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TUCS Newsletter 2.9.2013

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TUCS activities

New courses

Announcements

Latest publications at TUCS

TUCS activities

TUCS Distinguished Lecture Series

TUCS Distinguished Lecture on 27.9.: Jan van Leeuwen

Friday, September 27, 2013 at 13.15

ICT Building, Auditorium Lambda

Coffee served from 12:45

Jan van Leeuwen, Dept of Information and Computing Sciences Utrecht University The Netherlands: "What is computation?"

Host: Ion Petre, Åbo Akademi University

Abstract:

Various new ideas have developed lately about computation. Do we actually know what it is, despite what Turing told us? Are ‘abstract state machines’ the answer? Do Valiant's ecorithms count as computation? We will survey a number of issues in the Philosophy of Computing and present a new, epistemological view of computation that may radically change our understanding of computational processes (joint research with J. Wiedermann). What are the challenges for computer science?

The TUCS Distinguished Lecture Series is a forum for public lectures by outstanding national and international researchers in all aspects of computing, coming both from academia and industry. All lectures are free and open to the public.

Welcome!

TUCS GP doctoral defences

On Wednesday, August 28th, TUCS GP Student Alexander Wei Yin presented his Doctoral thesis "On Energy Efficient Computing Platforms" for public criticism. The opponent of M.Sc. Yin was Professor Zheng Yan from Xidian University, China. Adjunct Professor Pasi Liljeberg acted as the custos at this public defence.

Time: 12 noon

Place: Auditorium Lambda, The ICT Building

On Thursday, August 22nd, TUCS GP Student Mikołaj Olszewski presented his Doctoral thesis "Scaling Up Stepwise Feature Introduction to Construction of Large Software Systems" for public criticism. The opponent of M.Sc. Olszewski was Professor Kai Koskimies from Tampere University of Technology. Professor Ralph-Johan Back acted as the custos at this public defence.

Time: 12 noon

Place: Auditorium Gamma, The ICT Building

New courses

Inforte courses

Oulu 23–24/9/2013

REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING: LESSONS LEARNED

Speaker: Professor Alan M. Davis, University of University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, USA

Organizer: Professor Markku Oivo, University of Oulu

Registrations and more information: http://inforte.jyu.fi/events/req_engineering

 

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Jyväskylä 29–30/10/2013

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE MANAGEMENT

Speaker: Professor Robert Winter, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

Organizer: Post-doctoral researcher Mirja Pulkkinen, University of Jyväskylä

Registrations and more information: http://inforte.jyu.fi/events/ea

 

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Tampere 6–7/11/2013

PROCEDURAL CONTENT GENERATION IN GAMES

Speaker: Associate Professor Julian Togelius, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Organizer: Teaching associate Timo Kellomäki, Tampere University of Technology

Registrations and more information: http://inforte.jyu.fi/events/pcg

 

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Participating all seminars and workshops is FREE OF CHARGE for PhD students and staff members working in participating university departments. Check out the updated member list 2013 when registering: www.inforte.fi/participate

See detailed programs http://inforte.jyu.fi/

Intensive Course: Business Essentials for Scientists 2013

The technology transfer office at Åbo Akademi University organises an intensive course entitled "Business Essentials for Scientists" during weeks 41-43.

BES 2013 (2ECTS credits) is a seminar -based intensive course for Postdoctoral researchers or Doctoral Students.

The course is especially directed to reseachers coming from ICT, Biosciences, or Chemical Engineering, but we welcome applications also from other fields.

BES will introduce you for example to:

- Business strategy

- IPR Protection

- Marketing

- Accounting for Decision Making

- Local Entrepreneurs

- Innovation -related resources at ÅAU in Finland

Time: 12-18 p.m.

Dates: 7.10. , 10.10. , 16.10. , 18.10. , 21.10. and 23.10.

25 Scientists interested in Business and Commercialization of Innovations will be selected to attend BES 2013. The Course is available for scientists coming from Åbo Akademi and Turku University.

The course is organized by ÅAU's Technology Transfer Unit (TTO). Contact Lotta Bergman (lobergma@abo.fi) by 24.9. to get an application form!

