÄ TUTKIMUSHANKE-EHDOTUSTA NETS-HAKUUN

TEKES:in Tulevaisuuden verkot (NETS) -tutkimusohjelman alueena ovat langattomat järjestelmät ja laajakaistaiset verkot. Siten se sijoittuu erityisesti HIIT:in Fuego-tutkimusohjelman kannalta keskeisille alueille. Lisää tietoa itse ohjelmasta on tarjolla sen www-sivuilla http://akseli.tekes.fi/Resource.phx/tivi/nets/index.htx.

NETS:in ensimmäinen hakukierros päättyi 1.10.2001. HIIT toimitti tähän kierrokseen neljä hakemusta:

FUEGO CORE

Hanke suuntautuu erityisesti liikkuvan Internetin esiinnostamiin middleware-tason ongelmiin. Sen tavoitteena on mm. tuottaa prototyyppitasoisia middleware-komponentteja ja niitä demonstroivia palveluja yhteistyössä muiden Fuego-ohjelman hankkeiden kanssa. Hankkeeseen sisältyy myös Berkeleyn yliopistossa tehtävä tutkimusosuus, joka toteutetaan yhdessä prof. Randy Katzin johtaman tutkimusryhmän kanssa. Hankkeen tieteellisenä johtajana toimii Helsingin yliopiston professori Kimmo Raatikainen, Kimmo.Raatikainen(a)cs.helsinki.fi. Sen yrityspartnerit ovat Nokia, Sonera, Elisa ja More Magic Solutions.

UBICAST

Projektin tavoitteena on tutkia oppivien mallittamismenetelmien soveltamista liikkuvan käyttäjän toiminnan mallittamisessa ja ennustamisessa. Tätä kautta avautuu uusia mahdollisuuksia palveluiden profilointiin ja personointiin ja myös palveluja tuottavan infrastruktuurin toiminnan ohjaamiseen ja optimointiin. Hankkeen tieteellisenä johtajana toimii Helsingin yliopiston professori Henry Tirri, Henry.Tirri(a)cs.helsinki.fi. Sen yrityspartneriksi on toistaiseksi sitoutunut Sanoma-WSOY; konsortiota pyritään edelleen täydentämään uusilla jäsenillä.

SEMANTIC WEB

Semantic Web paneutuu uuden sukupolven Internet-teknologiaan, joka pyrkii nostamaan Internet-sisältöjen "älykkyyttä" niihin liitettävän ontologiapohjaisen semanttisen tiedon avulla. Hanke paneutuu erityisesti palvelu- ja aihehakemistojen laatimiseen semanttisen tiedon tukemana.

Hankkeen tieteellinen johtaja on Helsingin yliopiston professori Eero Hyvönen, Eero.Hyvonen(a)cs.helsinki.fi. Sen konsortioon kuuluvat Nokia, TietoEnator ja Espoon kaupunginmuseo.

PERSONAL ADAPTIVE NETS (PETS)

Adaptive Personal Nets -hanke on suunnattu NETS:in ns. kärkiryhmäosuuteen, jonka kautta NETS tukee muutamia huipputasoisiksi arvioituja tutkimusryhmiä tavoittelemaan maailmanluokan tasoa. PETS-hanke on suunnattu stokastisten mallitusmenetelmien soveltamiseen tulevaisuuden liikkuvien ja konteksti-sidonnaisten palvelujen adaptiiviseen personointiin. Sen tieteellisenä johtajana toimii Helsingin yliopiston professori Henry Tirri, Henry.Tirri(a)cs.helsinki.fi. PETS:in yrityskonsortioon kuuluvat Nokia, Sonera ja Sanoma-WSOY.

Lisätietoa valmisteilla tutkimushankkeista antavat edellä mainittujen eri hankkeiden tieteellisten johtajien ohella myös tutkimusjohtaja Martti Mäntylä, Martti.Mantyla(a)hiit.fi, sekä tutkimuskoordinaattorit Mikko Mäkelä, Mikko.Makela(a)hiit.fi, ja Samuli Simojoki, Samuli.Simojoki(a)hiit.fi.

