UCL Discovery: raising the Open Access profile at the institution

Presentation at the "Tutkimus vapaaksi verkkoon!" seminar in Helsinki, January 25, 2011

Luminescence-based assay methods in drug discovery

The drug discovery process is facing new challenges in the evaluation process of the lead compounds as the number of new compounds synthesized is increasing. The potentiality of test compounds is most frequently assayed through the binding of the test compound to the target molecule or receptor, or measuring functional secondary effects caused by the test compound in the target model cells, tissues or organism. Modern homogeneous high-throughput-screening (HTS) assays for purified estrogen receptors (ER) utilize various luminescence based detection methods. Fluorescence polarization (FP) is a standard method for ER ligand binding assay. It was used to demonstrate the performance of two-photon excitation of fluorescence (TPFE) vs. the conventional one-photon excitation method. As result, the TPFE method showed improved dynamics and was found to be comparable with the conventional method. It also held potential for efficient miniaturization. Other luminescence based ER assays utilize energy transfer from a long-lifetime luminescent label e.g. lanthanide chelates (Eu, Tb) to a prompt luminescent label, the signal being read in a time-resolved mode. As an alternative to this method, a new single-label (Eu) time-resolved detection method was developed, based on the quenching of the label by a soluble quencher molecule when displaced from the receptor to the solution phase by an unlabeled competing ligand. The new method was paralleled with the standard FP method. It was shown to yield comparable results with the FP method and found to hold a significantly higher signal-tobackground ratio than FP. Cell-based functional assays for determining the extent of cell surface adhesion molecule (CAM) expression combined with microscopy analysis of the target molecules would provide improved information content, compared to an expression level assay alone. In this work, immune response was simulated by exposing endothelial cells to cytokine stimulation and the resulting increase in the level of adhesion molecule expression was analyzed on fixed cells by means of immunocytochemistry utilizing specific long-lifetime luminophore labeled antibodies against chosen adhesion molecules. Results showed that the method was capable of use in amulti-parametric assay for protein expression levels of several CAMs simultaneously, combined with analysis of the cellular localization of the chosen adhesion molecules through time-resolved luminescence microscopy inspection.

Building Next Generation Consortium Services – part 3: The National Metadata Repository, Discovery Service Finna, and the New Library System

Kristiina Hormia-Poutasen esitys CBUC-konferenssissa Barcelonassa 12.4.2013.

Price spike forecasting in a competitive day-ahead energy market

Electricity price forecasting has become an important area of research in the aftermath of the worldwide deregulation of the power industry that launched competitive electricity markets now embracing all market participants including generation and retail companies, transmission network providers, and market managers. Based on the needs of the market, a variety of approaches forecasting day-ahead electricity prices have been proposed over the last decades. However, most of the existing approaches are reasonably effective for normal range prices but disregard price spike events, which are caused by a number of complex factors and occur during periods of market stress. In the early research, price spikes were truncated before application of the forecasting model to reduce the influence of such observations on the estimation of the model parameters; otherwise, a very large forecast error would be generated on price spike occasions. Electricity price spikes, however, are significant for energy market participants to stay competitive in a market. Accurate price spike forecasting is important for generation companies to strategically bid into the market and to optimally manage their assets; for retailer companies, since they cannot pass the spikes onto final customers, and finally, for market managers to provide better management and planning for the energy market. This doctoral thesis aims at deriving a methodology able to accurately predict not only the day-ahead electricity prices within the normal range but also the price spikes. The Finnish day-ahead energy market of Nord Pool Spot is selected as the case market, and its structure is studied in detail. It is almost universally agreed in the forecasting literature that no single method is best in every situation. Since the real-world problems are often complex in nature, no single model is able to capture different patterns equally well. Therefore, a hybrid methodology that enhances the modeling capabilities appears to be a possibly productive strategy for practical use when electricity prices are predicted. The price forecasting methodology is proposed through a hybrid model applied to the price forecasting in the Finnish day-ahead energy market. The iterative search procedure employed within the methodology is developed to tune the model parameters and select the optimal input set of the explanatory variables. The numerical studies show that the proposed methodology has more accurate behavior than all other examined methods most recently applied to case studies of energy markets in different countries. The obtained results can be considered as providing extensive and useful information for participants of the day-ahead energy market, who have limited and uncertain information for price prediction to set up an optimal short-term operation portfolio. Although the focus of this work is primarily on the Finnish price area of Nord Pool Spot, given the result of this work, it is very likely that the same methodology will give good results when forecasting the prices on energy markets of other countries.