Courses on transferable skills at University of Turku

http://www.utu.fi/fi/Tutkimus/tutkijakoulu/courses/Sivut/home.aspx

Announcements

Åbo Akademi Department of IT coordinates national initiative on many-core computing

The "Parallel Acceleration" project is concerned with the efficient use of many-core processors. The goal is to develop methods for the development of efficient applications with low energy consumption.

Today it is not any more possible to increase the clock-frequencies of processors to achieve higher performance. This is due to energy- and heat-problems that arise at the high clock frequencies that would be needed. Instead processor manufactures have turned towards integrating more processor cores with lower clock-frequencies onto the die. It is however very challenging to build software that effectively exploits such many-core processors.  The project has been initiated by the Finnish IT-industry to find solutions to this big challenge.

The project "Parallel Acceleration" supports the Finnish IT-Industry in this central area, and aims to substantially improve the global competitiveness of the participating companies. Through the project opportunities for new innovative and competitive products are created

The total volume of the project is 3Meuro/year for 3 years. The project consortium consist of the main actors in the area: Nokia, Ericsson, Renesas Mobile, Nokia Siemens Networks, F-secure, ABB, CSC, Tampere University of Technology, Aalto University, University of Oulu and Åbo Akademi University.

 

The project is coordinated by Åbo Akademi, and Prof. Johan Lilius acts as the Principal Investigator and Responsible Leader of the project.

Ask & Apply -event, Turku, September 5, 2013

The Ask& Apply- tour of the Finnish Academy arrives to Turku on the 5th of September. The venue for the event is Åbo Akademi's Arken building,​ the Armfelt- lecture hall at 1.00 p.m (13.00). The event is a co-organised with Åbo Akademi and Intermunicipal Hospital District of Southwest Finland.

The first part of the event is for all applicants. The event will be held in English. Questions in Ask an Expert"-groups are also allowed in Finnish and group 1 (Research Council for Biosciences and Environment) also in Swedish.

1.       September Call (30 min.)

2.       What constitutes a good application? (20 min.)

3.       Budgeting; Academy and Universities and VSSHP together (30 min.)

4.       Ask an expert –hour in groups (60 min.)

In part 4, the groups are formed according to the Research Councils of the Finnish Academy, which are:

The deadline for registrations is Friday 30th of August and registrations are taken on first come first serve basis (due to seat limitations of the venue). So, do register now!​

REGISTER HERE: http://www.webropolsurveys.com/S/752F1C294768D29D.par

Nokia Scholarships 2013

The mission of the Nokia Foundation is to support the scientific development of information and telecommunications technologies and to promote the research education sector in Finland. Multidisciplinary research that bridges knowledge from other fields, like social, behavioral, business and services sciences, is highly valued.

 

The application period for the Nokia Scholarship has now opened and will close on the 3rd of October, 2013 at 23:59 GMT+2.

 

Applicants may submit their Nokia Scholarship application online at http://www.aspicore-asp.net/nokiafoundation/. This application tool makes it possible to register, create a draft application, and save and continue the application submission at later session. Application instructions are located within the tool and there is a section marked “need help?” for any specific questions regarding the application. Please note that referees of the applicant may submit their recommendation directly to the tool, but they are only able to do so after the applicant has submitted the application. Thus it is advisable to prepare the application well in time, even though referees will have one extra week after the deadline to submit their recommendation.

 

Please also note that Nokia Foundation Visiting Professor grants can be applied throughout the year. More information about Nokia Foundation and all the Nokia Foundation Scholarships is available at: www.nokiafoundation.com .

Conference announcement: WORDS 2013, Turku, September 16-20, 2013

The 9th International conference on Words will be hosted by the Department of Mathematcs of the University of Turku (Finland) on September 16-20, 2013 under the auspices of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. It is organized by the FUNDIM Centre in connection with FiDiPro program of the Academy of Finland.

The central topic of the conference is combinatorics on words (i.e. the study of finite and infinite sequence of symbols) from varying points of view, including their combinatorial, algebraic and algorithmic aspects, as well as their applications.

Invited speakers:

Julien Cassaigne (University of Aix-Marseille - France)

Frederik Michel Dekking (Delft University of Technology - Netherlands)

Vesa Halava (University of Turku - Finland)

Gilbert Levitt (University of Caen - France)

Narad Rampersad (University of Winnipeg - Canada)

Marinella Sciortino (University of Palermo - Italy)

http://www.math.utu.fi/projects/words13/index.php

TUCS GP travel reports

TUCS GP travel report: Formal Methods Summer School by Bogdan Iancu

Full name of the event: 13th International School on Formal Methods for the Design of Computer, Communication and Software Systems Dynamical systems.

