tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80962695322970582422024-03-24T13:11:48.339+02:00Cognitive SystemsAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.comBlogger133125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-25431469486095519452016-08-10T18:31:00.001+03:002016-08-11T00:43:45.146+03:00Towards new innovations in legal and regulatory systems<p>
On 4th of April 2016 in the <a href="http://blogs.helsinki.fi/tuhonkel/2016/01/07/modeling-meaning-and-knowledge-spring-2016/">Modeling Meaning and Knowledge</a> series of mini-symposia, <a href="https://tuhat.halvi.helsinki.fi/portal/en/persons/arho-toikka%282361b9c5-64c4-4367-b4b5-0ecc011d9e36%29.html">Arho Toikka</a> gave a talk on Creating scientific knowledge as a social process. This was preceded by a short tutorial entitled <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/timohonkela/timo-honkela-kuhns-structure-of-scientific-revolutions-and-grdenfors-conceptual-spaces">Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Gärdenfors’ Conceptual Spaces</a>, presented by <a href="http://375humanistia.helsinki.fi/en/humanists/timo-honkela">Timo Honkela</a>.
Toikka's presentation was related to his collaboration with <a href="http://blogs.helsinki.fi/njanasik/">Nina Janasik-Honkela</a>. <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Arho_Toikka/publication/259522480_Coming_to_grips_with_scientific_ignorance_in_the_governance_of_endocrine_disrupting_chemicals_and_nanoparticles/links/0c960532af7e501a31000000.pdf">Their work</a> has addressed, for instance, socio-cognitive views on risk assessment when nanoparticles and endocrine disrupting chemicals are considered. Toikka discussed in detail the social construction of knowledge. Toikka pointed out that
<ul>
<li>the relation between knowledge is done by purposeful humans that collaborate with each other,
<li>science is a special set of tools that produces ever-improving results, and
<li>but the human cannot be defined away.
</ul>
What results is that science and knowledge itself become objects of inquiry.
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<p>
In the discussion following the presentation, <a href=" http://www.sitra.fi/en/people/timo-hamalainen">Timo Hämäläinen</a> mentioned uncertainty, complexity science and the role of wicked problems in policy making. Hämäläinen has written an interesting article on a related topic entitled "<a href="http://timreview.ca/article/935">Governance Solutions for Wicked Problems: Metropolitan Innovation Ecosystems as Frontrunners to Sustainable Well-Being</a>". Hämäläinen also told about a <a href="http://www2.hull.ac.uk/hubs/news-events/news/2016_news/april2016/second-order-science.aspx">workshop on Second Order Science</a> that took place in Scotland. <a href="http://www.sitra.fi/en/blog/research-and-training/second-order-science-comes-rescue-complex-world">Second Order Science takes</a> the complexity of the world as its starting point.
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The presentation and the discussions inspired to consider the relationship between regulatory and legal systems in one hand and different paradigms of artificial intelligence in the other. Namely, policy making and regulations are based on explicit rules that are not very unlike from the rules used as representation in the traditional artificial intelligence. The limitations of symbolic, rule-based representations have become more and more obvious since the highest peak of activity of development in the 1980s. A number of rule-based expert systems were developed but they could not reach the ambitious goals set to them. To put it simply, experts cannot explain the principles that they use in problem solving. It also seems that complex expert knowledge cannot be represented as a collection of symbolic/logical rules. This is still disputed even though I have had the chance to work in this area since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many neural network modeling people have been in this field but at the early stages many such people came from signal processing backgrounds and only later tasks such as natural language processing and knowledge representation using neural networks have become commonplace.
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Even nowadays the vast majority of representing legal knowledge and regulations (if not in practice all) is represented in the form of written sentences and rules. As already said, representing knowledge in the form of rules has serious limitations. In order to reach the complexity of real world situations one should not imagine that wicked problems and changing context-dependent situations could be addressed successfully with limited number of simple rules. We live in a complex world: what may work in one context, can be unsatisfactory in another and catastrophic in yet another one. It is known well in design that people formulated solutions so that they take their own needs, experience and understanding as a starting point. Thus the solutions work best for those who are similar regarding the essential parameters. The same holds true for regulations. <i>It must be underlined that it is not by definition fair and right to have the same rules for all</i>. How outrageous this may first sound, this conclusion becomes obvious when one considers different people, different contexts, different times, etc. These kinds of contextual differences are taken into account in many practical regulatory situations. Simplicity is aimed at because keeping track of the effects of the regulations becomes easily too difficult. Here neural digital forms of representations and statistical machine learning methods could come into help. Explaining details needs another story but to put it shortly, these kinds of methods can be used to formulate high-dimensional regulations in a data-driven manner, potentially supported by crowdsourcing. Principles of fairness can be checked and ensured by considering the shapes of decision making surfaces. Moreover, limited number of key points of the decision making surface can be shown to make it understandable. In summary, legal and regulatory systems could be renewed in a radical manner in order to reach fairness and functionality over the whole decision making space, not only in a limited subset of it.
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<p>
In a separate discussion, Timo Hämäläinen brought up the book "<a href="https://hbr.org/2012/09/simple-rules-for-a-complex-world">Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World</a>" by Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt. The authors argue for simple rules that communicate well and give room for adaptation. Their argumentation is convincing but does not necessarily overrule what has been said above. Regulations adapted using relevant data, sophisticated statistical machine learning algorithms, high-dimensional representations, and powerful computational resources may give rise to similar processes that Sull and Eisenhardt
describe, but in a systematic way. This is, of course, a future vision the realization of which takes even decades. Experiments towards this direction could be conducted, however, quite immediately.
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-48229950414739935422016-01-26T23:19:00.000+02:002016-01-26T23:30:27.288+02:00Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for People symposium<p>
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On 7th of October 2015, Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) showed a documentary program A studio in which artificial intelligence research and applications were discussed. In media it is commonplace to consider the dangers and risks related to intelligent machines. This time, however, the focus was in positive developments, in particular related to language processing and health care. Regarding the first, prof. Timo Honkela (on the left) was interviewed, and an expert view on health informatics was provided by Dr. Jaakko Hollmén (on the right). The TV programme is available in <a href="http://areena.yle.fi/1-3137844">YLE Areena</a>.
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As the program gave a chance to discuss these issues only shortly, a symposium called "Artificial Intellgence and Machine Learning for People" was organized at the University of Helsinki on Monday 2nd of Novermber 2015. The symposium was organized in collaboration between experts from the University of Helsinki and the Aalto University.
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<p>
Timo Honkela provided an overview in his talk "<a href="http://www.slideshare.net/timohonkela/timo-honkela-artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-in-the-service-of-the-good"><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/timohonkela/timo-honkela-artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-in-the-service-of-the-good">Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Service of the Good</a></a>.
Professors Liisa Tiittula (University of Helsinki) and Mikko Kurimo (Aalto University) provided views on how to
help people with disabilities to follow media. Tiittula as an expert in interpretation and Kurimo as an expert in speech technology described how modern technology can be made to create speech-to.text services, to facitate content description and to facilate communication in general in the case of various disabilties.
Professor of language technology Jörg Tiedemann (University of Helsinki) explained how advances in machine translation have made it possible to
cross language borders. The coverage of the services have grown significantly thanks to the data driven approached used. Dr. Jaakko Hollmén (Aalto University) described methods used in intelligent data analysis based on machine learning. He used the health of the environment and of people as case studies. Dr. Krista Lagus (University of Helsinki) provided her insights on how data driven approaches can be used to promote wellbeing. Dr. Jorma Laaksonen (Aalto University) explained how machines that have vision can be used to help us.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieH7jBIjy36iE63CjuDYdVyzOcnfPL9N5ESSb9mkhkju7Y7DZxYethcDvtoeNxl88HVSJXvUIYA6Be-NJRDx4p3ey6wocGfoih6k3hOR2VPuRkE2BrEJs5qhRwV4HZI5-J7RnPppZsziQ/s1600/liisa_tiittula.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieH7jBIjy36iE63CjuDYdVyzOcnfPL9N5ESSb9mkhkju7Y7DZxYethcDvtoeNxl88HVSJXvUIYA6Be-NJRDx4p3ey6wocGfoih6k3hOR2VPuRkE2BrEJs5qhRwV4HZI5-J7RnPppZsziQ/s320/liisa_tiittula.jpg" /></a>
Liisa Tiittula
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinPMI9LjCXTBydJs1XM1nLqcfYf7HqAU0jG2qqJJ6H9HVpdZZ2SWb9vMVaFZiKKBqmePJ53mOemVhj-OG6Jda8RObG6cillNBwVbgnaOhmORi8OlmHZDM1CNEZPkmGfwctir4BpTyMn4k/s1600/mikko_kurimo.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinPMI9LjCXTBydJs1XM1nLqcfYf7HqAU0jG2qqJJ6H9HVpdZZ2SWb9vMVaFZiKKBqmePJ53mOemVhj-OG6Jda8RObG6cillNBwVbgnaOhmORi8OlmHZDM1CNEZPkmGfwctir4BpTyMn4k/s320/mikko_kurimo.jpg" /></a>
Mikko Kurimo
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHTSc3Gf3xMbIo6ukhzFeTsLf-YSEpWn3t392hltmg0qmHGBCbRNxZ2ITh-BQNawbJ7sazdtisKBXfnstarcSXyr9vq6N9NzM8ZXBbmhScu_YOGD2ijhjgk44mLjUb4DbLKGZwmBTxSWs/s1600/jorg_tiedemann.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHTSc3Gf3xMbIo6ukhzFeTsLf-YSEpWn3t392hltmg0qmHGBCbRNxZ2ITh-BQNawbJ7sazdtisKBXfnstarcSXyr9vq6N9NzM8ZXBbmhScu_YOGD2ijhjgk44mLjUb4DbLKGZwmBTxSWs/s320/jorg_tiedemann.jpg" /></a>
Jörg Tiedemann
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI1Z32hig9oAoqnPWaIDAA_17-YYPh3iWxaxDgA7Dij-JJJSMu4mw0yM8ECBWN3gxYo2H0u2RfbevCU40w4vf8kRy3yzHP-Fog2qsBC24LjBeWoD3y9ooyQdixaDtT_asepO5ygoTgd30/s1600/jaakko_hollmen.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI1Z32hig9oAoqnPWaIDAA_17-YYPh3iWxaxDgA7Dij-JJJSMu4mw0yM8ECBWN3gxYo2H0u2RfbevCU40w4vf8kRy3yzHP-Fog2qsBC24LjBeWoD3y9ooyQdixaDtT_asepO5ygoTgd30/s320/jaakko_hollmen.jpg" /></a>
Jaakko Hollmén
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnzFXCOrWStwoOmt5OaiAd6O1jELdKEjPXR5Ye_u5XHFo58g18Gey-3JlinLBb_N1OAeLw_OBDEHZGU5DwQ-beUxikzGacvZYVOwv94EvO691ElZipnhMo5YrvsVtSUPAfBJcs7GRfxLQ/s1600/krista_lagus.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnzFXCOrWStwoOmt5OaiAd6O1jELdKEjPXR5Ye_u5XHFo58g18Gey-3JlinLBb_N1OAeLw_OBDEHZGU5DwQ-beUxikzGacvZYVOwv94EvO691ElZipnhMo5YrvsVtSUPAfBJcs7GRfxLQ/s320/krista_lagus.jpg" /></a>
Krista Lagus
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOGB5ii7KG0-zYbaKLlli4pioSvdj2MaQ7YJsrJWEUKVSkuAFBlVUks0ksNzRWgKZiVVhot4xtRzJfDCjEPlN-PMV7k6quZaftt8tlbiO4W6ZJuNs1XhVVERvaqnHAQqa95QfRjaS5SXs/s1600/jorma_laaksonen.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOGB5ii7KG0-zYbaKLlli4pioSvdj2MaQ7YJsrJWEUKVSkuAFBlVUks0ksNzRWgKZiVVhot4xtRzJfDCjEPlN-PMV7k6quZaftt8tlbiO4W6ZJuNs1XhVVERvaqnHAQqa95QfRjaS5SXs/s320/jorma_laaksonen.jpg" /></a>
Jorma Laaksonen
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-67233150448095134052015-10-10T17:29:00.000+03:002015-10-10T17:29:24.556+03:00Klaus Förger: From motion capture to performance synthesis<p>
<a href="https://mediatech.aalto.fi/~kvlehton/">Klaus Förger</a> <a href="http://sci.aalto.fi/en/current/events/vaitos_forger_klaus/">defended</a> his dissertation “<a href="https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/17857">From motion capture to performance synthesis: A data based approach on full-body animation</a>” in Aalto University, School of Science. As the opponent served Associate Professor <a href="http://www.ru.is/faculty/hannes/">Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson</a>, Reykjavik University, Iceland, and as the custos Professor <a href="http://www.cs.hut.fi/~tta/">Tapio Takala</a>, Aalto University. The main topic of the dissertation is how to control the style of moving virtual characters with phrases of natural language. Motion style was a central theme and it was studied in context of a single character as well as within the interaction between two characters. In the lection precursoria, Förger described the background, motivation and main results of the work.