Stock Price Reactions on M&A, Dividends and Game Releases. Evidence from Gaming Industry.

A rapidly growing gaming industry, which specializes on PC, console, online and other games, attracts attention of investors and analysts, who try to understand what drives changes of the gaming industry companies’ stock prices. This master thesis shows the evidence that, besides long-established types of events (M&A and dividend payments), the companies’ stock price changes depend on industry-specific events. I analyzed specific for gaming industry events - game releases with respect to its subdivisions: new games-sequels, games ratings and subdivision according to a developer of a game (self-developed by publisher or outsourced). The master thesis analyzes stock prices of 55 companies from gaming industry from all over the world. The research period covers 5 year, spreading from April 2008 to April 2013. Executed with an event study method, results of the research show that all the analyzed events types have significant influence on the stock prices of the gaming industry companies. The current master thesis suggests that acquisitions in the industry affect positively bidders’ and targets’ stock prices. Mergers events cause positive stock price reactions as well. But dividends payments and game releases events influence negatively on the stock prices. Game releases’ effect is up to -2.2% of cumulative average abnormal return (CAAR) drop during the first ten days after the game releases. Having researched different kinds of events and identified the direction of their impact, the current paper can be of high value for investors, seeking profits in the gaming industry, and other interested parties.

Economical potential of controlling charging of electric vehicles by using price signal

The number of electric vehicles grows continuously and the implementation of charging electric vehicles is an important issue for the future. Increasing amount of electric vehicles can cause problems to distribution grid by increasing peak load. Currently charging of electric vehicles is uncontrolled, but as the amount of electric vehicles grows, smart charg-ing (controlled charging) will be one possible solution to handle this situation. In this thesis smart charging of electric vehicles is examined from electricity retailers` point of view. The purpose is to find out plausible saving potentials of smart charging, when it´s controlled by price signal. Saving potential is calculated by comparing costs of price signal controlled charging and uncontrolled charging.

Customer value assessment in business markets

Understanding how firms create, communicate, and deliver value to customers is a key factor when firms seek to differentiate in increasingly competitive and commoditized business markets. As product and price have become less important differentiators in many industries, suppliers are increasingly seeking ways to differentiate themselves based on delivered customer value. Therefore, to gain a holistic understanding on what their offerings are worth to the customer, suppliers need to conduct customer value assessment, which quantifies the impact of a supplier´s offering to customers’ costs and returns. However, from a managerial perspective, customer value assessment is the single most critical challenge for firms in business markets. Consequently, developing holistic frameworks for customer value assessment is seen as one of the most important research priorities for marketing research. The purpose of this study is to explore the process of customer value assessment in business markets. Business markets represent a context where an increasing number of industrial firms are transitioning from basic product offerings towards service-based and solution-oriented hybrid offerings, which emphasize value co-creation and realization in the long term, thus making it difficult to quantify their monetary value. This study employs exploratory and qualitative research design by applying inductive and discovery-oriented grounded theory and multiple case research methods. The empirical data comprise interviews with 61 managers from 12 industrial firms, including seven best practice firms in customer value assessment. The findings of this study show that customer value assessment is essentially a crossfunctional process, which involves several organizational functions. The process begins well before and continues long after the actual delivery, often until the end of a supplier´s offering’s life-cycle. Furthermore, the findings shed light on alternative strategies that firms in business markets can adopt to implement the customer value assessment process. Overall, the findings contribute to customer value research, the sales and organizational management literature, the service marketing and solutions business literature, and suggest several managerial implications on how firms in business markets can adopt a holistic approach to assess value created for customers.