Place and date: Bertinoro, Italy, June 17-22, 2013

Type of event: Summer School

My article:

The scientific profile of the event: The aim of the summer school was to offer a broad view on current research on foundations of formal methods and their applications.

Opinion on the best paper and its topic: Renato Renner – Quantum Information Theory.

Number of participants: 30 participants

Social events: Welcome dinner, visit at the local Bertinoro Castle Museum.

Touristic impressions: The summer school took place in the beautiful commune of Bertinoro, situated half-way between Bologna and the Adriatic coast town of Rimini. The commune lies mostly on a hill and it has a great view over the Forli region of Italy. On a clear day, one can also notice the Adriatic coast from a distance. The classes were held in a castle, which serves as the University Residential Centre of Bertinoro.

TUCS GP travel report: ISIT 2013 by Toni Ernvall

Full name of the event: International Symposium on Information Theory 2013

Place and date: Istanbul, Turkey, July 7-12, 2013

Type of event: Conference

My article:

The scientific profile of the event: ISIT is the biggest conference on information theory. There are presentations for example on the following areas: channel coding, network coding and Shannon theory.

Opinion on the best paper and its topic: I think that 'Rate Region of the (4,3,3) Exact-Repair Regenerating Codes' by Chao Tian was a very good presentation because it was the first non-trivial characterization of a rate region of exact-repair regenerating codes.

Number of participants: About 700 talks so maybe about 1000 participants

Social events: Welcome reception and banquet dinner at Istanbul Convention and Exhibition Center.

Touristic impressions: The historic parts of Istanbul are very interesting. There are many notable buildings, including Hagia Sofia, Topkapi Palace, and Blue Mosque.

TUCS GP travel report: Eurographics Conference 2013 by Ville Timonen

Full name of the event: Eurographics Conference 2013

Place and date: Girona, Spain, May 6-10, 2013

Type of event: Conference

My article:

The scientific profile of the event: Eurographics is the top computer graphics conference in Europe. Papers cover a wide variety of CG topics, such as animation, modeling, rendering, fluid simulation, etc.

Opinion on the best paper and its topic: The best presentation of the conference, out of the ones I was able to see, was “Analytic Visibility on the GPU” which presents an exact analytic solution to multi-polygon anti-aliasing, important for very high quality graphics in computer games and movie special effects.

Number of participants: Roughly 500 people participated in Eurographics 2013

Social events: The opening ceremony was held in “Teatre Municipal”, an impressive old theatre. The conference dinner was held at a three Michelin star restaurant “El Celler De Can Roca”, voted the best restaurant in the world 2013 by “The World's 50 Best Restaurants”. Service was exuberant and the food was unusual yet very very good.

Touristic impressions: The conference was held at the University of Girona campus, relatively close to the city center of Girona. Girona is a small idyllic city, and especially the old city area is fascinating. Seafood is very fresh and of the highest standard.

TUCS GP travel report: EGSR'13 by Ville Timonen

Full name of the event: Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2013

Place and date: Zaragoza, Spain, June 19-21, 2013

Type of event: Conference

My article:

The scientific profile of the event: Eurographics Symposium on Rendering is a computer graphics conference which hosts high quality papers on rendering.

Opinion on the best paper and its topic: The best presentation of the conference was, in my opinion, “The Perils of Evoluationary Rendering Research: Beyond the Point Sample” which shows how higher-order light samples in many cases are superior to point light samples, which is the de-facto sampling strategy today in movie special effects.

Number of participants: Roughly 150 people participated in EGSR'13

Social events: As social events, there was a city tour and a conference dinner held at a restaurant overlooking the central river in the city center.

Touristic impressions: The conference venue was a gorgeous historic 115-year-old University building which is nowadays used to host political, cultural, and scientific events.

TUCS GP travel report: HPG'13 by Ville Timonen

Full name of the event: High Performance Graphics 2013

Place and date: Anaheim, USA, July 19-21, 2013

Type of event: Conference

My article:

The scientific profile of the event: High Performance Graphics is a computer graphics conference which hosts rendering related research papers and papers which improve the performance of the existing state-of-the-art rendering methods.

