Lea Kutvonen
Docent and University lecturer · Department of Computer Science · Faculty of Science · University of Helsinki · Helsinki · Finland
Contact information
- Email: Lea.Kutvonen@cs.Helsinki.FI
- Mobile phone: +358 2941 51362
- Postal address:
Department of Computer Science
P.O. Box 68 (Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2b) FIN-00014 UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI, FINLAND - Visiting address:
Exactum, office D221, Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2b, 00560 Helsinki -
Office hours for short discussions that need no special appointment:
Autumn 2017, Period I: Tuesdays 10.00-10.30, Thursdays 13.00-13.30;
Autumn 2017, Period II: Tuesdays 13.00-13.30, Thursdays 10.00-10.30; See Exceptions on office hours. Thesis advisory appointment time reservations instructed separately after initial meeting.
Short CV
Lea Kutvonen received her PhD on computer science in 1998 at University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science. In 2000's she spent about 8 years as the leading professor of Distributed systems and data communication at the department, and about 12 years in the department board. Currently she leads the Collaborative and Interoperable Computing Group (CINCO). Her research interests lie in open service ecosystems, i.e., mature environments and methods for interenterprise collaboration for networked business. This involves alignment of infrastructure services for collaboration management, service-oriented software engineering, and governance at enterprise and ecosystem levels.
Lea Kutvonen has been active in scientific societies and standardisation. She is a member in IFIP WG6.1 and vice chair in IFIP WG5.8. She has been active in various ODP RM (open distributed processing) standards groups, and supported standards on service-oriented and cloud computing in ISO. She has been a board member, vice chair and chair of the Finnish association of Computer Science. As a member of EU INTEROP NoE and VLAb she has been initiating member of a number of workshop series, and have hosted a number of international conferences.
Research themes summary
service ecosystems - inter-enterprise service collaborations governed by contracts - Service interoperability; enterprise interoperability - business transactions and dynamic case management - breach detection and recovery - trust and privacy - service-oriented enterprise architecture and service engineering - service sciences - model-driven engineering and models at runtime - self-adaptable service systems
Research interests
I am a computer scientist by education, but am driven further by a curiosity on how client-centric services can be jointly provided by multiple organisations through their individual service applications. For example, think how you do shopping on the net, how rescue staff from different countries need to share information in a crisis situation, or how home-care services are combined from public and private domain components.
As a computer scientist, I am fascinated by the variety of new business models and mobile services that are presently being innovated. However, I also detect the training wheels on these innovation ecosystems. Some examples. First, the environments in which the services are built are still rather basic software engineering environments; support for interoperability, composability and governance by policies or regulations is still missing. Second, even the "global solutions" require a shared coordinating decision-maker, either in terms of technological platform, legal systems noted, or user preferences acknowledged. Finally, the current development funding schemes direct the development of new business ideas, that might not tolerate competition in the open market.
My research goals are associated with the collaborations of software-supported services that span organisational boundaries. This is the category of services into which all the above examples fall into. In this kind of environment, we want each client to have an independent collaboration-case for them, that is easy to create and administer. By administration we mean that the client can rely on the organisations involved, and the service adapts to the clients equipment and personal needs without extra limitations or undue effort. Further, the administration means that most appropropriate component services are connected to the case without risks in terms of cost, breaches of regulations or privacy, undetected failures of interoperability, and other relevant technical and business aspects.
My research results involve open service ecosystems. They are mature environments and methods for inter-enterprise collaboration administration and governance. There are i) infrastructure services for collaboration management, and ii) service-oriented software engineering methods to produce software that is administrable by the infrastructure means. Finally, there are governance methods at enterprise and ecosystem levels in order to maintain strategies on directing the capabilities of the collaborations towards the needs of the society.
I am the founder and the leader of the research group CINCO (Collaborative and Interoperable Computing); you can find us at http://cinco.cs.helsinki.fi to further familiarise with our results.
I am also heavily involved in academic education in this particular field. We need increasing numbers of strategic renovators of global infrastructure architectures, and builders of risk defusing engineering tools for safe collaborations.
Projects and publications
For the history of research groups I refer to CINCO group pages, and the summarising booklets. I started collecting funds for my research group right after receiving my MSc degree, and have mostly run nationally funded projects with TEKES or Acedemy of Finland.
For publications, please refer to CINCO publications.
For the summary of research results from the 1st and 2nd decade, please refer to booklets of First decade of NODES and "The 2nd decade of CINCO".
The 2nd decade report points out the following key research results:
- Pilarcos ecosystem architecture for inter-enterprise collaboration management that focuses on multi-partner contracts, operation-time contract agent usage, and trust and privacy management;
- eContracting process with two phases: i) population of business network model roles in such a way that all levels of interoperability and business requirements become fulfilled, based on public metainformation; and ii) a refining negotiation phase where trust and strategic willingess to become member of a particular collaboration is evaluated by each partner privately;
- monitoring for contract breach detection and breach recovery approaches;
- enhanced business transaction management that combines strict ACID properties for contractual state of the collaboration to be maintained, but relaxes the concept of transactions in the intermediate business processes, while adding subjective transaction management capabilities for each participating organisation;
- reputation-based trust management; and
- model-driven way of managing collaboration metainformation in order to enforce correct behaviour in the collaborations;
In other terms, the results can be viewed in terms of
- participation in 9 national projects, 6 international networks, and
- production of a hundred research publications and a hundred theses of MSc or PhD level.
Education
At present, the regular educational calendar includes
- a yearly course on Service ecosystems
- a biannual course on model-based integration of services in inter-organisational environment (course name: service-oriented software engineering with MDE)
- a constantly running laboratory course where modeling, application generation and ecosystem behaviour can be tried out
- a constantly running self-study course on Research methods for NODES (network of research groups associated to the Networking and services specialisation line (formerly Distributed systems and data communication line)
- an autumn term seminar on Trends in Service-oriented computing, with varying focal theme
- an autumn term seminar on Trends in Enterprise interoperability, with varying focal theme
- batchelor, master and PhD level theses advisory.
Earlier educational units have included
- C, UNIX, Middleware, Software architecture, software engineering, Scientific writing, Distributed systems, eCommerce and Internet;
- Seminars on Distributed applications, open distributed systems, electronic commerce, reflective systems, interoperability, service-oriented systems, virtual organisations, multimedia communication, ubiquitous computing
Theses supervised and evaluated include
- supervision of licentiate thesis Lea Viljanen and Toni Ruokolainen
- supervision of PhD theses by Sini Ruohomaa, Toni Ruokolainen, Petteri Pöyhönen
- about 140 MSc theses, and propably a similar number of BSc theses
- evaluation of international PhD theses by Alex Norta, Juanjuan Jiang, Andreas Jacobsson, and a few more (the evaluator's identity is not always public knowledge);
- running Finnish computer science dissertation competition 2000-2002 for Finnish Society of Computer Science; involves ranking of best computer sciences dissertations of each year for Computer Sciences, and simultaneously evaluation of the candidates and selecting Cor Baayen candidates from Finnish Universities