Eemil Lagerspetz was awarded a grant by the Jorma Ollila fund of Nokia Foundation on November 24, 2015

 

 
 
Eemil Lagerspetz was awarded a grant by the Jorma Ollila fund of Nokia Foundation on November 24, 2015. Congratulations!
 
The fund was launched in year 2014 to support post doctoral research career development. 
The title of Eemil’s post doctoral research is “Mind The Gap: Combining Trajectory Datasets for a Holistic Picture of Human Mobility” and the research will be carried out at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2016.
 
 
Abstract: 
Human mobility in an urban environment is an important topic in both academia and the transport industry, as well as a core
interest in city planning, commercial center placement, and traffic control. Recent work has shown that the aggregate urban
mobility pattern follows the Lévy walk. In particular, urban mobility consists of a mix of multiple modes of transport,
incorporating many short legs or flights, often corresponding to walking, and few long flights, typically vehicular transport.
There are many human mobility datasets available, for example NYC Open Data, and Chicago as well as Beijing City
Lab. These contain movement data of people, smartphones, vehicles, or other identifiable objects.
These datasets can be fine-grained or very coarse, ranging from accurate vehicular GPS data to point surveys filled by
travel agency customers. They also always contain holes, or gaps, where data is missing for one reason or another, for example because the device in question was turned off, there were no traffic cameras that detect license plates on a particular leg of the journey, the smartphone was unable to obtain a cellular signal, or the customer neglected to fill the survey. To mitigate the gaps and obtain a holistic picture of human mobility, this work aims to develop algorithms for filling the gaps based on learned models and external data. 

 

 

Created date

25.11.2015 - 14:22

Not just the local hero

For the Department of Computer Science, the well-being of international staff has a long history. Everyday communication in English is an essential part of this.

“It makes no sense to be just the local hero. If we want to develop further, we’ll need to follow international research standards” emphasises Juergen Muench. The German Professor has been leading the Software Systems Engineering research group at Helsinki University’s Department of Computer Science since 2011.

Linus Torvalds inspiring department students


Linus Torvalds – alumnus of the department, doctor honoris causa of the University of Helsinki, the best known representative of Finnish computer science internationally – visited the Kumpula campus on 23 October. He answered the questions of students and staff during an informal Q&A session attended by some 300 guests. As the floor was open, and Torvalds emphasized that all questions were welcomed, the queries ranged from extreme to extreme

Exactum rooftop greenhouse experiment grows herbs

A greenhouse has been built on the roof of Exactum in a collaboration by the Department of Computer Science and the Fifth Dimension science project. To begin with, sedum grass is growing on the roof and tomatoes, courgettes and chilli in the greenhouse. The greenhouse is 9.4 square metres large.

The motivation for the computer scientists is the estimation that 2% of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans are emitted by equipment using information technology. This is more than e.g. air traffic produces globally. To the scientists, this is reason enough to look into how to decrease the impact of information technology on global warming.

Study, teach and do what is fun

New postgraduates have recently been selected for the HeCSE graduate school that the department shares with Aalto University. One of the rising young researchers is Antti Laaksonen.

 

Antti finished his Master’s degree in spring 2011. Those whose job description includes reading lightweight Scrum theses written for the industry may be heartened by the fact that this student wrote his thesis on a most essential area of computer science, i.e. minimization of regular expressions. Antti chose his topic himself, because it was ‘interesting and suitably challenging.’