Opinion on the best paper and its topic: The best presentation of the conference in my opinion was “Fast Parallel Construction of High-Quality Bounding Volume Hierarchies” which introduces a very efficient method to balance BVH trees. Fast BVH methods are essential to high quality ray tracing applications such as movie special effects.

Number of participants: Roughly 200 people participated in HPG'13

Social events: As a social event, a banquet was held at the Bowers Museum, voted the best museum in Orange County. The Museum hosts art pieces from many ancient cultures.

Touristic impressions: The conference was held in Hilton Anaheim hotel, an up-scale hotel right next to Disney Land. Disney Land draws a lot of visitors annually, and therefore the general area is well set-up with all the services that a tourist might need. I enjoyed the best dinner with some exquisite local wines at a Hawaiian restaurant there.

TUCS GP travel report: Summer School on Cyber Physical Systems by Maryam Kamali

Full name of the event: Summer School on Cyber-Physical Systems

Place and date:Grenoble, France, July 8-12, 2013

Type of event: Summer School

The goal of the summer school was to cover different aspects of rigorous engineering of Cyber Physical Systems and to identify challenges, opportunities and research directions in these areas through a series of lectures by pioneers in CPS. The focus of the school was on system modeling and sensor networks. The invited speakers were from industry and academia in order to provide a great chance for participants to know people working in the field and to establish contacts for further collaborations.

Opinion on the best paper and its topic: I particularly liked the talk by Prof. Mafred Broy the most. He discussed about model based software and systems engineering. He introduced a theory and first concepts of an engineering methodology for the structured modeling in terms of formal specification, design and model-based implementation by state machines.

Number of participants: about 80

Social events: The social event of the school took place on July 10 at Le Per'Gras, located above La Bastille, Grenoble fortress. We had an outstanding view of the Alps with gastronomic dinner. We took the cable car, the famous “Bubbles” of Grenoble.

TUCS GP travel report: PIERS by Rajeev Kanth

 

Full name of the event: Progress In Electromagnetics Research Symposium, PIERS

Place and date: Stockholm, Sweden, August 12-15, 2013

Type of event: Conference

My article:

The scientific profile of the event: Progress in Electromagnetics Research Symposium (PIERS) provides an international forum for reporting progress and recent advances in the modern development of electromagnetic theory and its new and exciting applications since 1989. Topics include radiation, propagation, diffraction, scattering, guidance, resonance, power, energy and force issues, and all other modern developments, with spectra ranging from statics to RF, microwave, photonics, and beyond.

Opinion on the best paper and its topic: I found interesting, the talk from Toni Björninen from Tampere Institute of Technology and topic of the talk was Manufacturing and Applications of Screen-printed RFID Tags on Paper Substrate.

Number of participants: That was a huge conference and number of participants was approximately 1000.

Social events: Social event was taken place as a welcome reception hosted by the City of Stockholm in the Stockholm City Hall, the same venue that every year hosts the Nobel Banquet that follows the Nobel Prize awards ceremony.

Touristic impressions: Stockholm has long been one of Sweden's cultural, media, political and economic centers. The city is known for its beauty, architecture, abundant clean and open water, and many parks.

TUCS GP travel report: iV2013 by Annika Holmbom

Full name of the event: 17th International Conference on Information Visualisation (iV2013)

Place and date: London, U.K., July 15-18, 2013

Type of event: Conference

My article:

The scientific profile of the event: The scientific profile of the iV2013 conference was information visualization, including theory, practice, applications and evaluation. The main aim was to find new ways and ideas on how to visually present information better, so that it is more easily understandable to the user. The information that was visualized ranged from text from different sources, data, facial expressions and knowledge in different formats. Most of the participants had a background in other related topics, e.g. computer science and information systems, with information visualization as an important part of their research.

Opinion on the best paper and its topic: The presentation I had been waiting for was a keynote given by Eugene Sorenson from Bloomberg, NY, USA “Visual Analysis of Financial Data”, but an unexpected power cut took place in the middle of his presentation. He gave the presentation the following day, but it was simultaneously with my own presentation, so unfortunately I missed it.

