Helsinki Institute for Information Technology

About: Helsinki Institute for Information Technology is a facility organization based out in Espoo, Finland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Bayesian network. The organization has 630 authors who have published 1962 publications receiving 63426 citations.

Musical Activities Predispose to Involuntary Musical Imagery

Abstract: Involuntary semantic memories are a new topic in psychology. Initial research has suggested that musical memories are a dominant type of involuntary memory. Interestingly, no comprehensive information exists on the commonality of “earworms”, or repeated involuntary imagery of music (INMI), and its relationship to the engagement with musical activities. The present study investigated these using cross-sectional, retrospective reports from a questionnaire study that was conducted among Finnish internet users (N = 12,519). The analyses of the data revealed that 89.2% of participants reported experiencing this phenomenon at least once a week. The amount of music practice and listening was positively related to the frequency of involuntary music. Women reported elevated levels of involuntary imagery episodes in contrast to men, who reacted differently. In older age-groups the frequency of the incidents decreased among both sexes. People with extensive musical practice history seemed to experience longer musica...

Combining web, mobile phones and public displays in large-scale: manhattan story mashup

Abstract: We present a large-scale pervasive game called Manhattan Story Mashup that combines the Web, camera phones, and a large public display. The game introduces a new form of interactive storytelling which lets an unlimited number of players author stories in the Web while a large number of players illustrate the stories with camera phones. This paper presents the first deployment of the game and a detailed analysis of its quantitative and qualitative results. We present details on the game implementation and game set up including practical lessons learnt about this large-scale experiment involving over 300 players in total. The analysis shows how the game succeeds in fostering players' creativity by exploiting ambiguity and how the players were engaged in a fast-paced competition which resulted in 115 stories and 3142 photos in 1.5 hours.

Genome-wide modeling of transcription kinetics reveals patterns of RNA production delays

Abstract: Genes with similar transcriptional activation kinetics can display very different temporal mRNA profiles because of differences in transcription time, degradation rate, and RNA-processing kinetics. Recent studies have shown that a splicing-associated RNA production delay can be significant. To investigate this issue more generally, it is useful to develop methods applicable to genome-wide datasets. We introduce a joint model of transcriptional activation and mRNA accumulation that can be used for inference of transcription rate, RNA production delay, and degradation rate given data from high-throughput sequencing time course experiments. We combine a mechanistic differential equation model with a nonparametric statistical modeling approach allowing us to capture a broad range of activation kinetics, and we use Bayesian parameter estimation to quantify the uncertainty in estimates of the kinetic parameters. We apply the model to data from estrogen receptor α activation in the MCF-7 breast cancer cell line. We use RNA polymerase II ChIP-Seq time course data to characterize transcriptional activation and mRNA-Seq time course data to quantify mature transcripts. We find that 11% of genes with a good signal in the data display a delay of more than 20 min between completing transcription and mature mRNA production. The genes displaying these long delays are significantly more likely to be short. We also find a statistical association between high delay and late intron retention in pre-mRNA data, indicating significant splicing-associated production delays in many genes.

The Impact of Antimicrobials on Gonococcal Evolution

Abstract: The sexually transmitted pathogen Neisseria gonorrhoeae is regarded as being on the way to becoming an untreatable superbug. Despite its clinical importance, little is known about its emergence and ...