The disseratation work includes collaboration within the <a href="http://research.ics.aalto.fi/cog/mglt/people.shtml">Multimodally Grounded Language Technology project</a>.
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The opponent opened his commentary by stating that he is very excited about the work. A number of general themes related to the work as well as details were discussed.
Prof. Högni Vilhjálmsson mentioned that there are 250 joints in the human body to characterize the complexity of human movement.
He brought up an giving the virtual body some self-awareness. How
to detect unnaturalness was also discussed. In general, how to debug human motion? Förger explained that one option is to measure if the generated movement deviates too much from the examples. Movement styles were discussed in detail. Some styles such as depressed and weak are interrelated styles.
It was also discussed how would it be to extending the work to facial expressions. Prof. Högni Vilhjálmsson has been active in applying Behavioral Markup Language (BML). The relatioship between representations such as BML and data-driven approaches was discussed. During the defence Förger visualized the results both by showing exanples by himself as well as by demonstrating the systems that he had developed during the work.
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Högni Vilhjálmsson mentioned that the work is highly interdisciplinary and presented an intriguing final question: "What have you learned about life?" Förger answered referring to different points of view and the synthesis of those points of view provides a valuable view on the whole.
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-4671959809739206592015-04-17T13:56:00.000+03:002015-04-18T23:10:47.629+03:00Mark van Heeswijk: Advances in Extreme Learning Machines<p>
Mark van Heeswijk is defending his PhD thesis "<a href="https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/15585">Advances in Extreme Learning Machines</a>" at Aalto University School of Science. As the opponent serves Professor Donald C. Wunsch, Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA, and
as the Custos Professor Erkki Oja, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Computer Science. A large proportion of the research reported in the thesis was conducted in the research group lead by Dr. Amaury Lendasse. <a href="http://www.engineering.uiowa.edu/mie/faculty-staff/amaury-lendasse">Landasse</a> serves nowadays at the University of Iowa.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9GFr-pjtNe4rUn7DQhyphenhyphenYoGrIKwGnZy9DCmndjqsmWesVPN-xJ3MhWmOigE994mLlcJf67Z3hIHQLce6fVW87_pN63EX90YfJFLrJ6yobtFlw5fyXqIA76nqzBKPHG2nDI4_udDVrFgf0/s1600/general_setting.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9GFr-pjtNe4rUn7DQhyphenhyphenYoGrIKwGnZy9DCmndjqsmWesVPN-xJ3MhWmOigE994mLlcJf67Z3hIHQLce6fVW87_pN63EX90YfJFLrJ6yobtFlw5fyXqIA76nqzBKPHG2nDI4_udDVrFgf0/s400/general_setting.jpg" /></a></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAnJ19JD23LhulCuL2e7_CFjfiuold5mM2NjX0nQPD-AFziLTmuiEiQag_E1XxKi_rae3ueP-Fol7ZeD_2N0a7YgFlGAY7JfT1xw6X8zih_Xz4z2qpm97Cf9K9TzIi_0oyd7HajNt8c8A/s1600/heeswijk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAnJ19JD23LhulCuL2e7_CFjfiuold5mM2NjX0nQPD-AFziLTmuiEiQag_E1XxKi_rae3ueP-Fol7ZeD_2N0a7YgFlGAY7JfT1xw6X8zih_Xz4z2qpm97Cf9K9TzIi_0oyd7HajNt8c8A/s200/heeswijk.jpg" /></a></div>Extreme learning machine (ELM) is a modification of single layer feedforward neural network. An ELM is based on the idea that the hidden neurons do not need to be trained but can be randomly generated. The name and origin of the method was discussed. The opponent referred to the recent discussions on the fact that there have been related methods before the ELM such as
RVFL (Random vector functional linear network). It was concluded that the Van Heeswijk has carefully referred both to the older and more recent work.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2Yrzx5Kp6-mOgwv5be0ghN6kvO7CMr1uMPqRbxjU_MfvPd0graDz6u3VK-CrSfDHzJhnPmmmR1MW4xX_aVi4V2GyqyZVpdKyo5onTeJcOEzrtj2e7L6w18nw2QdeyEkso2Kd4hV5H16A/s1600/opponent.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2Yrzx5Kp6-mOgwv5be0ghN6kvO7CMr1uMPqRbxjU_MfvPd0graDz6u3VK-CrSfDHzJhnPmmmR1MW4xX_aVi4V2GyqyZVpdKyo5onTeJcOEzrtj2e7L6w18nw2QdeyEkso2Kd4hV5H16A/s200/opponent.jpg" /></a></div>The opponent quoted a piece of news according to which the amount of data will soon grow over zetabyte due to the developments related to the internet of things. He also reminded that neural networks have been widely deployd in different areas of society. For example, in the Humane Genome techniques have been heavily applied. In the discussion, a number of topics were covered including the role of randomness, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing">compressive sensing</a>, sparseness, and time-accuracy tradeoff.
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-16594616888076851362015-03-13T17:40:00.001+02:002015-03-14T22:08:18.881+02:00Asta Raami: Intuition Unleashed<p>
In the 1970s, I remember wondering how poorly the Nobel Prize winners were able to answer the question on intuition. Each time the moderator posed the same question and the well established researchers in physics, chemistry, medicine and other areas has actually no clue on what intuition is about. Today Asta Raami is defending her <a hre="http://medialab.aalto.fi/2015/02/13/asta-raamis-defense-13-3-2015/
">thesis</a> closely related to the question. Suitably for the academic context, the School of Art, Design and Architecture of Aalto University, the focus is in how intuition is used in design tasks and how designers can be helped to further develop and use their intuition.
</p>
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The opponents of Raami's dissertation "INTUITION UNLEASHED – On the application and development of intuition in the creative process" are Charles Burnette, PhD, FAIA, Former Professor and Director, Graduate Industrial Design, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia and Jorma Enkenberg, Professor Emeritus University of Eastern Finland.
As the Custos serves Professor Lily Díaz from Media Lab of Aalto University.
</p>
<p>
In her lectio precursoria, Raami emphasized that designers consider intuition to be the most trustworthy tool in their work. In the beginning of her studies, she was wondering what is the methodological basis of design work and what is the role of intuition in it. Raami did not take a strong stand on the definition of intuition but rather built on its utility. She noted, though, that reasoning faculties are dependent on intuition. In the thesis work, central questions where how intuition can be used intentionally and how that skill can be developed intentionally. In complex tasks such as in solving wicked problems, intuition is central. As intuition is an unconscious process, it can be confused with the results of other mental processes such as wishful or fearful thinking. To study intuiting, Raami had collected various kinds of data that had mostly been handled qualitatively. One of the opponents, professor Enkenberg pointed out in the discussion that a more appropriate characterization for the methodology would be mixed methods research. He also brought up that results in artificial intelligence research could be used to guide studies or to give ideas in this area. Enkenberg reminded that knowledge resides in distributed networks.
The central empirical theme in Raami's work has been intuition development. In the process circulating around intention and action, expanding the boundaries of mind,
developing perception skills, and developing discernment skills follow each other.
</p>
<p>
As an opponent professor Burnette called for the clarification of the concept. Raami wished to keep the concept quite open but rather build on its utility. Burnette pointed out some possibilities such as (1) collaboration with neuroscientists, (2) working on the theoretical foundation of intentional intuition, and (3) building models that integrate design and intuition. In his comment, he made, in my mind, a contradiction of terms by referring to verbal intuition as intuitive processes can be stated to be by definition non-symbolic. Burnette mentioned that intuition has raised attention through Kahnemann's recent book but research on dual processes of reasoning and unconscious thinking has taken place much before Kahnemann got interested in it. Moreover, it seems to me that Kahnemann has a biased view, with an overly strong emphasis on the merits of explicit reasoning.
</p>
<p>
Regarding other contexts than design, Raami did not want to take a strong stance even though she mentioned that the basic model works in workshops lasting for one day and educational processes of several years. In the Cognitive System blog, another thesis related to use of intuition was regarding <a href="
http://cogsys.blogspot.fi/2013/03/olli-hyppanen-is-defending-his-thesis.html">strategic decision making in companies</a>. In our own work, we have considered intuitive, unconscious processes as implicit reasoning processes as a part of a <a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/tho/online-papers/TKK-ICS-R24.pdf">model of individual and collective expertise</a>.
</p>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-60625967027463842142014-08-29T14:20:00.001+03:002014-08-29T15:07:56.702+03:00Svetlana Vetchinnikova: Second language lexis and the idiom principle<p>
Svetlana Vetchinnikova is <a href="http://helsinginyliopisto.etapahtuma.fi/Default.aspx?tabid=420&id=9849">defending</a> her doctoral dissertation entitled "<a href=" https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/135691/secondl.pdf?sequence=1">Second language lexis and the idiom principle</a>" at the University of Helsinki. Professor <a href="http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/elal/hunston-susan.aspx">Susan Hunston</a> (University of Birmingham) serves as the opponent, and Professor <a href="http://www.helsinki.fi/research/researchers/highlycited/mauranen.html">Anna Mauranen</a> as the custos.
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<p>
In the thesis, Vetchinnnikova examines how second language users of English acquire, use and process lexical items. Three types of data were collected from five non-native students: (1) drafts of Master’s thesis chapters ("output"), (2) academic publications a student referred to ("input"), and (3)
several hundreds of words the students used in their thesis were presented to them as stimuli in word association tasks. Lexical usage patterns ("output") were compared to the language exposure ("input") and to the word association responses.
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<p>
As a study to lexical meaning and how meanings are learned, Vetchinnikova refers to a shift of focus in research from explicit to implicit lexical knowledge, considering multi-word units rather than single words and usage-based acquisition rather than explicit instruction. A similar shift has been taking place also in the computational modeling of language learning.
</p>
<p>
In the thesis, Vetchinnikova mentions that "Corpus Linguistics has made possible to observe language in a way that makes visible the patterns which are otherwise not discernible for human analytic abilities". Furthermore, she refers to Michael Stubbs who has stated in his ICAME 32 plenary talk that Corpus Linguistics enables similar kinds of analytical processes that led Darwin to his theory of species.
</p>
<p>
A central question in the thesis is related to how a string of words starts to mean something different from what the sum of the
individual words comprising it would normally mean. Delexicalisation and the idiom principle are central notions here. The idiom principle, formulated by Sinclair, refers to the idea that a language speaker has available a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analyzable into segments.
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<p>
One of the conclusions of the work is that the idiom principle is available to second language learners to a much larger extent than is usually claimed. It would be interesting to study how these results relate to the attempts to build machine learning systems that learn or detect multi-word expressions, used for <a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/tho/info/paukkeri2010likey.shtml">keyphrase extraction</a>.
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-3524563737607063262013-12-17T23:45:00.000+02:002013-12-17T23:45:13.456+02:00Jefrey Lijffijt: Computational methods for comparison and exploration of event sequences<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUYaG7D7iMCSUgHj4OH5-JgGfatKkoI_bYvdYamVHI402g3shao_-TmbcDHQbSrMSXjRqGdxxSX9HFQucqUbyf6OT-Hz4TRzW7I6MrTHiesrvdy84RQzx_H2TUlYbYFD-1DotGwxX3gZ8/s1600/jefrey_lifflijt_161213.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUYaG7D7iMCSUgHj4OH5-JgGfatKkoI_bYvdYamVHI402g3shao_-TmbcDHQbSrMSXjRqGdxxSX9HFQucqUbyf6OT-Hz4TRzW7I6MrTHiesrvdy84RQzx_H2TUlYbYFD-1DotGwxX3gZ8/s320/jefrey_lifflijt_161213.jpg" /></a></div>
<a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/lijffijt/">Jefrey Lijffijt</a> successfully defended yesterday, 16th of December, his thesis "<a href="https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/11798">Computational methods for comparison and exploration of event sequences</a>". In his thesis work, Lijffijt has developed computationally efficient methods that can be used to compare and explore event sequences such as natural language texts, DNA sequences or sensor data. Central terms in the thesis are burstiness and dispersion that are measures of the variability of the frequency of an event. A event that is bursty or that has low dispersion tends to be frequent in some parts of an event sequence and infrequent in all other parts of an event sequence.
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<p>
Lijffijt and his colleagues, both linguists and machine learning specialists, have applied the methods developed in the thesis work to data sets from different domains. Text corpora include <a href="http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/">British National Corpus</a>, <a href="http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/domains/CEEC.html">Corpus of Early English Correspondence</a>, and the novel "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen. Another kinds of event sequences are the spatial occurrence patterns of nucleotides and dinucleotides in the human reference genomes, and train sensor time series of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollandse_Brug">Hollandse Brug</a>, a bridge in the Netherlands.
</p>
<p>
To model the contextual behaviour of words, Lijffijt considers their spatial distribution throughout texts. The primary unit used in modelling is the interval between two occurrences of a word in the texts. Bursty words tend to exhibit long inter-arrival times followed by short inter-arrival times, while the inter-arrival times for non-bursty words have smaller variance. In one of the case studies, the purpose was to test if there are linguistic differences between texts of fiction prose written by male and female authors. The results indicated, in a consistent manner with earlier research, that male-authored fiction is dominated by frequent use of noun-related forms, while female-authored fiction is more verb-oriented. Moreover, the personal pronouns that are overrepresented in male-authored texts are the first person plural forms "us" and "we" and the third-person pronouns "its", "their", and "they", while women overuse the second-person forms "you" and
"your" which can have singular and plural referents. One important methodological conclusion was that the choice of the statistical test matters both in theory and in practice.
