Annual Report 2019

Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence FCAI is a nation-wide community of experts in artificial intelligence in Finland, initiated by Aalto University, University of Helsinki, and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. FCAI brings together pioneering expertise and top talents in academia with industry and public sector to create new AI needed for solving real-life problems. In 2019 FCAI gained the Academy of Finland flagship status, a standing only granted to six centers of excellence of high quality and high societal impact.

The FCHealth programme aims to solve hard computational challenges faced upon the emerging digitalization and wide adoption of data-driven approaches in healthcare. We combine state-of-the-art computational methods with large-real world data arising in healthcare and personalized medicine, analysed in collaboration with experts from Aalto University, University of Helsinki, Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS) as well as Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM).

HAIC (Helsinki Aalto Center for Information Security) is a strategic initiative set up by Aalto University and the University of Helsinki in June 2016 to ensure excellence in information security research and education. During the last few years, Aalto University and the University of Helsinki have built up strong research groups and education programs in information security and privacy. HIIT hosts the research arm of HAIC as a research program. The long-term mission of the HAIC Research Unit towards the year 2025 is to enable the design, building and deployment of distributed large-scale systems, where each node (component, device, network element etc.) contributes in verifying trustworthiness of the entire system. Each node would also be able to verify whether any other node or even the entire system is trustworthy.

Data science, i.e., extraction of knowledge and insights from data, is important across many fields of science. HiDATA, Helsinki Centre for Data Science, aims to create a world-class research and research-based education hub of data science in Helsinki, as a joint effort between the University of Helsinki and Aalto University. HiDATA builds on the existing, strong research in various areas of data science, and aims to provide novel synergies across disciplines. HiDATA is funded in 2017-2021 as part of the profiling measures of the Academy of Finland, the University of Helsinki and Aalto University.