International Dissertation Award to Jeremias Berg
Jeremias Berg receives the 2020 Doctoral Research Award of the Association for Constraint Programming.
Jeremias Berg of the Constraint Reasoning and Optimization Group has been awarded the 2020 Doctoral Research Award of the Association for Constraint Programming (ACP) for his PhD thesis Solving Optimization Problems via Maximum Satisfiability: Encodings and Re-Encodings. [...]
Students and companies work together in Data Science program.
MSc program´s Data Science Project course is built around data science projects for external clients, like companies or research organizations. The course instructors accept project proposals from potential clients until the end of November 2020.
During the course, students will work in teams to provide prototype products to the clients. [...]
Project manager for the ELISE project
Hanna Poikela will start on as a project manager in an EU-funded project called ELISE on September 1. 2020.
Ms Poikela will be responsible for the administrative coordination of this 12M€ project that brings together top AI experts from over 100 organizations in the ELLIS network of excellence (ellis.eu).[...]
Translation models made in Helsinki are now integrated in Hugging Face transformers
Huge contribution has been made to democratize natural language processing. Translation models made in Helsinki are now integrated in Hugging Face transformers, the world’s most popular library for working with deep neural NLP models.
In memoriam: Jorma Rissanen, inventor of arithmetic coding and celebrated information theorist
One of the most accomplished and celebrated Finnish scientists, Jorma Rissanen, passed away at age 87 after a long illness in Los Gatos, California, on 9 May 2020.
Jorma Rissanen’s career and discoveries have been a continuous source of inspiration for generations of researchers and students. He was perhaps best known for his Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle, a fundamental principle of inductive inference. [...]
Multidisciplinary pilot project explored smart textiles and virtual reality in rehabilitation of stroke patients
The mc² – Mobile Cloud Computing group at Aalto University is doing experimental systems research on Virtual Reality (VR) and wearable sensing technologies. In a recent project with Kuopio University Hospital and Savonia University of Applied Science, they explored physical therapy as a potential application area. The idea was to create VR exergames and accompanying […]
FCAI supports the Finnish Government’s new expert group on AI and digitalization
Sirpa Paatero, the Finnish Minister of Local Government, has set up a new expert group on artificial intelligence and digitalization. Several members of FCAI were appointed as the expert group members.
Professor Petri Myllymäki was appointed as a permanent member of the group, while Professor Sasu Tarkoma, who at FCAI leads its collaboration with the 6GFlagship, and Dr. Jaana Leikas, the chairperson […]
Siamese neural networks applied to algorithm selection in recommender systems
The performance of a recommendation algorithm varies in different scenarios, and intuitions about what algorithms are best suited to a given scenario can be elusive even to recommender system experts. Furthermore, choosing a single algorithm that performs well across all the scenarios often reduces the effectiveness of the system in specific scenarios. In the domain of scholarly article recommendation, for example, […]
Foundations of animal-computer interaction explored with monkeys of the Helsinki Zoo
Much like humans, animals have also been using computers for a long time. Historically animals have used computer technology in space, used lexigrams (symbol keyboards) to form language, and dolphins have used underwater keyboards. Drawing parallels to human-computer interaction (HCI) research, which studies how humans use computers, ACI aims to investigate how animals interact with technology and the design of […]
Momentum of the MyData movement continues
The conferences of MyData Global have established their position as the premier events for the rapidly growing community interested in human-centered personal data management. MyData 2019, organised on 25-27 September in Helsinki, brought together 975 participants from 46 countries. The programme was arranged in 9 thematic tracks with “Rebuilding trust – for human-centered […]
Nordita program on Solar Helicities brought together observers, modelers and theorists
Understanding the Sun to the extent that we can predict how its magnetic field drives space weather and climate is an extremely challenging but important problem for the present-day, increasingly hi-tech, society. Key variables in this process are solar helicities, broadly speaking meaning twist of velocity or magnetic field. Magnetic helicity, for example, can be linked to the eruptibility of […]
Automatic dialogue generation demonstrated in an international conference on games
How does natural language generation relate to games? These two concepts that are seemingly far away from each other are surprisingly related. In the 14th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2019), two doctoral students of the University of Helsinki, Khalid Alnajjar from computer science and Mika Hämäläinen […]
Thermal cameras hold promise for improved energy management in smart buildings
Improving energy management of buildings is among the most promising application areas of new technology for sustainable living. The Pervasive Data Science Group of the University of Helsinki is experimenting with thermal cameras to gather fine-grained information for use as actionable feedback to heating, cooling and ventilation (HVAC) devices in shared living spaces. The idea is […]
Collaboration with Novartis in the field of Bayesian modelling
With support from HIIT, Topi Paananen from the Probabilistic Machine Learning (PML) group at Aalto University, recently did a 3-month research visit to the pharmaceutical company Novartis in Switzerland. During the visit, Topi and his collaborators worked on methods for constructing prior distributions in Bayesian analyses on longitudinal data sets. The methods were used with real medical data […]
Aalto’s Data Management Group develops cross-disciplinary collaboration in computational social science
Marta Kołczyńska was a visiting researcher at the Department of Computer Science of Aalto University from 21 April to 23 June, 2019. Marta is a post-doctoral researcher in sociology at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. During the visit, she collaborated with the group of Aristides […]
Research collaboration with Stockholm University in the field of Human-Computer Interaction
With the aid of HIIT Community Support, Jesse Haapoja, who is part of the Digital Content Communities (DCC) group at Aalto University’s Department of Computer Science, visited the Post-Interaction Computing group (PIC) at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University, Sweden. The visit lasted for three months during the spring of 2019. PIC […]
Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon #DHH19 | 15.-24.5.2019
Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon #DHH19 gathered students and researchers of humanities, social sciences, and computer science in May at the University of Helsinki. During a week and a half of intensive multi-disciplinary work, the groups applied digital methods to a variety of datasets, with the goal of solving research questions in the following themes:
- The […]
HIIT Open 2019 programming contest
The 4th HIIT Open programming contest was organised on 25 May 2019 in Otaniemi. The contest was open to everyone interested in programming and algorithmic challenges, and in addition to the universities in the Helsinki region, there were participants from Finnish high schools and companies, and two teams from Tallinn University of Technology. The youngest team, named “Piltit”, was not even in high school yet. The […]
Application of big data methods in sustainability science discussed in a workshop
Big data and increasing computing power can contribute to more sophisticated monitoring and modeling to address sustainability challenges and enable more informed decision-making. For instance, ecological monitoring towards resource optimisation, environmental risk assessment, and real-time reporting and assessment of environmental quality indicators are domains where big data is increasingly used. At the same time, environmental social scientists are discovering […]
5G enabled IoT innovations created at IoThon
5G mobile networks are tested and built all around the world and companies are looking for new business areas and service concepts enabled by 5G. IoThon 2019 brought together 110 students and developers from all over Europe for a 48-hour hackathon with challenges set by Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Telia and RIOT community. The challenges ranged from […]