</p>
<p>
As the opponent served Professor <a href="http://adrem.ua.ac.be/~goethals/">Bart Goethals</a>, University of Antwerp, Belgium, and as the custos Professor <a href="https://people.aalto.fi/index.html?profilepage=isfor#!juho_rousu">Juho Rousu</a>.
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-53209867076831532112013-12-04T12:17:00.001+02:002013-12-04T12:17:50.683+02:00Ricardo Vigário: Steps towards understanding the brain using independent component analysis<p>
<a href="http://www.aalto.fi/en/">Aalto University</a> recognizes the excellence of an individual by promotion to a distinguished professor category known as Aalto Professor. Professor <a href="http://cogsys.blogspot.fi/2013/08/erkki-oja-aalto-distinguished-professor.html">Erkki Oja is the third Aalto Distinguished Professor</a> in the history of the university.
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<p>
A symposium in honour of Aalto Distinguished Professor Erkki Oja was organized on 3rd December 2013 in Dipoli Conference Center, Espoo. <a href="http://dipoli.aalto.fi/en/">Dipoli</a>, known for its special architecture, is often used for local and international events such as <a href="http://www.cis.hut.fi/icann2011/">ICANN 2011 conference</a>. The symposium was opened by the President of Aalto University Tuula
Teeri and followed by Professor Oja’s lecture "40 years of machine learning and pattern recognition". In addition, four scientific
presentations were given by colleagues and his former doctoral students, Professors Samuel Kaski and Jouko Lampinen, Docent Ricardo Vigário, and Doctor Matti Aksela.
</p>
<p>
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In his talk "Component analysis - a machine learning and neuroinformatics view", Ricardo Vigário described Erkki Oja's influential works in developing machine learning and pattern recognition methods. Oja's early works include important contributions related to artificial neural networks with publications like "<a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00275687">Simplified neuron model as a principal component analyzer</a>" (Oja 1982) and
"<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0893608005800899">Principal components, minor components, and linear neural networks</a>" (Oja 1992). Vigário told his own story as a young research who was considering opportunities all around the world. He had a plan to first move to Finland to take the first steps here and then move to the United States to continue for the PhD studies. After some time in Finland, he realized that there is no need to go elsewhere to learn from the best experts - who happen to be in Finland. An interesting coincidence was that the artificial and biological neural network researchers were in the 1990s in the very same building in the Otaniemi campus. This lead to collaboration in which analysis of brain research results was conducted by neurally inspired computational methods. A good example of the successful results was the paper "<a href="http://cogprints.org/3639/1/TBME2000.pdf">Independent Component Approach to the Analysis of EEG and MEG Recordings</a>" (Vigário et al. 2000). As latest developments, Vigário discussed research on phase synchrony, e.g., "<a href="http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/bpasts.2012.60.issue-3/v10175-012-0057-y/v10175-012-0057-y.xml">A comparison of algorithms for separation of synchronous subspaces</a>" (Almeida et al. 2012).
</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-34674692446215368212013-11-29T12:32:00.001+02:002013-11-29T12:47:22.393+02:00Nick Enfield: Human Sociality and Systems of Language<p>
<a href="https://www.jyu.fi/hum/laitokset/kielet/tutkimus/langnet/en">Langnet</a> is a Finnish doctoral programme in language studies. Langnet Conference takes place in Jyväskylä from 28th to 30th of November. The program consists of presentations by graduate students and plenary talks by invited scholars. The plenaries are given by <a href="http://www.philhist.uni-augsburg.de/lehrstuehle/anglistik/sprachwissenschaft/mitarbeiter_innen/bublitz/">Wolfram Bublitz</a> (Augsburg University), <a href="http://www2.hawaii.edu/~cmhiggin/">Christina Higgins</a> (University of Hawai'i at Manoa), <a href=" http://nickenfield.org">Nick Enfield</a> (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen), and <a href="http://www.ohio.edu/linguistics/people/jarvis.html">Scott Jarvis</a> (Ohio University).
</p>
<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsgpqxq-GuUN86LVjiCC7rHPOvenJOQZzZeMWQuCjwWVDuk-6FlZ0SKoPLhMA6aAILP0fCbP7eIh45Y8788qRdOF9wU5EkLdxvmqn2TOgpnXeLX-ChtNc9UxB9iNkFLGL6CRhAUH4XxVE/s1600/nick_enfield1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsgpqxq-GuUN86LVjiCC7rHPOvenJOQZzZeMWQuCjwWVDuk-6FlZ0SKoPLhMA6aAILP0fCbP7eIh45Y8788qRdOF9wU5EkLdxvmqn2TOgpnXeLX-ChtNc9UxB9iNkFLGL6CRhAUH4XxVE/s320/nick_enfield1.jpg" /></a></div>
In 2009, <a href="http://nickenfield.org/">Nick Enfield</a> was awarded European Research Council (ERC) grant to set up a 5-year project under the ERC's Starting Independent Researcher Grant programme. The project 'Human Sociality and Systems of Language Use' has involved extensive fieldwork on several non-European languages. The basic idea has been to test the hypothesis that patterns of language use are universally grounded in social-cognitive interactional propensities. In his talk, entitled 'Human Sociality and Systems of Language Use: the case of "other-initiated repair"', Enfield discussed the background and motivation for the results and presented a number of specific results of his and his colleagues' research.
</p>
<p>
Enfield started by presenting a transformation of interests in the study of language and cognition. Earlier focus has been in reference and representation. More and more research on language has been considering language as social action and studying sociality of cognition. <a href="http://www.mpi.nl/people/enfield-nick/research">Enfield's research interests</a> include causal dependencies in semiotic systems, for instance, the interplay between individual cognitive representations and processes, actual communicative interactions, and higher-level systems such as languages. In his talk, Enfield discussed in some detail the relationship between different causal frames or timescales such as <a href="http://faculty.washington.edu/cbehler/glossary/diachron.html">diachronic</a>, synchronic, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontogeny">ontogenetic</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetics">phylogenetic</a>, microgenetic, and <a href="http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/faces/viewItemFullPage.jsp?itemId=escidoc:1482156:3">enchronic</a>.
</p>
<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4epdZbef79_LdHN66CtdDP3Z4clzdXmyOGpjpwAVp6n0THSq6geNUnuQg3wI67aJg1PVZ98twhvEARYWh2czFDQXAJXqExqi-QlPo9ointCzU10yRK6Q9KvID_tVZPvQi0v67O2QHWzc/s1600/enfield_huh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4epdZbef79_LdHN66CtdDP3Z4clzdXmyOGpjpwAVp6n0THSq6geNUnuQg3wI67aJg1PVZ98twhvEARYWh2czFDQXAJXqExqi-QlPo9ointCzU10yRK6Q9KvID_tVZPvQi0v67O2QHWzc/s320/enfield_huh.jpg" /></a></div>A group of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira and Nick Enfield, published recently a result that raised considerable <a href="http://www.plosone.org/annotation/listThread.action?inReplyTo=75027&root=75027&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+plos%2Fambra%2FplosoneAnnotations+%28PLOS+ONE+-+Annotations%29">international</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/09/arts/that-syllable-everyone-recognizes.html?_r=0">attention</a>. They suggested that <a href="http://huh.ideophone.org/">“huh?” is a universal expression</a> based on evidence related to language scattered across five continents. Even though Finnish was not among the 31 languages studies, <a href="http://www.uusisuomi.fi/tiede-ja-ymparisto/63961-tutkijat-loysivat-ihmiskunnalle-yhteisen-sanan-suomen-hah">Finnish media</a> suggested that the Finnish expression "häh" is used all around the world.
</p>
<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/roots-of-human-sociality-9781845203948/" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://media.bloomsbury.com/rep/f/9781845203948.jpg" /></a></div>Enfield discussed in detail the basis for universality behind the "huh" finding. He presented a pragmatic universals hypothesis: While languages are highly diverse, systems of language use are: (1) largely common across language, and (2) may be locally inflected. Enfield referred to the book "<a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/roots-of-human-sociality-9781845203948/">Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition and interaction</a>", published in 2006, that he and <a href="http://www.mpi.nl/people/levinson-stephen">Stephen C. Levinson</a> have edited. Potential reasons for universality include (1) natural meaning, (2) processing, and (3) sociality. Reasons for local inflection includes differences in languages/societies as well as in languages. Enfield's upcoming book is on "<a href="http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/academic/language/linguistics/cognition/9780199338733.do#.UlQIH3dgu8F">Relationship Thinking: Agency, Enchrony, and Human Sociality</a>". The book outlines a framework for analyzing social interaction and its linguistic, cultural, and cognitive underpinnings.
</p>
<p>
Enfield's own empirical specialization is in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia, especially Lao and Kri. His colleagues and collaborators have collected evidence all over the world. The research method includes six main steps: (1) corpus collection, (2) data workshops, (3) coding design, (4) coding work, (5) ensuring reliability, (6) preparation of results.
</p>
<p>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Y0eKIcSzgc5liLrsHtuEGVeLair5V2konfUGJ9KvdgLWxXqkHDcA84mfFRNINFuldyJ3YJJJ_HjdP9qlOCYOYfLqyRvip4l4wKNS9ne0GNWZ7o_LnKEz8vzfh5J5wTDjkgsjhSDhLxY/s1600/enfield_world.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Y0eKIcSzgc5liLrsHtuEGVeLair5V2konfUGJ9KvdgLWxXqkHDcA84mfFRNINFuldyJ3YJJJ_HjdP9qlOCYOYfLqyRvip4l4wKNS9ne0GNWZ7o_LnKEz8vzfh5J5wTDjkgsjhSDhLxY/s320/enfield_world.jpg" /></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDFyHHuzrBJbnTpNlvtiNJUG6Tjcr_VMNAUk6sem4Cx2MWyYZVCelVFOQ2IazK0xKQ8ZPyK8bvJJWkbnpQpZ-b5y68X0yYCyIFSPclK-ZQIAY_k-QGY4vITdpOE-RQoC9XPAJW2QRtQ1c/s1600/enfield_laos_fieldwork.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDFyHHuzrBJbnTpNlvtiNJUG6Tjcr_VMNAUk6sem4Cx2MWyYZVCelVFOQ2IazK0xKQ8ZPyK8bvJJWkbnpQpZ-b5y68X0yYCyIFSPclK-ZQIAY_k-QGY4vITdpOE-RQoC9XPAJW2QRtQ1c/s200/enfield_laos_fieldwork.jpg" /></a>
</p>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-71928592218578727552013-11-04T20:03:00.000+02:002013-11-04T20:03:44.470+02:00Sunandan Chakraborty: Big Data Analytics for Development<p>
<a href="http://cs.nyu.edu/~sunandan/">Sunandan Chakraborty</a> gave a talk entitled "<a href="https://www.hiit.fi/node/2468">Big Data Analytics for Development</a>" in the <a href="https://www.hiit.fi/">HIIT</a> Otaniemi seminar series. Chakraborty s presently doing an internship in the Microsoft Research Cambridge and is a PhD candidate at the Computer Science department of New York University.
</p>
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<p>
Chakraborty's research includes analysis of parallel streams of datasets from the web to infer and forecast macroeconomic and societal indicators. The present the main focus is to extract events and infer spatio-temporal relationship between events using online news articles and other web-based sources. As related work, Chakraborty discussed, for instance, <a href="http://www.unglobalpulse.org/">United Nations Global Pulse</a> that gathers timely information to track and monitor the impacts of global and local socio-economic crises, and using Google Earth to study flood hazards.
</p>
<p>
Potential sources of useful data include news articles, blogs, social media, online image data and mobile call records. These can be used for inference of socio-economic indices. Challenges with data sources include biases, incomplete coverage, influence of personal opions, noise, lacking uniformity in quality, expensiveness, privacy issues, and limited availability. Chakraborty described five projects and their results:
<ul>
<li>development of a location specific summarization tool
<li>development of diagnostic tools for online textbooks
<li>computing cropland disappearing rate using Google Earth Satellite images
<li>extracting structure from unstructured text
<li>using mobile apps to collect data
</ul>
</p>
<p>
Chakraborty reported results related to the design and use of a system that mines news articles, blogs and other information sources on the web to automatically summarize important climatic and agricultural trends as well as construct a location-specific climatic and agricultural information portal. This is system has been described in the article "<a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1963360">Location specific summarization of climatic and agricultural trends</a>" by Chakraborty and Subramanian. The idea has been to collect topic-specific information on, for example, erosion, infertility, scarcity, drought and floods in different locations. The authors have evaluated the system
across 605 different districts in India.
