Events 2006
The main speaker at the seminar to celebrate 15 years of Linux was Jon “Maddog” Hall with a talk role of Linux and its future in a global perspective. Other speakers discussed the birth of Linux, the new generation of Finnish developers and the new work method that led to the birth of the operating system.
January
12 January
Guest lecture by Jiaheng Lu: From Region Encoding To Extended Dewey: On Efficient Processing of XML Twig Pattern Matching
31 January
Guest lecture by Rene Mayrhofer, PhD ( University of Lancaster ): Context prediction based on learning user habits: A next step towards "smart" system
February
1 February
The Finnish Linux and Open Source Initiative (FILOSI) forum started operations. FILOSI brings together Linux expertise and promotes open-source development. It is a forum for software research institutions and companies established by IBM, Ericsson, Nokia, the University of Helsinki, Tampere University of Technology, the University of Oulu, HIIT (Helsinki Institute for Information Technology), the Centre for Scientific Computing CSC and COSS (Centre for Open Source Software).
1 February
Guest lecture by Tommi Jaakkola, PhD (MIT CSAIL): Game theory, biology, and the binding game
2 February
Guest lecture by Rene Mayrhofer, PhD ( University of Lancaster ): Context authentication: making secure communication more user-friendly
20 February
HOSLAB – Helsinki Open Source Laboratory – started operations. HOSLAB stores and distributes high-end Finnish open-source software and computer science teaching material on the internet.
28 February
Guest lecture by Professor Masanori Arita ( University of Tokyo ): Metabolome Research in Japan
March
15 March
Tekes awarded the spearhead project “Trustworthy Internet” MEUR 1.8 of research funding for a three-year period 2006-2008. The project, managed by HIIT, brings together the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki and the Telecommunications and Multimedia Laboratory at Helsinki University of Technology.
17 March
Antti Viljamaa's dissertation: Specifying Reuse Interfaces for Task-Oriented Framework Specialization
April
26 April
At the demonstrations of the software engineering projects, students presented, among other things, an observation system for football referees that they had developed for the Football Association.
29 April
Sasu Tarkoma's dissertation: Efficient Content-based Routing, Mobility-aware Topologies, and Temporal Subspace Matching
May
4-5 May: Digital Semantic Content across Cultures
A Finnish-French symposium at the Louvre in Paris on research in eCulture and applications, like the semantic web and ontologies. The SeCo (Semantic Computing) research group of the Department of Computer Science and Helsinki University of Technology acted as one of the organisers of the symposium.
9 May
Guest lecture by Gao Cong ( University of Edinburgh ): Mining top-k covering rule group from microarray data and classifying microarray data
10 May
Guest lecture by Gemma Garriga (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona ): On Identifying Discriminative Combinations of Features for Labeled Data
18-21 May: Baltic Olympiad in Informatics (BOI)
BOI is a competition for upper-secondary pupils in the Baltic area who are interested in IT. In 2006, the Department of Computer Science and the Board of Education arranged the Olympiad at the Heinola high school. Out of 50 participants, the Polish and the Finnish pupils were most successful.
30 May
Guest lecture by Dr Michael Madden (National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland): Machine Learning Techniques for Analysing Chemical Data for Hazardous Materials and Illegal Drugs
June
5-6 June: Annual meeting for computer scientists
New disciplines met at the annual get-together with presentations on subjects like bioinformatics and scientific computation. The annual dissertation and master's thesis prices were also awarded at the meeting. Both prizes went to Helsinki : Taneli Mielikäinen, PhD, was awarded for his dissertation on data mining and Gian Donato Colussi, MSc, was awarded for his thesis on congestion control on the Internet.
14 June
Guest lecture by Rainer Typke (Utrecht University, The Netherlands): Music Notation Retrieval with Transportation Distances - Distance Measure, Indexing Method, and Human-generated Ground Truth for Melodic Similarity
15-16 June: 3rd International Service Availability Symposium (ISAS 2006)
ISAS promotes support for 24/7 availability when constructing new systems. The symposium acts in the middle ground between the corporate and the academic world. Nokia was the main organiser, while the Department of Computer Science assisted.
17-18 June: Probabilistic Modeling and Machine Learning in Structural and Systems Biology (PMSB 2006)
An international meeting arranged by the Department of Computer Science and Helsinki University of Technology to discuss machine learning and statistical modelling in structural and system biology.