One session was in my opinion really interesting, though a bit different and artistic: Vis2013_1.8: Visualization, Art, and Design. The chair of the session was Prof. Vladimir Geroimenko from Plymouth University, UK. The three presentations given were:

  1. “Virtues and Vices: Examples of Medieval Knowledge Visualization” by Francis T. Marchese, Pace University, USA.
  2. “A mathematical look to the world” by Hervé Lehning, www.lehning.eu, France, and
  3. “Magic Squares and Aesthetic Events” by Hans Eberhard Dehlinger, Fang You, Jian Ming Wang and Ming Jiao, from University of Kassel, School of Arts, Germany; School of Communication and Design, and School of Software, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. Note: This last presentation gave me a clue on how Marimekko creates their fabulous designs on their fabrics. Not the ones lately accused of plagiarism, but the more “mathematical” ones consisting of stripes and boxes.

Number of participants: approx. 80-100 participants

Social events: Visualisation Social Networking Event was an evening cruise on the river Thames. A buffet dinner was served on the boat.

Touristic impressions: The conference venue was located in the central part of London within a walking distance from several interesting locations and with good tube and bus connections all over London city.

TUCS GP travel report: Research Visit to University of Southampton by Inna Pereverzeva

Full name of the event: Research visit to University of Southampton, UK, group of Michael Butler

Place and date: Southampton, U.K., May 1st - July 1st, 2013

Type of event: Research visit

The scientific profile: Michael Butler is internationally recognised as leading in refinement-based formal methods. He has made key methodological contributions to the Event-B formal method, especially around model composition and decomposition. He plays a leading role in the development of several tools for B and Event-B especially the Rodin toolset.

The aim of my research visit was to work on the principles of architectural decomposition. This topic is very important for achieving the objectives of my thesis.

Currently I have thoroughly studied the principles of specifying and verifying fault tolerant systems. The next important step towards defining a formal development technique for autonomic distributed systems is to integrate architectural decomposition into the development process. In our group, we do not have an experience in event-based decomposition, which is the main technique for deriving a distributed architecture.

During my visit I mastered the principles of atomicity decomposition and model decomposition in Event-B. Atomicity decomposition is one of the techniques to help with the structuring of refinement-based development of complex systems in Event-B. Atomicity decomposition diagrams provide a systematic means of introducing control structure into the Event-B development process. It provides a means to express refinement relations between events of different refinement levels, through a set of hierarchal diagrams. In addition it can be merged with model decomposition technique to manage the complexity of large models.

Based upon the research results during my visit, currently we are writing a paper entitled "Formal Derivation of Fault Tolerant MapReduce", co-authored by Inna Pereverzeva, Michael Butler, Asieh Salehi Fathabadi, Elena Troubitsyna and Linas Laibinis.

TUCS GP travel report: ICEIS 2013 by Hongyan Liu

Full name of the event: 15th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

Place and date: Angers, Loire Valley, Fance, July 4-7, 2013

Type of event: Conference

My article:

The scientific profile of the event: The ICEIS 2013 is sponsored by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC), co-organized by the ESEO Group, held in cooperation with the IEICE Special Interest Group on Software Interprise Modelling (SWIM), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), ACM SIGMIS - ACM Special Interest Group on Management Information Systems, ACM SIGCHI - ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction and in collaboration with the Informatics Research Center (IRC).

Six simultaneous tracks were held, including “Databases and Information Systems Integration”, “Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems”, “Information Systems Analysis and Specification”, “Software Agents and Internet Computing”, “Human-Computer Interaction”, and “Enterprise Architecture”.

The technical program of the conference included a panel and 4 invited talks delivered by internationally distinguished speakers, namely: Stephen Mellor (Freeter, United Kingdom), Fabien Gandon (Inria, France), Ulrich Frank (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany) and Henderik A. Proper (Public Research Centre - Henri Tudor, Luxembourg).

ICEIS 2013 received 321 paper submissions from 48 countries in all continents. From these, 27 papers were presented as full papers (30mins oral presentation), 80 papers reflecting work-in-progress were accepted for short presentation (20mins), and another 82 papers were presented in poster session. The total oral paper acceptance ratio is 33%.