</p>
<p>
An interesting example of a diagnostic tools for online textbooks is described in the article "<a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2339682">Empowering authors to diagnose comprehension burden in textbooks</a>". The authors (Agrawal, Chakraborty et al.) mine textbooks for identifying sections and concepts that can benefit from reorganizing. With their method, authors can quantitatively assess the burden that a textbook imposes on the reader due to non-sequential presentation of concepts. They have applied the tool to a corpus of high school textbooks that are in active use in India. This method could potentially be used in a complementary fashion with a related method described in our article "<a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/tho/info/PaukkeriOllikainenHonkela13.shtml">Assessing user-specific difficulty of documents</a>".
</p>
<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLkHKbwl8v8Yt6EdaDGQ-zW1DdM0WwAjyitgOfNF4TS1IUNJm_MWxxG_xpO3fIxoPka-QqEwOUzs4SzXTx0pm85XD1E7EYY-e5hbrrAivVUwB0C-F_Jws_hJam7fkc04gAyk6vrVoO5vE/s1600/compsust12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLkHKbwl8v8Yt6EdaDGQ-zW1DdM0WwAjyitgOfNF4TS1IUNJm_MWxxG_xpO3fIxoPka-QqEwOUzs4SzXTx0pm85XD1E7EYY-e5hbrrAivVUwB0C-F_Jws_hJam7fkc04gAyk6vrVoO5vE/s320/compsust12.jpg" /></a></div>Chakraborty discussed the fact that less and less land is used for agriculture. In India, <a href=" http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/NM8/farmers-protest-land-acquisition/Article1-83012.aspx">farmers protest land acquisition</a>s. Also climate change impacts on global agricultural situation.
In their paper "<a href="http://cs.nyu.edu/~sunandan/compsust12.pdf">Computing the rate of disappearance of cropland using satellite images</a>", Chakraborty and his colleagues present a tool that can monitor this change through satellite images. Google Earth offers a huge corpus of satellite images across the globe that they have used in the analysis to distinguish between arable, barren, tree-covered and developed land areas. This application area has, of course, a long history in relation to pattern recognition and image analysis research (consider, e.g., the paper "<a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5408777&tag=1">A Comparative Study of Texture Measures for Terrain Classification</a>" from 1976). <a href="http://cogsys.blogspot.fi/2012/12/nips-2012-workshop-on-computational.html">Computational sustainability</a> is naturally becoming more and more relevant.
</>
<p>
A current project was described in which archived news data is analyzed for event detection and analysis of spatio-temporal relationship between events. The work is currently focusing on India and Indian news articles.
</p>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-89490388699179181942013-10-28T14:00:00.000+02:002013-11-05T16:46:43.990+02:00Melanie Swan: Big Data and the Quantified Self<p>
<a href="http://www.melanieswan.com/bio.html">Melanie Swan</a> is visiting National Consumer Research Center in Helsinki. Swan is a Quantified Self and Big Data Research Principle at MS Futures Group, Palo Alto, California. Minna Ruckenstein is hosting the visit and served as the chair of the invited talk by Swan. The title of Melanie Swan's talk was "Big Data and the Quantified Self".
</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvxxeYo_NMlZ1qfmwitYk6CBsjCncVtSihaU_j5KpDxD72zEGVTuqWD8XM0lWUuPAt1l9DAGKypVAeKUe_DNZdUOke0KByNOFKVfXcloGjFV_sK1UErrKMIQ25C4ISO4J3HJpYNmMRwTk/s1600/melanie_swan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvxxeYo_NMlZ1qfmwitYk6CBsjCncVtSihaU_j5KpDxD72zEGVTuqWD8XM0lWUuPAt1l9DAGKypVAeKUe_DNZdUOke0KByNOFKVfXcloGjFV_sK1UErrKMIQ25C4ISO4J3HJpYNmMRwTk/s320/melanie_swan.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>
According to Swan, a key contemporary trend emerging in big data science is the <a href="http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/big.2012.0002">quantified self</a> (QS). The quantified self refers to the activity in which individuals are engaged in the self-tracking of any kind of biological, physical, behavioral, or environmental information as individuals or in groups. She covered a number of QS projects and tools including <a href="http://paco.googlecode.com/git-history/6d2801ed87c9dcfa621bf60ac494927dab377716/Paco-Server/war/index.html">Personal Analytics COmpanion</a> (PACO) and MIT Body Track as well as closely related developments such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things">internet of things</a> that contributes to the explosion of big data.
</p>
<p>
Swan discussed various topics in Personal Health 'Omics' and reminded that the fastest growing area in the big data area is human biology-related data. One possibility emerging from the developments is shifting from reactive to active. An opportunity is QS Data Commons where <a href="https://github.com/">Github</a> has emerged as the de factor platform. Mental performance optimization (mood management apps, etc.) and quality of life development belong to the current QS frontier. As a means for behavior change, Swan discussed <a href="http://mtmr.jp/aaai2013/">Shikake</a> that are sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects to trigger a physical or psychological behavior change.
</p>
<p>
Big data opens up new methodological opportunities. A traditional example is Google in building services based on unsupervised machine learning modeling of vast text collections rather than relying on traditional artificial intelligence approach. Swan mentioned a number of contemporary topics including:
<ul>
<li>foundational characterization (longitudinal baseline measures of internal and external daily rhythms, normal deviation patterns, contingency adjustments, anomaly and emergent phenomena)
<li>new kinds of pattern recognition
<li>multidisciplinary models (turbulence, topology, chaos, complexity, etc.)
</ul>
</p>
<p>
An interesting these was building exosenses for the qualified self. This leads to extending our senses in new ways to perceive data as sensation. Exosenses serve as quantified intermediates.
</p>
<p>
In the second part of her talk, Swan concentrated on the social aspects of QS, i.e, collecting and analyzing group data. Underlying trends include growing and aging world population and urbanization.
</p>
<p>
Towards the end of the presentation, Swan discussed limitations and risks related to big data. An interesting concept that came up is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance">sousveillance</a> which is the opposite of surveillance. In French, surveillance means "watching from above" whereas sousveillance means "watching from below." It seems that sousveillance and general transparency could be a useful counter force or antidote against totalitarianism and big brother activities. Some other means are needed, though, to diminish widely spread categorical thinking that can be a source for many kinds of societal problems, whether top-down or bottom-up. Far too often people base their decisions and actions on too clear cut interpretations. This prevents from reaching good solutions through evolutionary processes. Therefore, analysis of big data needs to deal with the level of interpretation and its complexities including <a href="http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxAaltoUniversity-Timo-Honkel">contextuality</a> and <a href="http://research.ics.aalto.fi/cog/gica/">subjectivity</a>.
</p>
<!--
public transit, traffic management, eTools, parking, adaptive lighting, etc.
MIT SENSEable City Lab
urban data: 3S buildings and population density
3D tweet landscape (sentiment analysis: emotion barometer)
3D Urban Data Viz: Decision-making Tool (London's underground)
Group data: office building community
Abu Dhabi: carbon neutral
Urban farms based on vertical architectures
Transportation revolution: self-driving cars
Pervasive trend: crowdsourcing
coordination of …
Genomera
Dopamine genes and rapid reality adaptation in thinking
Conclusions
limitations and risks
(see PIC)
souveillance: It is the opposite of surveillance, which in French means "watching from above." Souveillance means "watching from below."
<--!>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-10486349550185280762013-10-25T15:03:00.001+03:002013-10-25T15:03:20.188+03:00Elizabeth Bradley: Chaos and Control with Applications in Science, Technology and Art<p>
Prof. <a href="http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lizb/">Elizabeth Bradley</a>, University of Colorado is visiting the <a href="http://ics.aalto.fi/en/">Department of Information and Computer Science</a>, hosted by <a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/jhollmen/">Jaakko Hollmén</a>. Bradley is an editor of the journal <a href="http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/chaos">Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science</a> and has been program chair of Dynamics Days in 2006, International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning in 2008, and the International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis in 2003 and in <a href="http://www.inescporto.pt/~jgama/ida2011/">2011</a>.
</p>
<p>
On 24th of October, Bradley gave an <a href="http://ics.aalto.fi/en/current/events/icsforum-20131024/">invited talk</a> entitled "Chaos and Control". She provided a review of the mathematical theory and computational techniques that are used in the control of chaos, and covered a variety of examples ranging from science and engineering to music and dance.
</p>
<p>
Bradley started by introducing basic concepts related to the dissipative dynamical systems. Chaos can be defined as complex behavior, arising in a deterministic nonlinear dynamic system, which exhibits two special properties: (1) sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and (2) characteristic structure. Properties of chaotic or "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor#Strange_attractor">strange</a>" <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor">attractors</a> include neighboring trajectories diverge exponentially, covered densely by trajectories.
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</p>
<p>
Bradley emphasized that chaos is not an academical oddity. Actually, nonlinearity and chaos are ubiquitous, e.g., in hearts, brains, populations, planets, black holes, pulsars, flows of heat and fluids, and many other kinds of systems. Key concepts of chaotic systems from the point of view of control include
<ul>
<li>characteristic attractor geometry,
<li>exponential trajectory separation,
<li>dense attractor coverage,
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifurcation_theory">bifurcation</a>s,
<li>un/stable manifold structure, and
<li>unstable periodic orbits
</ul>
</p>
<p>
From the point of view of problem solving, denseness indicates reachability. In other words, trajectories on a chaotic attractor densely cover a set of non-zero measure and thus make all points in that set reachable from any initial condition in its basin of attraction. Reachability is nondeterministic and therefore using chaos in control is not for time-critical applications. Bradley told about an early instance of research related to this topic, published as "<a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=00251819">Using Chaos to Broaden the Capture Range of a Phase-Locked Loop</a>" (1993). Bradley discussed how to target a specific point on the attractor, exploiting sensitive dependence on initial conditions for control leverage and controllability. Here she referred to her MIT PhD thesis "<a href="http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/7044/AITR-1388.pdf?sequence=2">Taming Chaotic Circuits</a>" (1993) and to <a href="http://sol.rutgers.edu/~shinbrot/Web2009/index.html">Troy Shinbrot</a> and his colleagues' <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/037596019290239I">work</a>. Bradley also warned about being naive in one's expectations regarding applications of controlling complex chaotic systems. For instance, it is <b>im</b>possible to find out where to make a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect">butterfly</a> to flap its wings in order to control the future development and route of a hurricane.
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<p>
Towards the end of her presentation, Bradley discussed two applications of chaos theory in art. First, she introduced <a href="http://www.olin.edu/faculty/faculty_profile.aspx?FacultyId=11">Diana Dabby</a>'s work on generating variations using chaotic mapping. A convincing example was a <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/320/5872/62/suppl/DC1">variation of J.S. Bach's Prelude in C</a> from the Well-tempered Clavier, Book I generated by the chaotic mapping. The details of the mapping technique are described in the article "<a href="http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/chaos/6/2/10.1063/1.166171;jsessionid=1mic0aut4oh85.x-aip-live-03">Musical variations from a chaotic mapping</a>". As a second application in the area of performing arts, Bradley described her and her collaborators' <a href="http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lizb/chaotic-dance.html">work on dance</a>. She discussed, for example, the paper "<a href="http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lizb/papers/icml98.pdf">Learning the Grammar of Dance</a>" by Joshua Stuart and herself.
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-24577074463452630352013-09-23T16:48:00.000+03:002013-09-23T16:48:19.408+03:00Consortium of National Institutes for Health and Wellbeing in Finland<p>
Consortium of National Institutes for Health and Wellbeing (SOTERKO) was formed to improve the quality and efficiency of reseach and development among three institutes under the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health in Finland. The activities include expert networking, joint research and development programs. The <a href="http://www.ttl.fi/en/Pages/default.aspx">Finnish Institute of Occupational Health</a>, <a href="http://www.thl.fi/en_US/web/en">National Institute for Health and Welfare</a> and the <a href="http://www.stuk.fi/en_GB/">Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority</a> participate in the consortium. In a <a href="http://statsradetskansli.fi/ajankohtaista/tiedotteet/tiedote/en.jsp?oid=393357&c=0&toid=5299&moid=5300">recent resolution</a> on comprehensive reform of research institutes and research funding, deeper, network-based collaboration was required, crossing the boundaries of government agencies and public bodies. The activities begun under, e.g., SOTERKO will be developed and expanded in order to improve the quality, productivity and impact of research and consultancy.
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<p>
SOTERKO organized its first research seminar day on 23rd of September, 2013. The event was opened by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pekka_Puska">Pekka Puska</a> (Director General of the National Institute for Health and Welfare) and <a href="http://www.keva.fi/en/about_us/administration/management_group/Pages/Default.aspx">Tapani Hellstén</a> (Deputy CEO of KEVA). The seminar takes place in <a href="http://www.keva.fi/en/Pages/Default.aspx">KEVA</a>, former Local Government Pensions Institution.
</p>
<p>
Raine Hermans, Ph.D., is the director of strategic intelligence at Tekes, focused on impact analysis, innovation research funding, and knowledge management. He has co-authored a book on "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Medical-Innovation-Government-Intervention-Hermans/dp/9516284817">Medical Innovation and Government Intervention</a>". Hermans gave a talk on Finnish innovation system in general and discussed issues related to health and wellbeing services. He discussed in detail a model on innovation cluster on health care applications, referring to Hermans, Kulvik and Löffler (2009). The model includes unique factors of production, a learn-and-let-go strategy, supporting industries and a domestic market laboratory.
