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.

ECOISLAND: A System for Persuading Users to Reduce CO2 Emissions

Abstract: A significant portion of the carbon dioxide emissions that have been shown to cause global warming are due to household energy consumption and traffic. EcoIsland is a computer system aimed at persuading and assisting individual families in changing their lifestyle patterns in a way that reduces CO2 emissions. The system builds on our earlier work on persuasive ubiquitous computing applications and applies ideas from behaviorism, social psychology and emissions trading to attempt to motivate changes in users' behavior. In this paper, we briefly describe the concept and the theories behind it, and provide preliminary results from a user study measuring its effectiveness.

Description of Klebsiella spallanzanii sp. nov. and of Klebsiella pasteurii sp. nov.

Abstract: Klebsiella oxytoca causes opportunistic human infections and post-antibiotic haemorrhagic diarrhea. This Enterobacteriaceae species is genetically heterogeneous and is currently subdivided into seven phylogroups (Ko1 to Ko4 and Ko6 to Ko8). Here we investigated the taxonomic status of phylogroups Ko3 and Ko4. Genomic sequence-based phylogenetic analyses demonstrate that Ko3 and Ko4 formed well-defined sequence clusters related to, but distinct from, Klebsiella michiganensis (Ko1), K. oxytoca (Ko2), K. huaxiensis (Ko8), and K. grimontii (Ko6). The average nucleotide identity (ANI) of Ko3 and Ko4 were 90.7% with K. huaxiensis and 95.5% with K. grimontii, respectively. In addition, three strains of K. huaxiensis, a species so far described based on a single strain from a urinary tract infection patient in China, were isolated from cattle and human feces. Biochemical and MALDI-ToF mass spectrometry analysis allowed differentiating Ko3, Ko4, and Ko8 from the other K. oxytoca species. Based on these results, we propose the names Klebsiella spallanzanii for the Ko3 phylogroup, with SPARK_775_C1T (CIP 111695T and DSM 109531T) as type strain, and Klebsiella pasteurii for Ko4, with SPARK_836_C1T (CIP 111696T and DSM 109530T) as type strain. Strains of K. spallanzanii were isolated from human urine, cow feces, and farm surfaces, while strains of K. pasteurii were found in fecal carriage from humans, cows, and turtles.

Secure end-to-end communication for constrained devices in IoT-enabled Ambient Assisted Living systems

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) technologies interconnect broad ranges of network devices irrespective of their resource capabilities and local networks. In order to upgrade the standard of life of elderly people, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems are also widely deployed in the context of IoT applications. To preserve user security and privacy in AAL systems, it is significant to ensure secure communication link establishment among the medical devices and the remote hosts or servers that are interested in accessing the critical health data. However, due to the limited resources available in such constrained devices, it is challenging to exploit expensive cryptographic operations in the conventional security protocols. Therefore, in this paper we propose a novel proxy-based authentication and key establishment protocol, which is lightweight and suitable to safeguard sensitive data generated by resource-constrained devices in IoT-enabled AAL systems.