Opinion on the best paper and its topic: The presentation given by one of the keynote speakers-- Fabien Gandon from Inria, France, entitled ‘Semantic and Social (Intra) Webs’, is the best presentation to my mind. In this talk, he reported the results of the ISICIL project which studies and experiments with the usage of new tools for assisting corporate intelligence tasks. These tools rely on web 2.0 advanced interfaces (blog, wiki, social bookmarking) for interactions and on semantic web technologies for interoperability and information processing.

Number of participants: about 300 participants

Social events: A dinner at the Grenier de Saint Jean. The dinner is accompanied by lyric singing of Verdi, Puccini, and others together with a string quartet. The dinner also includes the presentation and degustation of local wines from the Loire Valley region.

Touristic impressions: Angers is in western France, about 300km southwest of Paris, the capital city of province of Anjou. It is located in the Loire Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and a region notable for historic towns, castles, and wineyards.

TUCS GP travel report: INSNA by Tingting Lin

Full name of the event: XXXIII Sunbelt Social Networks Conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA)

Place and date: Hamburg, Germany, May 21-26, 2013

Type of event: conference

My article:

The scientific profile of the event: It is a multi-disciplinary conference covering all kinds of topics using SNA (Social Network Analysis).

Opinion on the best paper and its topic: There have been almost 700 paper presentations in the conference, so it is not possible for me to attend all of them. I can only tell that the sessions focusing on mixed method are most interesting for me. For example, Alan Sloane’s presentation titled “Socio-economic Process and Network Structure- Integrating Network and Qualitative Analysis” is very inspiring for my own research.

Number of participants: 1000+

Social events:

Touristic impressions: Hamburg is a big city, with many good restaurants. However, the weather was too rainy for the conference name of “Sunbelt”.

TUCS GP travel report: iV2013 by Samuel Rönnqvist

Full name of the event: 17th International Conference on Information Visualisation (iV2013)

Place and date: London, U.K., July 15-18, 2013

Type of event: Conference

My article:

The scientific profile of the event: The conference is a long-running conference on Information Visualisation, organized annually by the Information Visualisation forum. It has a wide focus ranging from information visualization theory to application. The participants mostly have their stronghold in computer science and visualization, but many come from widely varying areas including business, arts and engineering.

Opinion on the best paper and its topic: The best paper/presentation was perhaps ”Defining Visual User Interface Design Recommendations for Highway Traffic Management Centres” by Johanna Haider et al., which reviews literature from the human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology and information visualisation fields to the end of presenting a concise set of guidelines for the design of visualisations. The focus stems from requirements in systems for monitoring traffic flows, but is highly applicable to visualisation of any spatio-temporal data. The article constitutes a good entry point for anyone interested in the design of visualisation interfaces.

Number of participants: approximately 80

Social events: Conference dinner on river cruise

Touristic impressions: The conference venue was situated on the University of London campus in central London, with many sights conveniently nearby. Of special topical interest, I can mention the currently running Alan Turing exhibition at the Science Museum, as well as Broadwick Street (with its historical John Snow pub) in Soho.

TUCS GP travel report: HotSWUp'13 by Simon Holmbacka

Full name of the event: 2013 Usenix Federated Conferences Week (HotSWUp'13 workshop)

Place and date: San José, CA, USA, June 23 - July 1, 2013

Type of event: Conference

My article:

The scientific profile of the event: The Conference is a well established computer science conference which holds together several workshops and the Linux Journal publishing. Topics covered in the conference were Hot topics on: Parallel computing, Cloud computing, Feedback computing, Software updating, Usenix Women in Advanced computing and the Annual technical Usenix conference.

Opinion on the best paper and its topic: The best presentation was given by Eric Brewer with the title “Parallelism in the Cloud”. The presentation was in short about how to schedule work efficiently and with scalability in mind in a large cloud cluster.

Number of participants: Whole conference 200+ HotSWUp workshop: 20-30

Social events: Conference Happy hour after 6 pm

Touristic impressions: San José is the heart of Silicon valley which includes the headquarters of all the largest computer companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle,IBM,Intel, Broadcom, McAffe etc. The city is close to San Francisco and is easily reached by car or train.

Paper Summary:

My paper with title “A Lightweight Runtime Updating Framework for C-based Embedded Systems” was presented in the workshop HotSWUp'13. The workshop invited researchers from all fields of software updating and Peleus Uhley from Adobe held a keynote in the updating process of Flash Player.