</p>
<p>
The results of different SOTERKO consortium projects were described in a number of presentations. Eira Viikari-Juntura (Research Professor, Finnish Institute of Occupational Health) presented a research program on chronic diseases and working life. Marianna Virtanen (Research Professor, Finnish Institute of Occupational Health) provided additional details.
<a href="http://www.stuk.fi/ota_yhteytta/ympariston-sateilyvalvonta/radon-ja-terveys/en_GB/kurttio-paivi/">Päivi Kurttio</a> (Head of Laboratory, Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority STUK) a program on risk management. Research on risks includes, for instance, research on indoor air, risks of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining">mining</a>, and risk communication.
</p>
<p>
Markku Sainio (Adjunct professor, Finnish Institute of Occupational Health) discussed in detail issues related to idiopathic environmental intolerance. A central problem is that there is a large number of potential risk factors as well as symptoms related to the sensitivity. Sainio's focus was in the adaptive processes that may explain why in some cases the fear of the risk creates even a greater problem than the risk itself. In the emotional response, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala">amygdalae</a> have a central role. If a perceived risk is automatically associated with an adverse reaction, dealing with the situation becomes complicated. Future research is needed to help in creating interventions that cover both careful analysis of environmental risk factors as well as deal with adaptive emotional processes that may become the primary concern, for example, because of potentially unnecessary avoidance behaviors. In the first task, <a href="http://research.ics.aalto.fi/mi/">modern data analysis and mining methods</a> are importance whereas in the second task <a href="http://research.ics.aalto.fi/cog/">cognitive modeling</a> techniques can be useful.
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Research professor Jussi Simpura (Research Professor, National Institute for Health and Welfare) presented a report on technological change and the future of wellbeing. The work includes a division into three scenarios ranging from positive through neutral to negative. Adjunct professor <a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/tho/">Timo Honkela</a> (aalto University) presented comments on the report and gave some optimistic insights on the use of modern and emerging computing technologies in the area of health and wellbeing.
</p>
<p>
The introductions to SOTERKO programs continued by presentations by coordinators Päivi Hämäläinen (National Institute for Health and Welfare) on digital resources, <a href="http://www.ttl.fi/fi/henkilokunta/Sivut/Husman_P%C3%A4ivi.aspx">Päivi Husman</a> (Finnish Institute of Occupational Health) on young adults and and Sakari Karvonen (National Institute for Health and Welfare) on inequality.
Research professor <a href="http://www.ttl.fi/fi/henkilokunta/Sivut/Vuori_Jukka.aspx?back=true">Jukka Vuori</a> (Finnish Institute of Occupational Health) also discussed this area in detail including studies on how to prevent exclusion among young people.
</p>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-30110966819875811032013-09-20T17:55:00.000+03:002013-09-20T17:55:25.961+03:00Andrea Botero: Expanding Design Space(s)<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4JXXWaSXME0-nOuDUWTAO_9RGo0MTV6HNtQGp4XFrFn4QUss09A6UAxAaVU-fbavtVE4tq3VCJ1a2kvOulnLOM39nIU3eA_5RrB23zf14zIwxL1L_C6Dm_uQoSSV-8NIWDNk14ERLJ8Y/s1600/botero_after_defence.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4JXXWaSXME0-nOuDUWTAO_9RGo0MTV6HNtQGp4XFrFn4QUss09A6UAxAaVU-fbavtVE4tq3VCJ1a2kvOulnLOM39nIU3eA_5RrB23zf14zIwxL1L_C6Dm_uQoSSV-8NIWDNk14ERLJ8Y/s200/botero_after_defence.jpg" /></a></div>
At Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, <a href="http://mlab.taik.fi/people/showperson?pid=90">Andrea Botero</a> defended today her PhD thesis "Expanding Design Space(s) - Design in Communal Endeavours". Dr. <a href="http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/profiles/monika-buscher">Monika Büscher</a> (Lancaster University) acted as the opponent and Prof. Lily Diaz as the Custos. Botero started her lectio precursoria by a personal anecdote. She described her experiences giving a birth in a baby-friendly hospital. Here it means <a href="http://www.hus.fi/en/medical-care/hospitals/katiloopisto-maternity-hospital/Pages/default.aspx">Kätilöopisto Maternity Hospital</a> with its family-friendly special unit called <a href="http://finland.fi/Public/default.aspx?contentid=160100&nodeid=37598&culture=en-US">Haikaranpesä</a> (Stork's Nest). She concluded the description by stating that giving and assisting a birth is neither a miracle nor a routine thing to do. Many partnerships of many kinds are needed that extend well before and after the birth. A lot can be achieved through companionship and caring. This is issue of caring became one of Botero's main interests in design research.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitzblvQjAgKoK_xPREInMaQSiQ8sWOgCGKh_JAePlvTUxUVN8YSq5pj-6wxkik_tQYvcAaBxDwXlgQUJSWrZDZ8202ZSxOS6nfxaBaWMc_pgAxkyhvmq4YiMOZV6JQYvb5ty3_bOvaTrs/s1600/botero_defence1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitzblvQjAgKoK_xPREInMaQSiQ8sWOgCGKh_JAePlvTUxUVN8YSq5pj-6wxkik_tQYvcAaBxDwXlgQUJSWrZDZ8202ZSxOS6nfxaBaWMc_pgAxkyhvmq4YiMOZV6JQYvb5ty3_bOvaTrs/s320/botero_defence1.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>
Botero continued by presenting two case studies of fledgling communities (seniors aging together) and emergent collectives (citizens and city officials linked by locative media). Particular attention was paid on expanding what comprises the design spaces of these communal endeavours to capture a wider interplay of possibilities including practices, partly assembled technologies, as well as developing competencies and social arrangements. Related to the first case study, Botero discussed experiences in developing and using Miina, a web-based everyday life management system for the <a href="http://arch1design.com/LOPPUKIRI_HOUSING_COMMUNITY.html">Loppukiri</a> residents in Arabianranta.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgao3hfZ6zAgHL-nVmu5RKhmiwv1OOnSpd9x2pe7uEoJlgF_e69LNRm9DvmIs4CFKql1CZ3OMm-LPgW3H8HhRw1sx8JKYIRc4kN69J4iR7LmWXMm1PnuqZ9Sam2PPt0utg4LSLSUY6Ux1Y/s1600/botero_diagram1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgao3hfZ6zAgHL-nVmu5RKhmiwv1OOnSpd9x2pe7uEoJlgF_e69LNRm9DvmIs4CFKql1CZ3OMm-LPgW3H8HhRw1sx8JKYIRc4kN69J4iR7LmWXMm1PnuqZ9Sam2PPt0utg4LSLSUY6Ux1Y/s320/botero_diagram1.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>
The opponent raised discussions about a number of topics including unintended consequences and the role of designers in collaborative design. The interesting book "<a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ignorance-and-surprise">Ignorance and Surprise</a>" by Matthias Gross was touched upon in the discussion. Another theme was how to create trust in collaboration. Openess regarding one's goals and motivations was emphasized as an important factor. Regarding solving problems in the world and a designers' role in it, Botero provided a nice formulation. One does not need to go to the people and tell them that they need to save the world as they are doing it already. One can just offer help for them. Starting from Bruno Latour's <a href="bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/97-SPINOZA-GB.pdf">matters of concern</a> and discussing further <a href="http://medea.mah.se/author/pelle-ehnmah-se/">Pelle Ehn</a>'s and his colleagues' work, matters of care were mentioned and everything that we do to sustain life.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-24100688259783727982013-09-18T14:46:00.000+03:002013-09-18T19:51:01.236+03:00Lance Fortnow: Bounding Rationality by Computational Complexity<p>
<a href="http://www.scs.gatech.edu/people/lance-fortnow">Lance Fortnow</a> is professor and chair of the School of Computer Science of the <a href="http://www.cc.gatech.edu/">College of Computing</a> at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on computational complexity and its applications to economic theory. Fortnow and <a href="http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/">William Gasarch</a> write in a widely read <a href=" http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/">blog on computational complexity</a>. Fortnow is the author of a recently published book entitled "<a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9937.html">The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible</a>".
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<p>
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Fortnow s visiting Aalto University and gave an <a href="http://ics.aalto.fi/en/current/ics_forum/">ICS Forum</a> talk at the <a href="http://ics.aalto.fi/en/">Department of Information and Computer Science</a> at Aalto University School of Science. The title of his talk was "Bounding Rationality by Computational Complexity".
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<p>
As a general topic, Fortnow showed how to incorporate computational complexity into various economic models including game theory, prediction markets, forecast testing, preference revelation and contract theory. He discussed, for instance, so called factoring game. The factoring game was introduced in the article "An Approach to Bounded Rationality" by Eli Ben-Sasson, Adam Tauman Kalai and Ehud Kalai. The basic motivation of the paper is how a rational intelligent agent should behave in a complex environment, given that it cannot perform unbounded computations.
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<p>
Another example discussed by Fortnow was weather forecasting. He discussed Sandroni's theorem that has been published in the article "<a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs001820300153">The reproducible properties of correct forecasts</a>". Fortnow continued by described the results published in the article "<a href="http://ideas.repec.org/a/ecm/emetrp/v77y2009i1p93-105.html">The Complexity of Forecast Testing</a>" by himself and Rakesh V. Vohra.
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<p>
Another interesting topic was computational awareness. The amount of unawareness of an object is the time needed to enumerate that object in a certain environment and a context. A context is a topic like "restaurant". The environment would consist of ways to find restaurant including memories, interactions with others, guidebooks, internet, etc.
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<p>
Fortnow discussed conditions that characterize wise crowds referring to the book by James Surowiecki on wisdom of crowds. Four criteria were mentioned: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization and aggregation.
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-51800654670039420482013-09-16T20:08:00.000+03:002013-09-16T20:08:03.497+03:00 Stephen Grossberg: Cooperation, competition, preference, and rational decision making<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.bu.edu/research/spotlight/profile/grossberg.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8oP1CXO7FZ3fSa0QXFPj7m0IoDVhIk-b8ypIxEdY_93wJmz1DHAQsfkrrqDMtTL1BeZyAoZVCCyGEHtj3zN6TgA3VFCm_M0C6-QfVjuO5JreILvUFxM54xrs6SnMXzHtTdKLG9Ix0yBE/s320/grossberg_bu.jpg" /></a></div>
<a href="http://cns.bu.edu/~steve/">Stephen Grossberg</a> belongs to the central founders of the fields of computational neuroscience, connectionist cognitive science, and neuromorphic technology. He has studied how brains give rise to minds since he <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Grossberg">took the introductory psychology course</a> as a freshman at Dartmouth College in 1957. At that time, Grossberg presented the idea of using nonlinear systems of differential equations to show how brain mechanisms can give rise to behavioral functions. Grossberg founded and was first President of the <a href="http://www.inns.org/">International Neural Network Society</a> (INNS). The formation of INNS soon led to the formation of the <a href="http://www.e-nns.org/">European Neural Network Society</a> (ENNS) and the <a href="http://www.jnns.org/english.html">Japanese Neural Network Society</a> (JNNS). With <a href="http://techlab.bu.edu/members/gail/">Gail Carpenter</a>, Grossberg developed the <a href="http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Adaptive_resonance_theory">adaptive resonance theory</a> (ART). ART is a theory of how the brain can quickly learn, and stably remember and recognize, objects and events in a changing world.
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The European Neural Network Society organizes annually International Conference on Neural Networks (ICANN). The <a href="http://s289.photobucket.com/user/wduch/library/ICANN%20Conferences/ICANN%201991%20Helsinki?sort=2&page=1">first ICANN</a> was organized in Finland in 1991. This year the conference was organized in Sofia, Bulgaria at the Technical University of Sofia in collaboration with Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Union of Automatic and Informatics.
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With <a href="http://cogsys.blogspot.fi/2013/08/erkki-oja-aalto-distinguished-professor.html">Erkki Oja</a>, <a href="http://www.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/~meierk/?lang=en">Karlheinz Meier</a>, <a href="http://www.aut.ac.nz/profiles/nikola-kasabov">Nikola Kasabov</a>, <a href="http://www.hec.unil.ch/people/avilla">Alessandro E. P. Villa</a> and <a href="http://www.informatik.uni-ulm.de/ni/staff/GPalm_e.html">Günther Palm</a>, Stephen Grossberg was a <a href="http://magazin.mageks-v.com/icann2013/index.php/plenary-speakers">plenary speaker</a> of <a href="http://www.icann2013.org/">ICANN 2013</a>. Grossberg's topic was "Behavioral economics and neuroeconomics: Cooperation, competition, preference, and decision making". The general themes of Grossberg's talk were
<ul>
<li>how understanding human cognition, emotion, and decision making can impact economic theory, and
<li>how mathematical understanding of cooperative-competitive dynamics can impact economic theory.