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HIITIN LÄHIAJAN TAPAHTUMIA

24.10. kello 15-?? HTC Grand Opening Gala: HIIT:in HTC-tupaantuliaiset. Puheiden ohella tarjolla on muutakin ohjelmaa, syötävää ja juotavaa. Ilmoittautumiset 17.10. mennessä Pirkko Miettuselle, Pirkko.Miettunen(a)hiit.fi.

31.10. kello 16-19 HIIT:in teollisuuden neuvottelukunnan kokous HTC:n C-talon saunaosastossa (7. kerros). Aihepiirinä erityisesti HIIT:in toiminnan näkymät vuonna 2002 ja siitä eteenpäin. Ilmoittautumiset 29.10. mennessä Pirkko Miettuselle, Pirkko.Miettunen(a)hiit.fi.

2.11. kello 9-17 Semantic Web Kick-off -tilaisuus, joka pidetään HTC:n C-talon auditoriossa. Tilaisuuden järjestää HIIT yhdessä Suomen Tekoälyseuran kanssa ja se on tarkoitettu vauhdittamaan semanttisen Internetin tutkimuksen käynnistämistä Suomessa kokoamalla alan tutkijat ja siitä kiinnostuneet teollisuusosapuolet yhteen. Lisätiedot: prof. Eero Hyvönen, Eero.Hyvonen(a)cs.helsinki.fi. Seminaarin www-sivu on osoitteessa http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/eahyvone/stes/semanticweb/.

7.11. kello 12-14 HIIT:in johtokunnan kokous HTC:n 5. kerroksen neuvotteluhuoneessa.

11.-18.11. HIIT:in edustajat vierailevat Berkeleyn yliopistossa uusien yhteishankkeiden suunnittelun ja toteuttamisen vauhdittamiseksi. Tapaamisia tulee olemaan professoreiden Randy Katz, Nelson Morgan, Hal Varian ja muidenkin kanssa. Esillä tulevat olemaan mm. hankkeet Fuego Core, TTY-vuorovaikutus ja jo käynnissä oleva Mobile IPR.

27.11. kello 9-11 XML Devices -projektin johtoryhmän kokous TKK:n Tietotekniikan talossa, Konemiehentie 2, Espoo.

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Newsletter:

HIIT Update

HIIT Update 1/2001

noronen — Mon, 30 Apr 2001 21:00:00 +0000

Tämänkertaiset otsikot:

- MUUTTO UUSIIN TILOIHIN SYYSKUUSSA
- HIITIN PERUSTETTAVALLE PERUSTUTKIMUSYKSIKÖLLE HAETAAN JOHTAJAA
- UBISERVICES JA ELE YHDISTYVÄT
- HIIT MUKANA HECSEN KESÄKOULUN JÄRJESTÄMISESSÄ
- HIIT HAKEE JATKORAHOITUSTA SUUNNITELLUSTI MOBILE IPR -HANKKEELLE JA MC CORE -HANKKEELLE
- HIITIN UUSIA TUTKIMUSHANKKEITA
- VERKKOYHTEISKUNNAN INNOVAATIOPROSESSIT
- UUDEN TUTKIMUSOHJELMAN VALMISTELU
- HIITIN LÄHIAJAN TAPAHTUMIA

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MUUTTO UUSIIN TILOIHIN SYYSKUUSSA

HIIT muuttaa suunnitelmien mukaisesti syyskuussa 2001 uusiin valmistuviin toimitiloihin Helsinki High Tech Centeriin (HTC) Ruoholahteen. HIIT:n käyttöön tulee HTC:ssä todennäköisesti ainakin yksi kokonainen kerros eli noin 1300 m2.

