Each year the Department and HIIT recruit summer interns to work in research projects over the Summer. The call opens in early Spring and the projects start in early Summer.

The summer interns presented their projects in the traditional results seminar on 17.8. The seminar consisted of three sessions and 13 presentations. The sessions clustered around three central topics: CS theory, bioinformatics, and networking and applications. The projects are indicative of the strong interdisciplinary research tradition of the Department.

In the first session, the participants heard about path optimization and planning, different aspects of graph theory, improved Inverse Burrows-Wheeler transform and computational poetry generation. Graph theory was specifically covered in two of the talks with one considering the number of connected subsets in bounded degree graphs, and the second one considering models of distributed computation. Discussions varied from algorithmic complexity to the possibilities of computer-generated poetry in appreciating and criticizing poetry.

The second session focused on bioinformatics with computational techniques for processing RNA-seq, microarray, and mass spectrometer data. The participants heard about the different algorithms for combining, splicing, and comparing genomic data as well as how to fingerprint mass spectral data. The talks highlighted the central nature of efficient algorithms and structures for processing vast amounts of biological data.

The third and final session focused on networking and applications related topics. The participants heard about a system for aggregating and ranking various Internet resources, and efficient content delivery in delay tolerant networks. The last two talks focused on human centric issues. We heard about the information capacity of the human motor system, which could be used to develop new more adaptive user interfaces. The final talk was about an ongoing project that investigated the monitoring of the daily lives of people with a novel gateway device with special emphasis on privacy and the consent of the people being monitored. The results of this experiment potentially results in new ways of understanding home ICT usage as well as how to address privacy challenges in data gathering.

In all, the day covered a lot of ground and the topics demonstrate that a lot of cool activities are being pursued at the Department and advancing the state of the art.

Results seminar in progress (photo by Marko Ikonen).