</ul>
</p>
<p>
The Nobel prize-winning work of Kahneman and Tversky on Prospect Theory is an illustrative example
of the first item. Grossberg's talk showed how properties of cooperative-competitive and cognitive-
emotional neural systems that were developed to explain large behavioral and neural data bases
exhibit emergent properties that are economically relevant, including results about the voting
paradox, the Invisible Hand, how to design stable economic markets, irrational decision making
under risk (Prospect Theory), probabilistic decision making, preferences for previously
unexperienced alternatives over rewarded experiences, and bounded rationality.
</p>
<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8zrNTIKqRs1WVdtqdyPiSfZGlAU3eoUoD8pArB4ZCU_44scZUaY2wXJ12-tTDJ0TlWtkUtoB_T9RHx5x491l7KtbDE9pNcXUhpkc3cygbgMotVNl4g6Tf2TSNbXjbnCybktyK0KrOFaw/s1600/grossberg_all.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8zrNTIKqRs1WVdtqdyPiSfZGlAU3eoUoD8pArB4ZCU_44scZUaY2wXJ12-tTDJ0TlWtkUtoB_T9RHx5x491l7KtbDE9pNcXUhpkc3cygbgMotVNl4g6Tf2TSNbXjbnCybktyK0KrOFaw/s400/grossberg_all.jpg" /></a></div>
</p>
<p>
Neural mechanisms that have been selected by evolution because they
support adaptive behaviors that are crucial for survival can give rise to irrational
behaviors when they are exposed to certain environments. Occasional irrational behavior is the
price we pay for adaptive processes: it is a part of the "human condition". Grossberg continued by asking two important questions: (1) What design principles and mechanisms have been selected by evolution? (2) How do certain environments contextually trigger irrational decisions? He provided answers through describing his widely used equations on short-term (activation), medium-term (habituation) and long-term (learning) memory. He showed how a correct form of these equations can help to explain a wide range of data about behavioral economics and neuroeconomics.
</p>
<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim2vTDvW1TC4VTM81kHVhV0uCNP8tA54YWqNgBTmkNu_6nwZgv91oAl7-NHWBVv2LvHa92it9Yt7epyeu8DMX2YQg2f-d91XJ83SZpKb-G4QXvUj6foiAfXmyPKWOduj5XOL0S8FZ4_vQ/s1600/grossberg_political_interpretation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim2vTDvW1TC4VTM81kHVhV0uCNP8tA54YWqNgBTmkNu_6nwZgv91oAl7-NHWBVv2LvHa92it9Yt7epyeu8DMX2YQg2f-d91XJ83SZpKb-G4QXvUj6foiAfXmyPKWOduj5XOL0S8FZ4_vQ/s320/grossberg_political_interpretation.jpg" /></a></div>
</p>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-33177807855783676702013-09-01T13:29:00.000+03:002013-09-02T20:09:52.258+03:00Kalervo Järvelin 60 years: Reseach enabling information to be fully accessible for all<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="hhttp://www.uta.fi/ajankohtaista/yliopistouutiset/0409/2004B.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqyDUp-Xvf7ozqx0FbndwcB03KWNgyPcMta76UAn7RMpzVTnxQyd6c6n7Xi5CTL1WP-LC2WmEdhPP_stWXn7go-LskZfjb-MWQSHbin2T8GLqwPErYtgohCgN1gX7t8Mapd7zWs0Koezc/s320/kalervo_pic1.png" /></a></div><a href="http://www.uta.fi/~likaja">Kalervo Järvelin</a> is a professor at the Department of Information Studies,
University of Tampere. He has authored over 200 scholarly
publications and supervised close to twenty doctoral dissertations. Professor Järvelin has
served the ACM SIGIR Conferences as a program committee member, <a href="http://www.sigir.org/sigir2002/html/organizingcommittee.htm">Conference Chair</a> and Program Co-Chair.
He is an Associate Editor of Information Processing and Management.
</p>
<p>
Driven by the idea that <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Career-in-Information-Retrieval-Research-44332.S.211681053">information should be fully accessible for all</a>, regardless of format, language or location, professor Järvelin has conducted research on information retrieval. Specific research topics in information retrieval have included dealing with the morphologic complexity, analyzing the vocabulary mismatch between query and text, developing optimal methods for assessing relevance of search returns, analyzing specific task settings and simulating human information behavior. In 2000, Kalervo Järvelin and Jaana Kekäläinen received the SIGIR Best Paper Award for their paper "<a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=345545">IR evaluation methods for retrieving highly relevant documents</a>". This and their other paper "<a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=582418">Cumulated gain-based evaluation of IR techniques</a>" have become very highly cited. In 2002, Järvelin chaired the <a href="http://www.sigir.org/sigir2002/html/organizingcommittee.htm">SIGIR 2002 conference</a> in Tampere, Finland. In 2008, Järvelin received the <a href="http://www.ukeig.org.uk/awards/tony-kent-strix">Tony Kent Strix Award</a> in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the field of information retrieval. The latest remarkable international recognition was given by American Society for Information Science (ASIS) for <a href="http://www.asis.org/awards/2012_winners.html">Research in Information Science</a>.
</p>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYsXI3kJTUEZ5Qh53Ejntq1T1LHw2IlqFZ4fRshbc_WRZDRkdeVKWnzTvIWEOE3m1a8U7Fcxjv6jWRcpmwdD_KyU8PZJSayLZnz4KpTr8_stQ7HJF_LnW1YgChAgiYh0OFQHVxgPbpoh8/s1600/kalervo_awards.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYsXI3kJTUEZ5Qh53Ejntq1T1LHw2IlqFZ4fRshbc_WRZDRkdeVKWnzTvIWEOE3m1a8U7Fcxjv6jWRcpmwdD_KyU8PZJSayLZnz4KpTr8_stQ7HJF_LnW1YgChAgiYh0OFQHVxgPbpoh8/s320/kalervo_awards.png" /></a></div>
</p>
<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh4ozbRan0q0ioTa6epJmINyxd7VTi3i4T3Y6Ev-d8owXcA1oi8y70Yi4EWSyCl5lCTcwnEnrNwp_tRxPSsI2jaALKgVe1vI79kcL0Foqw3wLIlxgOEOrJbLBB-z4UOWzA3_k5Pi6Aews/s1600/ohjelma.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh4ozbRan0q0ioTa6epJmINyxd7VTi3i4T3Y6Ev-d8owXcA1oi8y70Yi4EWSyCl5lCTcwnEnrNwp_tRxPSsI2jaALKgVe1vI79kcL0Foqw3wLIlxgOEOrJbLBB-z4UOWzA3_k5Pi6Aews/s200/ohjelma.jpg" /></a></div>
University of Tampere organized a seminar to celebrate professor Kalervo Järvelin's 60th anniversary on Friday, 30th of August 2013.
Professor Pertti Vakkari opened the seminar, describing Järvelin's numerous achievements and his positive personality as a colleague. Invited talks were given by <a href="http://ils.unc.edu/~dianek/">Diane Kelly</a> (Charting the Turn: A Brief History of Interactive Information Retrieval), <a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/tho/">Timo Honkela</a> (<a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/tho/interplay_between.pdf">Relevance and meaning: Interplay between objective and subjective</a>), and <a href="http://www.hanken.fi/staff/hedlund/">Turid Hedlund</a> (Avoin tiedon saatavuus ja mobiili tietoyhteistyö). <a href="http://www.clikdesign.net/ilasmaa/pages/home.php">Urpu Ilasmaa</a> presented memories from a family album. Ilkka Mäkinen presented a poem that described different aspects of Järvelin's academic and personal profile.
</p>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi2NBGIxPgNYWgoI8Et9GCCv_jVbn9fEsDvC7bttWvkZkHRMD4fzHk4ZYU-H6L4VXUZLj1_7hxzueEy2oHHJJ4nMYAFxblJ_jkfrrlr7zTwmESSczqvc_76FT8cXZNEqXw5c66J4WY6bo/s1600/charting_the_turn.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi2NBGIxPgNYWgoI8Et9GCCv_jVbn9fEsDvC7bttWvkZkHRMD4fzHk4ZYU-H6L4VXUZLj1_7hxzueEy2oHHJJ4nMYAFxblJ_jkfrrlr7zTwmESSczqvc_76FT8cXZNEqXw5c66J4WY6bo/s200/charting_the_turn.jpg" /></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNGIRltgMmZdUt7YttVF4ku3evylmu5YZcCcf2Rw4cmBEgoT20sica-d6XOdT_ADvoPoS0ziItogDxbgYgi39VdTdyQXk0S2qQzgnwlbWSLdNaThqWKbfWulX54xlfNuQi6NY05HDl-G8/s1600/turid_hedlund.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNGIRltgMmZdUt7YttVF4ku3evylmu5YZcCcf2Rw4cmBEgoT20sica-d6XOdT_ADvoPoS0ziItogDxbgYgi39VdTdyQXk0S2qQzgnwlbWSLdNaThqWKbfWulX54xlfNuQi6NY05HDl-G8/s200/turid_hedlund.jpg" /></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8W-ETXCvN1kYi_04sbj7a094dm1ehoWKh3zVvctuFntu5EgrcgvseTP7UmYXLnTP3kIWwWCVcDFFpiWoNdf-4iqgndu7rzWNHXZ8qjd7CoLxytYvwRA1Oq9t-pBsaqEqLryGJxlQ1DoI/s1600/lahjoja1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8W-ETXCvN1kYi_04sbj7a094dm1ehoWKh3zVvctuFntu5EgrcgvseTP7UmYXLnTP3kIWwWCVcDFFpiWoNdf-4iqgndu7rzWNHXZ8qjd7CoLxytYvwRA1Oq9t-pBsaqEqLryGJxlQ1DoI/s200/lahjoja1.jpg" /></a>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-89596930950621999862013-08-14T16:31:00.000+03:002013-08-14T16:31:46.578+03:00Erkki Oja: Aalto Distinguished Professor<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEgeh1n7-y4jx95uH7BjPbZLXc6_mgl_OJHIvu1qdpgwlL2gghyczMfioQF0U3XQdMAXujuzXFjMdXg970dGYHvYYXgFTrrBITZxF5NWS6VMQZsjLFqwfAp_cqkPAQCcIOMI7k_ujFUwM/s1600/oja2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEgeh1n7-y4jx95uH7BjPbZLXc6_mgl_OJHIvu1qdpgwlL2gghyczMfioQF0U3XQdMAXujuzXFjMdXg970dGYHvYYXgFTrrBITZxF5NWS6VMQZsjLFqwfAp_cqkPAQCcIOMI7k_ujFUwM/s200/oja2.jpg" /></a></div><a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/oja/">Erkki Oja</a> has been <a href="http://www.aalto.fi/en/current/news/view/2013-06-13-004/">appointed</a> as an Aalto Distinguished Professor from the 1st of August 2013. Professor Oja's successful research in the areas of pattern recognition, computer vision, neural networks and machine learning has been recognized widely. In the early 1980s, his PhD research on Subspace Methods of Pattern Recognition was widely adopted and one specific result of this work is called <a href="http://wiki.eyewire.org/en/Oja%27s_rule">Oja's rule</a>. With Aapo Hyvärinen and Juha Karhunen, Erkki Oja has co-authored a highly influential text book on <a href="http://research.ics.aalto.fi/ica/book/">Independent Component Analysis</a>.
</p>
<p>
In addition to his scientific merits, Professor Oja is known for his excellent organizational skills. He has been the director of one of the <a href="http://www.aka.fi/en-GB/A/">Academy of Finland</a>’s Centres of Excellence since 2000 and held numerous responsible positions in various scientific bodies serving, for instance, as a Founding Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition, the Chairman of the <a href="http://www.e-nns.org/">European Neural Network Society</a> between 2000 and 2005, and the Chairman of the Academy of Finland’s Research Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering between 2007 and 2012.
</p>
<p>
Oja's appointment was today celebrated at the <a href="http://ics.aalto.fi/en/">Department of information and computer science</a>, Aalto University School of Science. The department has been ranked to be among the top research units in the world in the area of machine learning and pattern recognition.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ-PjllU4X9BlGqOUJzsmEVu7XzXzTwOHOZ0WxG0HatPhFIsB2i9TY1_CFU2YiCEb9KX-EMwG-x3_ETl8i30Wt0HqH91ovkFhbO7OKiBscrisFH7zdDeiQsYRmSXK42hjUhwgbbcCo2U8/s1600/erkkiaalto2013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ-PjllU4X9BlGqOUJzsmEVu7XzXzTwOHOZ0WxG0HatPhFIsB2i9TY1_CFU2YiCEb9KX-EMwG-x3_ETl8i30Wt0HqH91ovkFhbO7OKiBscrisFH7zdDeiQsYRmSXK42hjUhwgbbcCo2U8/s400/erkkiaalto2013.jpg" /></a><br><font size="-1">Department head Pekka Orponen (on the right) congratulating Professor Erkki Oja</font></div>
</p>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-6189612373275609532013-08-12T14:37:00.000+03:002013-08-13T13:54:37.157+03:00Esa Saarinen 60 years: Philosophy with relevance, significance and empathy<p>Professor <a href="http://www.esasaarinen.com/en/about_e_saarinen">Esa Saarinen</a> reached 60 years of age on 27th of July. To celebrate this event, his colleagues, friends and collaborators over the years prepared a book called "<a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2589677/ElamanFilosofi.pdf">Elämän filosofi</a>" (Philosopher of Life). This book, edited by <a href="http://frankmartela.fi/">Frank Martela</a>, <a href="http://ajattelunammattilainen.fi/lauri-jarvilehto/">Lauri Järvilehto</a>, <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/peterkentta">Peter Kenttä</a> and Jaakko Korhonen, was compiled as a surprise gift. The book contains 17 contributions from a number of authors, discussing different aspects Saarinen's life and work.