Tiloihin muuttavat HIITin hallinto sekä useimpien Digitaalinen talous ja Fuego-tutkimusohjelmien hankkeiden tutkijat. Niiden sisustamisesta vastaa todennäköisesti Martela Oy. Ensimmäiset kalustesuunnitelmat saadaan toukokuun puolivälissä 2001.

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HIITIN PERUSTETTAVALLE PERUSTUTKIMUSYKSIKÖLLE HAETAAN JOHTAJAA

Helsingin yliopiston piirissä syntyneen aloitteen pohjalta HIITin johtokunta päätti viime joulukuussa perustaa HIIT:in yhteyteen erityisen perustutkimuksesta vastaavan yksikön. Helsingin yliopisto on päättänyt suunnata sen toimintaan vähintään 2 Mmk erillisrahoituksen viideksi vuodeksi 2001-2005; Teknillinen korkeakoulu osallistunee rahoitukseen samansuuruisella panoksella.

Perustutkimusyksikölle tulee sen toiminnasta vastaava oma tutkimusjohtaja, joka valmistelee ja esittelee perustutkimusasiat HIITin johtokunnalle. Positio oli haettavana 30.4. asti, ja siihen saatiin 4 hakijaa. Positio on tarkoitus täyttää ensi tilassa siten, että yksikön toiminta voisi alkaa syksyllä 2001.

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UBISERVICES JA ELE YHDISTYVÄT

HIITissä on ollut käynnissä syyskuusta 2000 alkaen liikkuviin ubicomp -palveluihin suuntautunut tutkimushanke UbiServices. Talven 2000-2001 aikana HIIT valmisteli toisen läheisesti samalle alueelle suuntautuneen hankkeen ELE, joka jätettiin TEKES:in harkintaan maaliskuussa 2001.

Neuvottelujen jälkeen TEKES esitti huhtikuussa 2001, että hankkeet voitaisiin toteuttaa parhaiten yhdistettynä siten että UbiServices-hankkeen rahoitusta kasvatettaisiin jonkin verran. Tämän mukaisesti HIIT on nyt yhdistänyt hankkeet uudeksi projektiksi Between, joka muodollisisti korvaa UbiServices-hankkeen kesäkuun alusta 2001. Hankkeeseen osallistuvat Nokia, Sonera, Elisa, Alma Media ja First Hop.

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HIIT MUKANA HECSEN KESÄKOULUN JÄRJESTÄMISESSÄ

HY:n ja TKK:n yhteinen tietojenkäsittelyn tutkijakoulu HeCSE ja Berkeleyn yliopisto järjestävät kesäkoulun otsikolla ”Summer School on Telecommunications Service Architectures” 29.-30.5.2001 Kaliforniassa ja 9.-11.6.2001 Espoossa. HIIT osallistuu kesäkoulun valmisteluun ja rahoitukseen.

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HIIT HAKEE JATKORAHOITUSTA SUUNNITELLUSTI MOBILE IPR -HANKKEELLE JA MC CORE -HANKKEELLE

Digitaalinen talous -ohjelmaan kuuluva tutkimushanke Verkottuvien ja liikkuvien tietotuotteiden oikeuksien hallinta (MobileIPR) hakee parhaillaan jatkorahoitusta hankkeelle. Hanke etenee projektisuunnitelman mukaisesti. Kaksi projektin tutkijaa, Olli Pitkänen ja Mikko Välimäki työskentelevät parhaillaan Berkeleyn yliopistossa Kaliforniassa.

Media Convergence -tutkimusohjelman core-projektin rahoituskausi päättyy 30.6. Myös tälle projektille tullaan hakemaan jatkorahoitusta suunnitelusti.

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HIITIN UUSIA TUTKIMUSHANKKEITA

HIITissä on parhaillaan valmistelussa seuraavat tutkimushankkeet:

FUEGO CORE

DIGITAL ECONOMY CORE

Projektin tavoitteena on tutkia liikkuvan ja laajakaistaisen Internetin mahdollistamia liiketoimintamalleja useita eri näkökulmia integroiden.