My paper described the implementation of a runtime updating library developed in the framework of the RECOMP project. In short, the library enables the programmer to create runtime updatable programs for FreeRTOS based embedded systems. Use cases has so far been created for RECOMP demonstrators and a cooperation project with University of Granada, Spain.

TUCS GP travel report: Advanced RF Implementation Flow by Rajeev Kanth

Full name of the event: Advanced RF Implementation Flow

Place and date: Oxford, UK, January 14-18, 2013

Type of event: Summer School

The scientific profile of the event: This summer school was a five days intensive course which includes theoretical lectures and hands on lab exercises on implementation of widespread IC design skills in advanced deep submicron technologies and microwave passive component design and simulation. I have gained five credits for my doctoral studies. This course is very useful for me as my future research work may align towards this course theme.

Opinion on the best paper and its topic: In my opinion, the best lecture delivered was by A. Koukab, Professor of EPFL. The name of the topic was mixed mode SoC design and simulation technology.

Number of participants: 30

Social events: As the course was intensive, the social event did not take place.

Touristic impressions: Oxford and London are the famous touristic attractions nearby. I enjoyed the summer school.

TUCS GP travel report: ICSE-13 and MTD-13 by Johannes Holvitie

Full name of the event: 4th International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt (MTD) and 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

Place and date: San Francisco, USA, May 18-26, 2013

Type of event: Workshop and Conference

My article:

The scientific profile of the event: ICSE is regarded as one of the most influential conferences for the fields of software engineering and development. This was evident for this year's conference as well and could be measured in the number of high profile academia and industrial attendees. The MTD workshop was co-held within the ICSE conference. While this event is one of its kind when it comes to the field of software technical debt management and its research, the number of attendees taking part in this workshop indicated that the field was in very much an upward trend.

Opinion on the best paper and its topic: I was most intrigued by "Exploring Software Supply Chains From a Technical Debt Perspective", a paper by Monteith and McGregor. In this paper they discussed the use of betweenness centrality metric to indicate areas of a software implementation that were likely to be changed in the event of technical debt governance. The showcased experiment indicated that this metric was indeed very close to identifying those areas that were actually changed by expert developers. I found the paper to be of high quality and the presented approach to be something that I must get more acquainted with later on in my own research.

Number of participants: for ICSE circa 1400 and for MTD close to a hundred

Social events: As part of the ICSE, there were sponsored lunches as well as a banquet cruise with dinner. Excepting the cruise, this applied for MTD as well. Additionally, a tour around Silicon Valley including visits to and presentations from major companies.

Touristic impressions: San Francisco is a place of numerous sights. From this plethora, the most notable ones that I had a chance to visit were the Golden Gate Bridge, Pier 39, Lombardo Street, the Coit Tower, and the Cable Cars.

TUCS GP travel report: PAAMS 2013 by Natalia Díaz Rodríguez

Full name of the event: 10th International Symposium on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence within PAAMS (11th International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems)

Place and date: Salamanca, Spain, May 22-24, 2013

Type of event: Symposium

My article:

The scientific profile of the event: Most of the papers and topics were around agents. However, very diverse papers were presented on distributed computing and on Ambient Intelligence, since there was collocated 6 different events at the same time (http://dcai.usal.es/events)

Opinion on the best paper and its topic: I found very relevant for my research two papers, the first one entitled Multimodal Indoor Tracking of a Single Elder in an AAL Environment by Ismail and Florea, and the second, entitled Kitchen AS-A-PAL: Exploring Smart Objects as Containers, Surfaces and Actuators by Surie et al.

Number of participants: about 200-300

Social events: There was a cocktail reception at Palacio Anaya, a very nice old palace with patios and typical Spanish tapas. There are plenty of patios in Salamanca in all the historical buildings, which are very well conserved and still today serve as main faculty buildings. There was also a guided tour around the old city, a gala dinner and two nights socializing at a bar/pub.

Touristic impressions: Uni. Of Salamanca is the oldest universities in Spain and the third oldest in Europe. I could say it is one of the most beautiful cities in Spain, it is full of students and it is small; everything in the city is within walking distance.

Open jobs at University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University

Latest publications at TUCS

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