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<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEyWrf9B5V3ALz7GdJscuHz7rV3DnoQZhmd-HF5t1un4jw5Q3oTbkyQ4BIxGnNBezreZa41rGQWmLaKEloH6VVjHEYYf3JK-Fy23fBCzCgQ7JjHuGfGCpNoOrKnvgyrqiiX5RVIqYHbAE/s1600/esa_saarinen_elevation_2013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEyWrf9B5V3ALz7GdJscuHz7rV3DnoQZhmd-HF5t1un4jw5Q3oTbkyQ4BIxGnNBezreZa41rGQWmLaKEloH6VVjHEYYf3JK-Fy23fBCzCgQ7JjHuGfGCpNoOrKnvgyrqiiX5RVIqYHbAE/s320/esa_saarinen_elevation_2013.jpg" /></a></div>
Esa Saarinen got his doctorate at the age of 24 at the University of Helsinki, working for a famous logician and philosopher, professor <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaakko_Hintikka">Jaakko Hintikka</a>. After working in the 70's in the tradition of analytic philosophy and philosophical logic, Saarinen moved in the 1980's to broader themes including existentialism, philosophy of feminism, history of philosophy, and philosophy of culture. In 2000, as an initiative of professor <a href="http://sal.aalto.fi/en/personnel/raimo.hamalainen/">Raimo P. Hämäläinen</a>, he was invited to join the faculty at Helsinki University of Technology (currently Aalto University) where he has been teaching very popular courses on Applied Philosophy, Philosophy of Life, and Systems Thinking with even more than half a thousand students participating each voluntary course. Saarinen and Hämäläinen have jointly developed the concept of <a href="http://systemsintelligence.aalto.fi/">Systems Intelligence</a>, to help in understanding human behaviors from a point of view that Saarinen calls optimistic and realistic. This work combines engineering and systems thinking with humanistic tradition.
</p>
<p>
On Monday, 12th of August, a seminar was organized in the honor of professor Saarinen and to provide an overview on his work and its broad influence in academic world as well as more broadly in the society. The speakers consisted of a subset of the contributors for the book Philosopher of Life:
</p>
<p>
<ul>
<li>The head of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at Aalto University, <a href="https://people.aalto.fi/index.html#hannele_wallenius">Hannele Wallenius</a>: Opening of the seminar.
<li><a href="http://frankmartela.fi/">Frank Martela</a>: "An Introduction to Saarinen's Elevation Philosophy"
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilkka_Niiniluoto">Ilkka Niiniluoto</a>: "Is Esa Saarinen a Systems Intellectual?"
<li><a href="http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/members/lecturers/james_wilk">James Wilk</a>: "Icarus: Disembodied Knowledge, Bureaucratic Thinking, and the Hopeful Return to Reality"
<li><a href="http://sal.aalto.fi/en/personnel/raimo.hamalainen/">Raimo Hämäläinen</a>: "Esa Saarinen and Systems Intelligence"
<li><a href="http://ajattelunammattilainen.fi/lauri-jarvilehto/">Lauri Järvilehto</a>: "Sokratic Conductor - Esa Saarinen's Elevating Practice of Life Philosophy"
<li><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/pub/makke-j-lepp%C3%A4nen/0/125/3ab">Makke Leppänen</a> & <a href="http://ollis.wordpress.com/kuka-ollis/">Ollis Leppänen</a>: "Pafos Capital - Esa Saarinen's Pafos Pedagogy and Psychological Capital"
<li><a href="http://kirstilonka.fi/">Kirsti Lonka</a>: "Views into E. Saarinen's Pedagogy of Human Florishing"
<li><a href="http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Inkinen">Sam Inkinen</a>: "'Imagologies' - Esa Saarinen as a Contemporary and Visionary of Media Society"
<li><a href="http://nostetuotanto.fi/nostemestari">Heikki Peltola</a>: "Towards Interhumanity - Development of Esa Saarinen's Leadership Philosophy"
<li><a href="http://www.novetos.fi/tapio.html">Tapio Aaltonen</a>: "Dramaturgy of Spiritual Leadership"
<li><a href="http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._T._Bergqvist">J.T. Bergqvist</a>: "Let Yourself to Get Inspired – Esa as a Liberator of Hidden Potential"
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matti_Alahuhta">Matti Alahuhta</a>: "Leadership"
<li><a href="http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pertti_Korhonen">Pertti Korhonen</a>: "Esa Saarinen - a Deliberator of Human Beings"
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorma_Ollila">Jorma Ollila</a>: "Esa Saarinen and the World of a Business Leader"
</ul>
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<p>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg176r6hycqFczGOOyvYIySy9KtuWhFXuZ7kaNyv3hFgsdRnGLclgjKQ9Z8AwIVFO0yFf_J6F0Ngsn80LIhfEo9PPfmHzDkQ5090hZrp29ob8SHUPVRR2qc98uC67jQ5atcei-1Jh3VpN8/s1600/ilkka_niiniluoto1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg176r6hycqFczGOOyvYIySy9KtuWhFXuZ7kaNyv3hFgsdRnGLclgjKQ9Z8AwIVFO0yFf_J6F0Ngsn80LIhfEo9PPfmHzDkQ5090hZrp29ob8SHUPVRR2qc98uC67jQ5atcei-1Jh3VpN8/s200/ilkka_niiniluoto1.jpg" /></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7d7gCPfBZ-h6cRvKzmkF_QWuIriYmIO-52IiVoLFLYN8iFoD2skyLY7F5q0Qn0b95bcIqRosK1rFH_dtHtOPGFlUtt_a6Zu6LCRkbGPQwOr8spMlMqoAanCO46YP0E0XOYfvm-FtDpE0/s1600/james_wilk1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7d7gCPfBZ-h6cRvKzmkF_QWuIriYmIO-52IiVoLFLYN8iFoD2skyLY7F5q0Qn0b95bcIqRosK1rFH_dtHtOPGFlUtt_a6Zu6LCRkbGPQwOr8spMlMqoAanCO46YP0E0XOYfvm-FtDpE0/s200/james_wilk1.jpg" /></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2HPfx7t0FpUqlapPWmS28iDgQf0_OTNOFPxCpQCyxQtp8EU2YQGIDlHj1B4K8Wo0fa_awbaLzE6ORtULsHgn34wQfsgLJas0gYrFzCIIhyXTzNM6q8Qo_5X62u71Q8GlBp3UCpFMX4f0/s1600/lauri_jarvilehto1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2HPfx7t0FpUqlapPWmS28iDgQf0_OTNOFPxCpQCyxQtp8EU2YQGIDlHj1B4K8Wo0fa_awbaLzE6ORtULsHgn34wQfsgLJas0gYrFzCIIhyXTzNM6q8Qo_5X62u71Q8GlBp3UCpFMX4f0/s200/lauri_jarvilehto1.jpg" /></a>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-30263234028701484142013-08-07T09:30:00.000+03:002013-08-09T08:49:09.420+03:00Crowd competence for investment banking<p>
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Five years ago, the Adaptive Knowledge Representation and Reasoning conference (<a href="http://research.ics.aalto.fi/events/AKRR08/">AKRR 2008</a>) took place. The <a href="http://research.ics.aalto.fi/events/AKRR08/programme.shtml">conference program</a> included a special session on creativity and innovation. <b>Sakari Virkki</b> gave an interesting and thought provoking talk related to investment banking. He described his system that had every year outperformed Standard & Poor's 500 stock market index. The system is based on crowdsourcing in such a manner that all members of the community are not considered equally important but their competence is carefully analyzed by the system.</p>
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The latest version of the system has mapped and ranked the activity of 10,000 investors and 30,000 instruments at work in US stock exchanges.
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After 2008, Virkki has joined forces with the economist <b>Akseli Virtanen</b> to establish <a href="http://www.rhmam.org/">Robin Hood Asset Management Cooperative</a>. Huffington Post published recently an <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/student-reporter/21st-century-robin-hood-i_b_3639926.html">article</a> describing Robin Hood as a means to introduce altruism to investment banking. It is clear that the economical system is currently overly centralized. Virkki's system potentially offers an important solution for repairing some main defects in the current capitalistic system without sacrificing the essential strengths of market economy.
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-85526901275668564922013-05-05T19:42:00.000+03:002013-05-05T19:42:20.484+03:00Per Linell: Interactivity and Intersubjectivity<p>
Professor <a href="http://www.lincs.gu.se/members/per-linell/">Per Linell</a> is known for his influential work within linguistics including the books "<a href="http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Per_Linell:_Rethinking_Language,_Mind_and_World_Dialogically._Interactional_and_contextual_theories_of_human_sense-making,_Charlotte,_NC:_IAP,_INC_%28Series_editors_introduction,_Preface,_chapters1,_2,_5,_9,_16_%26_20%29">Rethinking Language, Mind and World Dialogically: Interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making</a>" and "<a href="http://books.google.fi/books/about/The_Written_Language_Bias_In_Linguistics.html?id=ClD2J8ISsf8C&redir_esc=y">The Written Language Bias in Linguistics: Its Nature, Origins and Transformations</a>". On Friday, 3rd of May, Linell gave an invited talk entitled "Interactivity and intersubjectivity: Dialogical perspectives" in a seminar series organized by the <a href="http://www.intersubjectivity.fi/en/">Finnish Centre of Excellence in Research on Intersubjectivity in Interaction</a>.
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Linell started by citing and discussing <a href="http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/users/william-f-hanks">William F. Hanks</a>' book "<a href="http://books.google.fi/books?hl=en&lr=&id=dPXvxgL2t1oC&oi=fnd&pg=PA232&dq=%22Language+form+and+communicative+practices%22&ots=dRr5DuW020&sig=UWvLC8Dng52RQysIcS7iksnCAFo&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22Language%20form%20and%20communicative%20practices%22&f=false">Language form and communicative practices</a>": "These [...] questions arise from a series of contradictions in language: It is both an abstract system system and an intimate part of our daily experience, and individual capacity and a social fact, a form and an activity." He pointed out that <a href="http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/chomsky/index.html">Noam Chomsky</a> took a narrow view on linguistic theory formation assuming ideal speaker-listeners who know language perfectly and are unaffected by such irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors. Linell reminded that Chomsky's assumption moves aside most of language use, or languaging, and was formulated only to save the notion of one underlying abstract language system.
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As an opposing or complementary view to Chomsky, Linell presented interactionism: The sense-making ability of humans is rooted in social interaction; the mind is interactive, dialogical, social, shared, extended, distributed, etc. He discussed in detail the relation between an individual and the social level of reality, and concluded that both points of view are necessary and can be brought together. The mind lives in/through the ecosocial world, referring to works on "interactive mind" (Schegloff, 1991; Trognon & Batt, 2010), "social mind" (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000), "shared mind" (Zlatev et al. 2008), "extended mind" (Clark & Chalmers, 1998), "enactive mind" (Thompson, 2007), "distributed mind" (Cowley, 2011) and "dialogical mind (Linell, 2009, and others). In Finland, related work within education science has been conducted by professor Kai Hakkarainen with his colleagues who have published a book on "<a href="http://www.helsinki.fi/science/networkedlearning/news/networkedexpertise.html">Communities of networked expertise: Professional and educational perspectives</a>" (2004). Linell reminded that even though individuals have their own bodies and have personal biographies and conceptions of self, they are also partly constituted in/through self-other relations. People have dialogical emotions such as shame, guilt, compassion, empathy and conscience.
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Intersubjectivity was a theme that Linell discussed in detail and only some aspects can be reported here. He considered intersubjectivity to be an alternative or intermediate position to subjectivity and objectivity. He comprised some of the main points of dialogical theories. First, participants in interactivities produce and understand real actions and utterances in the world. Second, one moves away from a single individual towards an individual in interaction with others. These interactions are situated and form situation-transcending sociocultural practices. Linell concluded by stating that individualism and collectivism are both insufficient for solving the conceptual problem in the theory of language. Rather than preserving the Cartesian dichotomy, one can start out from the dialogical foundation of both individuals and communities, i.e. the interactivity between self and others.
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The talk was also very interesting from the point of view that in computational modelling of cognition and language related parallel developments have taken place. In 1980s it was commonplace to develop <a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/tho/info/Jappinen88a.shtml">rule-based systems for language processing</a> with an idea that they could capture the linguistic skills of a generalized language speaker. The <a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/tho/thesis/index.html#SECTION00060000000000000000">knowledge acquisition bottleneck</a> was recognized as well as the practical conclusion that "<a href="http://pages.uoregon.edu/delancey/sb/LECT02.htm">all grammars leak</a>".