P2P DIGITAL ECONOMY

Projektin tavoitteena on tutkia digitaalisten, tuotteeseen liittettävien ja etäluettavien tunnisteiden soveltamista peer-to-peer tyypisesti organisoidussa elektronisessa kaupassa sekä kehittää prototyyppitasoisia toteutuksia tarvittavista ohjelmistokomponenteista ja avoimista järjestelmärajapinnoista.

ENNALTA VARAUTUMINEN UBICOMP-YMPÄRISTÖSSÄ

Projektin tavoitteena on kehittää liikkuvan käyttäjän toiminnan ja tarpeiden ennustamista tukevia hajautettuja järjestelmäpalveluita, joiden avulla voidaan varautua ennalta esim. käyttökontekstin vaihdoksiin Ubicomp-tyyppisessä ympäristössä. Prototyypeissä tullaan demonstroimaan uusia ratkaisuja sellaisiin ongelmiin kuten palvelutason säilyttäminen ja älykäs synkronointi.

Lisätietoa valmisteilla olevista tutkimushankkeista antavat tutkimusjohtaja Martti Mäntylä, Martti.Mantyla(a)hiit.fi, sekä tutkimuskoordinaattorit Mikko Mäkelä, Mikko.Makela(a)hiit.fi, ja Samuli Simojoki, Samuli.Simojoki(a)hiit.fi.

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VERKKOYHTEISKUNNAN INNOVAATIOPROSESSIT

HIIT jätti 30.4.2001 alustavan projektiehdotuksen Tekesin ja Kauppa- ja teollisuusministeriön uuteen tutkimusohjelmaan "Teknologian, elinkeinoelämän ja yhteiskunnan vuorovaikutus". Alustavan projektiehdotuksen otsikko on "Verkkoyhteiskunnan innovaatioprosessit". Projektin tarkoituksena on jäsentää informaatioteknologisen murroksen vaikutuksia innovaatioprosesseihin. Laajaa ja haastavaa tutkimusongelmaa lähestytään täsmentyvin teemoin erilaisin tieteellisin metodein mm. sosiologisesta, oikeudellisesta, politiikan tutkimuksen ja teknis-taloudellisen tutkimuksen näkökulmista.

Mikäli projektiehdotus hyväksytään hakuprosessissa jatkoon, varsinainen projektihakemus jätetään 15.8. mennessä ja projekti alkaa lokakuussa 2001.

Lisätietoja projektiehdotuksesta antaa tutkimuskoordinaattori Samuli Simojoki, Samuli.Simojoki(a)hiit.fi.

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UUDEN TUTKIMUSOHJELMAN VALMISTELU

HIITissä on ryhdytty valmistelemaan uutta tutkimusohjelmaa. Alustavien suunnitelmien mukaan tutkimusohjelman teemat painottuvat ohjelmistotekniikkaan, ohjelmistokehitykseen sekä ohjelmistotuotantoon. Ohjelman on määrä käynnistyä keväällä 2002.

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HIITIN LÄHIAJAN TAPAHTUMIA

22.5. klo 12.30 - 22.00 HIITin henkilöstön kevätpäivät Humaljärven tutkimusasemalla

6.6. klo 10.00 NAVI-säädöspuitteet -projektin ohjausryhmä, Dipoli

8.6. klo 12.00 HIIT johtokunnan kokous, Runeberg-sali, HY päärakennus

9.6. HeCSE-Berkeley kesäkoulu, TKK, Tietotekniikan talo, Otaniemi

11.6. HeCSE-Berkeley kesäkoulu, TKK, Spektri/Pilotti, Otaniemi

14.6. klo 9.00 Mobile IPR -hankkeen johtoryhmä, Otaniemi

14.6. klo 10.30 DE Prep -hankkeen johtoryhmä, Otaniemi

15.6. klo 14.00 STAMI-hankkeen johtoryhmä, Otaniemi

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