Repository content - lost in Discovery?

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Envia – a repository for environmental information access and discovery

Poster at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Self-deposit, discovery, and delivery of scientific GIS datasets using GeoHydra

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Commodity Future Price Premiums – Case EU ETS

The purpose of this thesis was to study commodity future price premiums and their nature on emission allowance markets. The EUA spot and future contracts traded on the secondary market during EU ETS Phase 2 and Phase 3 were selected for empirical testing. The cointegration of spot and future prices was examined with Johansen cointegration methodology. Daily interest rates with a similar tenor to the future contract maturity were used in the cost-of-carry model to calculate the theoretical future prices and to estimate the deviation from the fair value of future contracts, assumed to be explained by the convenience yield. The time-varying dependence of the convenience yield was studied by regression testing the correlation between convenience yield and the time to maturity of the future contract. The results indicated cointegration between spot and future prices, albeit depending on assumptions on linear trend and intercept in cointegration vector Dec-14 and Dec-15 contracts. The convenience yield correlates positively with the time-to-maturity of the future contract during Phase 2, but negatively during Phase 3. The convenience yield featured positive correlation with spot price volatility and negative correlation with future price volatility during both Phases 2 and 3.

A systematic mapping study of web services discovery mechanisms

Context: Web services have been gaining popularity due to the success of service oriented architecture and cloud computing. Web services offer tremendous opportunity for service developers to publish their services and applications over the boundaries of the organization or company. However, to fully exploit these opportunities it is necessary to find efficient discovery mechanism thus, Web services discovering mechanism has attracted a considerable attention in Semantic Web research, however, there have been no literature surveys that systematically map the present research result thus overall impact of these research efforts and level of maturity of their results are still unclear. This thesis aims at providing an overview of the current state of research into Web services discovering mechanism using systematic mapping. The work is based on the papers published 2004 to 2013, and attempts to elaborate various aspects of the analyzed literature including classifying them in terms of the architecture, frameworks and methods used for web services discovery mechanism. Objective: The objective if this work is to summarize the current knowledge that is available as regards to Web service discovery mechanisms as well as to systematically identify and analyze the current published research works in order to identify different approaches presented. Method: A systematic mapping study has been employed to assess the various Web Services discovery approaches presented in the literature. Systematic mapping studies are useful for categorizing and summarizing the level of maturity research area. Results: The result indicates that there are numerous approaches that are consistently being researched and published in this field. In terms of where these researches are published, conferences are major contributing publishing arena as 48% of the selected papers were conference published papers illustrating the level of maturity of the research topic. Additionally selected 52 papers are categorized into two broad segments namely functional and non-functional based approaches taking into consideration architectural aspects and information retrieval approaches, semantic matching, syntactic matching, behavior based matching as well as QOS and other constraints.

Forecasting financial weather - can we foresee market sentiment? Spectrum of stock price behavior - NYSE case study

The desire to create a statistical or mathematical model, which would allow predicting the future changes in stock prices, was born many years ago. Economists and mathematicians are trying to solve this task by applying statistical analysis and physical laws, but there are still no satisfactory results. The main reason for this is that a stock exchange is a non-stationary, unstable and complex system, which is influenced by many factors. In this thesis the New York Stock Exchange was considered as the system to be explored. A topological analysis, basic statistical tools and singular value decomposition were conducted for understanding the behavior of the market. Two methods for normalization of initial daily closure prices by Dow Jones and S&P500 were introduced and applied for further analysis. As a result, some unexpected features were identified, such as a shape of distribution of correlation matrix, a bulk of which is shifted to the right hand side with respect to zero. Also non-ergodicity of NYSE was confirmed graphically. It was shown, that singular vectors differ from each other by a constant factor. There are for certain results no clear conclusions from this work, but it creates a good basis for the further analysis of market topology.