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One serious line of research that has tried to alleviate these problems in computational modelling of language is based on (statistical) machine learning. The basic idea is to device systems that learn language based on large corpora rather than trying to formulate linguistic rules manually. A nowadays commonplace practice is to collect statistics of morphemes, words or expressions appearing in contexts and use some suitable method to model the relationship between these elements using the context data. In an early study, the self-organizing map algorithm was used to create <a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/tho/info/honkela95.shtml">a map of words in Grimm brothers' fairy tales</a>. The result included emergent implicit categories of nouns, verbs and some subcategories within them including animate and inanimate nouns. As attempt to build a bridge between the individual and social dimensions, <a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/tho/info/Rome06.shtml">simulation models</a> have been developed in which communities of artificial agents converge towards a shared symbol set in a number of interactions. The context can also be multimodal, for instance, in formulating <a href="https://mediatech.aalto.fi/~kvlehton/gica_eng/">a mapping between words and expressions that describe human movement and the corresponding complex visual movement patterns</a>. Moreover, <a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/tho/info/GICAIJCNN12.shtml">Grounded Intersubjective Concept Analysis (GICA) method</a> has been developed as a attempt to quantify semantic variation. In essence, GICA aims to measure the degree of intersubjectivity.
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-79689211392916871912013-04-05T12:43:00.000+03:002013-04-05T12:43:08.575+03:00ICANNGA'13 - Tom Heskes: Reading the Brain with Bayesian Machine Learning<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br /><br />The International Conference on Adaptive and Natural Computing algorithms, ICANNGA'13 opened with a keynote talk by prof. Tom Heskes from the Radboud University of Nijmegen titled Reading the Brain with Bayesian Machine Learning. <br /><br />Technology Review had listed Bayesian Machine Learning (BML) as one of the emerging technologies that will change our world in 2004, and we were first treated with a short introduction to BML, and the current state of the research. There are many general purpose software tools such as <a href="http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/bugs/">Bugs</a>, <a href="http://mcmc-jags.sourceforge.net/">Jags</a> and <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/infernet/">Infer.net</a> available and quite a few cool models, but killer applications and better techniques for discovering causal relations are still needed. <br /><br />Heskes then gave examples of applications of Bayesian ML in the neuroimaging domain, or more specifically those related to Brain-Computer Interfaces. He defined the goal as classifying the mental states of the brain. 'The holy grail' of the research would be to provide the means of communication for a person who has lost all motor control (for example due to ALS). <br /><br />That goal has not been reached yet, but we were given some examples of the state of current research. First Heskes showed us how it is possible to classify imagined movement of fingers from EEG data. In another experiment the focus of covert attention (focus attention without moving your eyes) on different directions was used instead. The results are strong enough to predict the angle the person was attending.<br /><br />Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) provides a possibility to try to classify image data. First a goal was to classify handwritten 6's versus 9's based on the fMRI data. The next logical step is then to try to predict what image the subject was seeing, and further down the road predict what a person is imagining. Currently, it was possible to do reconstruction of the handwritten 6's and 9'swith Deep Bolzmann machines (with a background idea that the brain might be doing something similar). <br /><br />If this isn't enough, the Bayesian framework has also been used for inferring brain networks yielding a clustered graph. All in all, a very enlightening talk and a great start for the conference. <br /><br />(Picture courtesy of Tom Heskes)<br />Tiina Lindh-Knuutilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14129251734877844634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-2382827636971935542013-03-22T13:57:00.001+02:002013-03-22T14:10:35.379+02:00Hyppänen: Decision makers’ use of intuition at the front end of innovation<p>Olli Hyppänen is defending his thesis "<a href=" http://lib.tkk.fi/Diss/2013/isbn9789526050300/isbn9789526050300.pdf">Decision Makers’ Use of Intuition at the Front End of Innovation</a>" on Friday, 22nd of March at Aalto University School of Science. Juha Laurila from University of Turku is serving as the opponent and Karlos Artto as the custos.
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Empirical research on human knowing and experience has clearly shown that expertise is based on skills and knowledge that are difficult to represent explicitly in linguistic form. Dijksterhuis et al. have recently shown that intuitive decision making gives systematically better results than reliance on explicit or rational thinking in solving complex problems (see "<a href="users.ics.aalto.fi/tho/online-papers/TKK-ICS-R24.pdf">Modeling communities of experts</a>" for more details).
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In his thesis, Hyppänen states that the findings in managerial decision making research suggest that decision makers most often use intuition in uncertain situations. Moreover, innovation front end is a good example of an environment with high uncertainty. An essential motivation for Hyppänen's research is the finding that the use of intuition in decision making has not been extensively researched at the innovation front end context. According to the defendant, existing research in innovation front end decision making has concentrated on building traditional normative models to deal with uncertainty.
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The first part of empirical data of the thesis research consists of 19 interviews in 4 ICT companies. The second part of data consists of the results from 86 questionnaires from innovation decision makers. The results of the initial phase resulted in list of categories and related properties relevant in the development of the grounded theory framework for innovation front end decision making. Decision making was the main focus of the data analysis, non-rational elements in decision making emerging as a core category. this category was named as intuition. In Hyppönen's thesis, the main research questions are the following.
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<li>How does intuition reveal itself in innovation front end decision making?
<li>What approaches do decision makers have when using intuition at the innovation front end?
<li>How do experienced decision makers differ from inexperienced decision makers in their use of intuition?
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The opponent explored, for instance, methodological challenged related to the thesis.
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-11370800292519439632013-03-22T13:20:00.003+02:002013-03-22T14:16:59.675+02:00Pylkkönen: Towards Efficient and Robust Automatic Speech Recognition<p>
<a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/jpylkkon/">Janne Pylkkönen</a> is defending his PhD thesis "<a href=": http://lib.tkk.fi/Diss/2013/isbn9789526050645/isbn9789526050645.pdf">Towards Efficient and Robust Automatic Speech Recognition: Decoding Techniques and Discriminative Training</a>" on Friday, 22nd of March, 2013 at Aalto University School of Science. The research has been conducted in a research group focusing on speech technology, lead by Prof. <a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/mikkok/">Mikko Kurimo</a>. Dr. <a href="http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=7AQD6T8AAAAJ&hl=en">Erik McDermott</a>, Google, is serving as the opponent and Prof. <a href="http://users.ics.aalto.fi/oja/">Erkki Oja</a> as the custos. The research on speech recognition has long roots in Otaniemi as Academician Teuvo Kohonen conducted active research in this area already in early 1980s and developed the famous <a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=28&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel1%2F2%2F4%2F00000028">neural phonetic typewriter</a> with his team.
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Pylkkönen's thesis presents methods for decoding and modeling the acoustics for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition with two main contributions. First, he has developed a large vocabulary decoder suitable especially for morphologically rich languages. Second, he has improved discriminative training of acoustic models to increase
their robustness. The thesis also includes a theoretical analysis of discriminative training where the extended
Baum-Welch algorithm is formulated as a constrained optimization method. The methods have been tested using a speech recognition system that has been developed over the years with contributions from a number of researchers.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqWea3JdtPkIRCKhdI8xoc8JpCVB0AOyEnhojlG14yUT-RPT4QgNzMZh0og8MC6EPzYfvj427PaWnxHstBDPvTEzbUVS7lSgxcmDkVI5Mu1Bxo5MxPpnlX19XMthNKVeYeHfMmw9n9-9g/s1600/janne_pylkkonen1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqWea3JdtPkIRCKhdI8xoc8JpCVB0AOyEnhojlG14yUT-RPT4QgNzMZh0og8MC6EPzYfvj427PaWnxHstBDPvTEzbUVS7lSgxcmDkVI5Mu1Bxo5MxPpnlX19XMthNKVeYeHfMmw9n9-9g/s320/janne_pylkkonen1.jpg" /></a>
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In the lectio precursoria, Pylkkönen described the background and motivation of his research related to speaker-independent large vocabulary continuous speech recognition. He introduced the main ideas related to acoustic modeling, language modeling and decoding that combines the information related to the speech signal and language statistics. Pylkkönen gave an example on the complexity of the task. When the system "knows" 20,000 morphs (word segments), 24 phonemes, 1500 phoneme models and 40,000 Gaussian components, there are 3,200,000 parameters to be estimated.
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In his opening statement, Erik McDermott first told that he works in the speech division at Google that develops speech recognition capabilities of the Android phones. He mentioned that Android has speech recognition for 40 languages including Finnish. He reminded of the challenges related to speech recognition. There are still fundamental problems with the technology and therefore active research is still needed. McDermott recognized the important contributions by Teuvo Kohonen and Erkki Oja in providing what he called an organic view to pattern recognition systems. In essence, this refers to the contributions related to unsupervised machine learning where systems improve over time based on a data-driven approach.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxdlJcYbK2pTOTXV14HpJ3tt5TXCZ8hJ-Zz6xvJOZWoNSd3gEXTbmp9LhL6yjzoZG8okiHfhR5jPr77P1Jc0fYqOyFbvqDkLpoSqcxuYPfp36niAhr-QNGdzbkJcz_NWwzNDAkiP74V1Q/s1600/janne_pylkkonen2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxdlJcYbK2pTOTXV14HpJ3tt5TXCZ8hJ-Zz6xvJOZWoNSd3gEXTbmp9LhL6yjzoZG8okiHfhR5jPr77P1Jc0fYqOyFbvqDkLpoSqcxuYPfp36niAhr-QNGdzbkJcz_NWwzNDAkiP74V1Q/s320/janne_pylkkonen2.jpg" /></a>
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In the discussion, several methodological themes considered in detail related to decoding techniques, potential use of finite-state transducers, pruning techniques, discriminative training, maximum likelihood modeling and Gaussian mixtures.
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00264017426433186755noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096269532297058242.post-11058786378804497642013-03-15T12:57:00.002+02:002013-03-15T12:57:43.544+02:00Johnson: How Social Media Changes User-Centred Design<p>
<a href="http://www.hiit.fi/u/johnson/">Mikael Johnson</a> is <a href="http://sci.aalto.fi/en/current/events/vaitos_johnson_mikael/">defending</a> his thesis "<a href="http://lib.tkk.fi/Diss/2013/isbn9789526050737/isbn9789526050737.pdf">How Social Media Changes User-Centred Design</a>” at Aalto University School of Science. A case study on <a href="http://www.sulake.com/">Sulake</a>'s Habbo Hotel questions basic assumptions of user-centred design concerning social media service design. In his lectio precursoria, Johnson discussed different aspects of the concept user and user-centred design. He further presented views on social media and presented some central questions behind his research. These included (1) (2) (3). The method applied in the thesis is based on explorative case studies. The specific context has been Habbo Hotel that is one the largest social media applications in the world for teenagers. The results have been presented in twelve publications, among which seven have been included in the thesis. In his work, Johnson developed two new concepts, i.e. <i>developer–user
social distance</i> and <i>content creation capacity</i>. The motivation has been to help designers and researchers to consider and communicate previously neglected dimensions of user involvement.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEmZ1IIZyroaeNKrbh78MS3Vjj4yJKGPYI6z3A9JqZ5nG2-fVaoPafpBArv6PK9yqr9TXslWfRxf2yWQX478LbOZLWxE3ydK_HW0AJdKnz-uY5PALLfTTmyYTAeuOeDI9uG1NwnK5HzWM/s1600/johnson_defence1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEmZ1IIZyroaeNKrbh78MS3Vjj4yJKGPYI6z3A9JqZ5nG2-fVaoPafpBArv6PK9yqr9TXslWfRxf2yWQX478LbOZLWxE3ydK_HW0AJdKnz-uY5PALLfTTmyYTAeuOeDI9uG1NwnK5HzWM/s320/johnson_defence1.jpg" /></a>
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The opponent, professor <a href="http://www.kth.se/en/csc/forskning/mid/people/gulliksen-jan-1.285655">Jan Gulliksen</a> from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, paid attention to the fact that some research questions and topics such as user-centered design deserve continuous attention. He mentioned that no one would ask cancer researchers are not asked why they still continue as the topic has been explored already for a long time. Gulliksen reminded that huge amounts of time are used yearly to deal with non-optimalities of computerized systems which motivates paying attention to information systems development and how they serve the users. He underlined the idea that designers should not be "psychopaths" so that they should be able to take users' point of view. Gulliksen said that Johnson had a magnificent opportunity to conduct a longitudinal study.
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The first question professor Gulliksen posed was: "Is this a usable thesis?". Johnson referred to the concepts of satisfaction, effectiveness and efficiency, and their relation to different user groups such as the opponent, colleagues or one's mother. After some discussion on the cover of the thesis, various aspects were covered in detail.
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The event was attended by a remarkably large multidisciplinary audience from universities and research institutions such as <a href="http://www.kuluttajatutkimuskeskus.fi/en">National Consumer Research Centre</a>. The defence was nicely multilingual as the custos, Professor Marko Nieminen, opened the event in Finnish and English, lectio precursoria was given in Swedish, and the opponent started with some words of Swedish and continued by using English.
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