Timo Hämäläinen

Bio: Timo Hämäläinen is an academic researcher from University of Jyväskylä. The author has contributed to research in topics: Quality of service & Encoder. The author has an hindex of 38, co-authored 560 publications receiving 7648 citations. Previous affiliations of Timo Hämäläinen include Dalian Medical University & Nokia.

On Detection of Network-Based Co-residence Verification Attacks in SDN-Driven Clouds

Abstract: Modern cloud environments allow users to consume computational and storage resources in the form of virtual machines. Even though machines running on the same cloud server are logically isolated from each other, a malicious customer can create various side channels to obtain sensitive information from co-located machines. In this study, we concentrate on timely detection of intentional co-residence attempts in cloud environments that utilize software-defined networking. SDN enables global visibility of the network state which allows the cloud provider to monitor and extract necessary information from each flow in every virtual network in online mode. We analyze the extracted statistics on different levels in order to find anomalous patterns. The detection results obtained show us that the co-residence verification attack can be detected with the methods that are usually employed for botnet analysis.

Linear approximation based compression algorithms efficiency to compress environmental data sets

Abstract: Measuring some environmental magnitudes is a very typical application in the field of Internet of Things. Wireless sensor nodes measuring these environmental magnitudes are often battery powered devices. Thus, the energy efficiency is an important topic in these measuring devices. The most efficient method to reduce energy consumption in wireless devices is to reduce the amount of data needed to transmit via wireless connection. A simple method to reduce the amount of the data is to compress sensor data. Environmental data behaves quasi linearly in short time window and many compression algorithms utilize this data behavior. In this paper the different environmental data sets characteristics and their effect on compression algorithms’ compression ratio are evaluated. The results can be used to evaluate and choose the suitable compression algorithm for the application and to predict the lifetime of the battery powered device.

A Survey on Technologies Which Make Bitcoin Greener or More Justified

Abstract: According to recent estimates, one bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy as 1.5 million Visa transactions. Why is bitcoin using so much energy? Most of the energy is used during the bitcoin mining process, which serves at least two significant purposes: a) distributing new cryptocurrency coins to the cryptoeconomy and b) securing the Bitcoin blockchain ledger. In reality, the comparison of bitcoin transactions to Visa transactions is not that simple. The amount of transactions in the Bitcoin network is not directly connected to the amount of bitcoin mining power nor the energy consumption of those mining devices; for example, it is possible to multiply the number of bitcoin transactions per second without increasing the mining power and the energy consumption. Bitcoin is not only “digital money for hackers”. It has very promising future potential as a global reserve currency and a method to make the World Wide Web (WWW) immune to cyberattacks such as the Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks. This survey approached cryptocurrencies’ various technological and environmental issues from many different perspectives. To make various cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH), greener and more justified, what technological solutions do we have? We found that cryptocurrency mining might be cleaner than is generally expected. There is also a plan to make a vast renewable energy source available by combining Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion and Bitcoin mining. There are plans to use unconventional computing methods (quantum computing, reversible computing, ternary computing, optical computing, analog computing) to solve some of the issues regarding the vast energy consumption of conventional computing (including cryptocurrency mining). We think using spare computing cycles for grid computing efforts is justified. For example, there are billions of smartphones in the world. Many smartphones are being recharged every day. If this daily recharging period of twenty to sixty minutes would be used for grid computing, for example, finding new cures to cancer, it would probably be a significant breakthrough for medical research simulations. We call cryptocurrency communities to research and develop grid computing and unconventional computing methods for the most significant cryptocurrencies: bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH).

Scalable DSP realization of wavelet transform in image coding

Abstract: A scalable realisation of a two dimensional (2D) fast wavelet transform (FWT) is presented and compared to an earlier implementation of discrete wavelet transform (DWT), which uses matrix multiplication method. Parallelisation and mapping possibilities are analysed. The main emphasis is in minimising communication requirements and utilising local communication. Measured performance figures verify good performance and illustrate the benefits of parallel computation in Wavelet transform. The computation time of the FWT is only a fraction of the computation time of the previous implementation.

Service management model for integrated 3/4G and wireless LANs

Abstract: There are many challenges to transport multimedia traffic over wireless network, because of eg bandwidth fluctuation, user mobility and bandwidth resource scarcity This paper presents management issues how quality of service can be guaranteed when the mobile users are roaming between different wireless networks (WLAN, GPRS, UMTS)

I and i

Abstract: There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality. Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

Machine learning

Abstract: Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Survey of Wireless Indoor Positioning Techniques and Systems

Abstract: Wireless indoor positioning systems have become very popular in recent years. These systems have been successfully used in many applications such as asset tracking and inventory management. This paper provides an overview of the existing wireless indoor positioning solutions and attempts to classify different techniques and systems. Three typical location estimation schemes of triangulation, scene analysis, and proximity are analyzed. We also discuss location fingerprinting in detail since it is used in most current system or solutions. We then examine a set of properties by which location systems are evaluated, and apply this evaluation method to survey a number of existing systems. Comprehensive performance comparisons including accuracy, precision, complexity, scalability, robustness, and cost are presented.

The Self-Organizing Map

Abstract: An overview of the self-organizing map algorithm, on which the papers in this issue are based, is presented in this article.