ICT 2023 programme funds a wide range of research

Academy of Finland’s Research Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering has granted funding for 17 projects within the ICT 2023 programme with a total of 32 subprojects. The total funding granted by the Research Council amounts to some 9.25 million euros. The success rate of the subproject applications was around 20 per cent. 

The research, development and innovation programme ICT 2023 is jointly coordinated and funded by the Academy of Finland and Business Finland. The aim of the programme is to further improve scientific expertise in computer science and to promote the extensive application of ICT. The funded projects belong to three thematic calls:

1. Innovation, Business and Sustainability in and with Software
2. Autonomous Everything
3. Programmable World and Advanced Software Techniques

”The first call on the list received surprisingly few applications, whereas the second and third call were rather popular. According to the feedback from the review panels, the Autonomous Everything call received many excellent consortium applications. Finnish research does seem to be especially strong in this research field”, says Minnamari Vippola, chair of the Research Council’s preparation group.

Examples of funded projects

Professor Mika Mäntylä from the University of Oulu studies the collaboration of people and machines in software development. Software developers’ thoughts can be analysed from the comments about the source code. The project focuses on thoughts about technical debt in the source code. Technical debt utilises the concept of financial debt to illustrate the problems in software that result in unnecessary increases costs. According to some estimates, the cost of technical debt can be several hundred millions of dollars to the software industry. The aim of the project is to build a natural language processing (NLP) based technical debt detector.

Professor Pan Hui from the University of Helsinki, Academy Professor Samuel Kaski from Aalto University and Associate Professor Antti Honkela from the University of Helsinki aim to resolve the key challenges of the Internet of Things (IoT). The objective is to provide an easy-to-use modelling framework that is scalable, enables the use of powerful probabilistic models to account for complex dependencies in the data, and has a strong, built-in privacy protection. The solution is to be demonstrated with prototype applications on an IoT platform. The currently ongoing revolution in machine learning and artificial intelligence is largely driven by the wide availability of data. The rapidly developing IoT is intimately connected to this process: advanced machine learning methods improve IoT, which drives further progress by providing large amounts of new data.  The project is a part of the Academy flagship Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence, led by Kaski. The Academy of Finland Flagship programme includes six competence clusters. It promotes active collaboration between research, business and society.

Research Manager Eija Honkavaara from the National Land Survey of Finland and Docent Ilkka Pölönen from the University of Jyväskylä form a multidisciplinary research consortium. Their objective is to develop an autonomous tree health analyser based on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) that utilises imaging spectroscopy and machine learning. The UAV can capture data of the environment rapidly and safely. The project responds to the urgent need of developing efficient technologies for canopy health monitoring that are needed due to increasing frequency and severity of forest disturbance due to climate change.