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

Brain poetry

In the latest research result of the month section, we interview PhD student Jukka Toivanen about his recent work on brain poetry in the Discovery group led by professor Hannu Toivonen. How can humans and machines be creative together?

Kjell Lemström to be new Head of Studies

Since Jaakko Kurhila left the department to head the Open University, we had to find a new university lecturer to act as head of studies in short order. We received a total of 28 applications. Out of these, and after a preliminary qualification round, evaluations, interviews, and a department council hearing, Kjell Lemström (KL) was elected for the post. He started working as the department's Head of Studies on 2 March 2015, so the Head of the department (JP) conducted the following induction interview that very week.

This is by no means the first time Kjell has been employed by the department. He defended his thesis on ‘String Matching Techniques for Music Retrieval’ in 2000, and has held numerous teaching and research positions both before and after that, until he transferred to the Laurea University of Applied Sciences in 2011 (luckily, that was only temporary).

Head of Studies Jaakko Kurhila to head Open University

The Head of Studies at the department, University Lecturer Jaakko Kurhila, has been elected to the post of director of the Open University at the University of Helsinki. It was a tough race: all in all, 39 applicants sought the post, some of them through the Mercuri Urval headhunting process. After a consultant evaluation, interviews, and aptitude assessments, the preparatory committee for the post, the steering committee for the Open University, and the rector of the university came to a unanimous decision to select Jaakko, and the contract is already being drawn up.

Being selected from this prestigious group of applicants, and after such a thorough process, is indisputable proof of the qualifications of Jaakko and the high esteem the academic community has for him. The department extends its warmest congratulations to Jaakko for this career development and is proud of the success of its protégé.

Bridging the Gap Between Research and Standardization

In the fourth research result of the month, we report a joint work between the UH NODES group and the Cambridge NetOS group, lead by Prof. Sasu Tarkoma and Prof. Jon Crowcroft, respectively. Their work recently received the best paper award "Best of CCR" from ACM SIGCOMM.