July
4 July
Guest lecture by Kamal Ali, Chi Chao Chang, and Yun-fang Juan: A Framework for Human Evaluation of Search Engine Relevance
6-8 July: International Workshop on Intelligent Information Access (IIIA2006)
An international group of leading internet-search experts from both academia and corporations met to ponder the future of internet search engines at a meeting arranged by the department of Computer Science and HIIT.
August
15 August
The national research project Finnish semantic web ontologies (FinnONTO) 2003-2007 was awarded c. MEUR 1.1 from Tekes and an exceptionally large research consortium comprising 36 companies and public organisations. FinnONTO develops the content structure of a Finnish semantic web and pilots practical applications.
17 August
Guest lecture by Hans Ulrich Simon (Ruhr-University Bochum): Spectral Norm in Learning Theory: Some Selected Topics
23 August
Guest lecture by François Nicolas (LIRMM, Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier , France ): Hardness of Optimal Spaced Seed Design
30 August
Presentation of current Projects in Bioinformatics & Biomedical Informatics within the Foundation for Biomedical Research of the Academy of Athens by Dr Sophia Kossida ( Academy of Athens , Foundation for Biomedical Research, Biotechnology Laboratory)
September
4 September
The Linux operating system was first developed at the department, so in collaboration with the Centre of Open Source Software, the department arranged a seminar to celebrate 15 years of Linux. The keynote speaker of the seminar was Jon ‘Maddog' Hall, executive director of Linux international, who pondered the role of Linux and its global future. Other speakers discussed subjects like the birth of Linux, the new generation of Finnish developers, and the new work routines that have led to the development of the OS. The seminar was attended by a live audience of c. 250 persons and over a hundred online guests.
Online video from the seminar: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/linux15vuotta/
9 September
The open-house event at the Kumpula campus attracted over 2000 visitors. Attractions at the Department of Computer Science included playing games developed by computer science undergraduates, hearing talks on subjects ranging from the functions of the Internet to how computational methods can cast light on the history of Saint Henrik's legend.
12 September
Guest lecture by Professor Dimitri Bertsekas (MIT): Dynamic and Neuro-Dynamic Programming: An Overview and Recent Work
20 September
Guest lecture Professor Dimitri Bertsekas (MIT): A New Look at Convexity, Duality, and Optimization
October
9 October
Guest lecture by Dr Andre Bondi (Siemens Corporate Research, Inc): Experience with Performance Engineering in an Agile Development Process
12 October
Guest lecture by Francesco Bonchi (Knowledge Discovery and Delivery Laboratory (KDD), Pisa , Italy ): Mining mobility data - opportunities and privacy threats: the GeoPKDD approach
November
14 November
Miro Lehtonen's dissertation: Indexing Heterogeneous XML for Full-Text Search
15 November
Guest lecture by Nora Pierstorff ( Institute of Genetics of the University of Cologne ): Identifying cis-regulatory modules by combining comparative and compositional analysis of DNA
16 November
Guest lecture by Roger Dannenberg: Music Understanding by Computer
22 November
Ari Rantanen's dissertation: Algorithms for 13C metabolic flux analysis
24 November
Guest lecture by Jussi Kangasharju, PhD (Technische Universität Darmstadt): Challenges in Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution
26 November
The student's union at the University of Helsinki awarded Computer Science Department lecturer Arto Wikla the Magister Bonus prize. The prize is awarded to instructors who have shown a skilled and interested approach to their work and their students.
December
5 December
The SOAMeS project organised an open seminar on implementing service orientation in corporate systems.
7 December
Demo day for the software engineering projects; students presented software they had produced during the projects, including a document browser based on metadata and an interactive geographical information system (GIS).
14 December
Robot race: vacuum cleaner robots programmed by student project groups navigated a track with obstacles. The vacuum cleaner robots used mobile phone cameras as their eyes. The race was videoed live both to the spectator stand in Exactum and to the Internet.
14 December
Algodan, the research group on algorithmic data analysis, is one of 18 Finnish Academy Centres of Excellence during 2008-2013. The unit mainly works at the Department of Computer Science, and Helsinki University of Technology also participates. Algodan develops new concepts, principles and algorithms for computational data analysis, and applies them in practice. Both basic computer science research and widely applied collaboration are carried out in the unit. The group is headed by Research Director Esko Ukkonen.
18 December
Evimaria Terzi's dissertation: Problems and Algorithms for Sequence Segmentations