Migrating legacy applications to cloud: case TOAS

Cloud computing, despite its success and promises, presents issues for businesses mi­grating their legacy applications to cloud. In this research legacy-to-cloud migration issues are reviewed based on literature findings and an experience report. Solutions are applied to Tieto Open Application Suite (TOAS) software development platform running on cloud infrastructure. It is observed that the migration strategy heavily affects the migration approach. For TOAS a strategy of redesigning the applications for cloud is suggested. Common migration-driven application level modifications in­clude adaptation to service-oriented architecture, load balancing, and runtime and technology changes. A cloud platform such as TOAS might introduce additional needs. Decision making on migration strategy is found to be an issue to be solved case by case. Use of assistive decision making tools is suggested.

Search advertising for small Finnish tourism company in Russian Internet – Experimental study: Google AdWords versus Yandex.Direct

Yandex is the dominant search engine in Russia, followed by the world leader Google. This study focuses on the performance differences between the two in search advertising in the context of tourism, by running two identical campaigns and measuring the KPI’s, such as CPA (cost-per-action), on both campaigns. Search engine advertising is a new and fast changing form of advertising, which should be studied frequently in order to keep up with the changes. Research was done as an experimental study in cooperation with a Finnish tourism company and the data is gathered from the clickstream and not from questionnaires, which is recommended method by the literature. The results of the study suggests that Yandex.Direct performed better in the selected niche and that the individual campaign planning for Yandex.Direct and Google AdWords is an important part of the optimization of search advertising in Russia.

It’s a workflow engine. It’s working with linked data. It’s repository! – Supporting electronic thesis related processes in University of Helsinki library

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

Facing the Hydra alone: three case studies

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

Integration of JINR Information Resources

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

Visual Arts Data Skills for Researchers (VADS4R)

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

DSpace for Data Revisited

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

The ETH Zurich DOI Desk: DOIs as standard persistent identifier and best practice in Swiss Open Access repositories

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

Grey literature, green open access: the BLDS Digital Library

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

Practical preservation with Arkivum & Eprints

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

Bibliographic import from Scopus and WoS

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

Scheduling dynamic dataflow graphs with model checking

With the shift towards many-core computer architectures, dataflow programming has been proposed as one potential solution for producing software that scales to a varying number of processor cores. Programming for parallel architectures is considered difficult as the current popular programming languages are inherently sequential and introducing parallelism is typically up to the programmer. Dataflow, however, is inherently parallel, describing an application as a directed graph, where nodes represent calculations and edges represent a data dependency in form of a queue. These queues are the only allowed communication between the nodes, making the dependencies between the nodes explicit and thereby also the parallelism. Once a node have the su cient inputs available, the node can, independently of any other node, perform calculations, consume inputs, and produce outputs. Data ow models have existed for several decades and have become popular for describing signal processing applications as the graph representation is a very natural representation within this eld. Digital lters are typically described with boxes and arrows also in textbooks. Data ow is also becoming more interesting in other domains, and in principle, any application working on an information stream ts the dataflow paradigm. Such applications are, among others, network protocols, cryptography, and multimedia applications. As an example, the MPEG group standardized a dataflow language called RVC-CAL to be use within reconfigurable video coding. Describing a video coder as a data ow network instead of with conventional programming languages, makes the coder more readable as it describes how the video dataflows through the different coding tools. While dataflow provides an intuitive representation for many applications, it also introduces some new problems that need to be solved in order for data ow to be more widely used. The explicit parallelism of a dataflow program is descriptive and enables an improved utilization of available processing units, however, the independent nodes also implies that some kind of scheduling is required. The need for efficient scheduling becomes even more evident when the number of nodes is larger than the number of processing units and several nodes are running concurrently on one processor core. There exist several data ow models of computation, with different trade-offs between expressiveness and analyzability. These vary from rather restricted but statically schedulable, with minimal scheduling overhead, to dynamic where each ring requires a ring rule to evaluated. The model used in this work, namely RVC-CAL, is a very expressive language, and in the general case it requires dynamic scheduling, however, the strong encapsulation of dataflow nodes enables analysis and the scheduling overhead can be reduced by using quasi-static, or piecewise static, scheduling techniques. The scheduling problem is concerned with nding the few scheduling decisions that must be run-time, while most decisions are pre-calculated. The result is then an, as small as possible, set of static schedules that are dynamically scheduled. To identify these dynamic decisions and to find the concrete schedules, this thesis shows how quasi-static scheduling can be represented as a model checking problem. This involves identifying the relevant information to generate a minimal but complete model to be used for model checking. The model must describe everything that may affect scheduling of the application while omitting everything else in order to avoid state space explosion. This kind of simplification is necessary to make the state space analysis feasible. For the model checker to nd the actual schedules, a set of scheduling strategies are de ned which are able to produce quasi-static schedulers for a wide range of applications. The results of this work show that actor composition with quasi-static scheduling can be used to transform data ow programs to t many different computer architecture with different type and number of cores. This in turn, enables dataflow to provide a more platform independent representation as one application can be fitted to a specific processor architecture without changing the actual program representation. Instead, the program representation is in the context of design space exploration optimized by the development tools to fit the target platform. This work focuses on representing the dataflow scheduling problem as a model checking problem and is implemented as part of a compiler infrastructure. The thesis also presents experimental results as evidence of the usefulness of the approach.

Endogenous vasopressin and the central control of heart rate during dynamic exercise

The present article contains a brief review on the role of vasopressinergic projections to the nucleus tractus solitarii in the genesis of reflex bradycardia and in the modulation of heart rate control during exercise. The effects of vasopressin on exercise tachycardia are discussed on the basis of both the endogenous peptide content changes and the heart rate response changes observed during running in sedentary and trained rats. Dynamic exercise caused a specific vasopressin content increase in dorsal and ventral brainstem areas. In accordance, rats pretreated with the peptide or the V1 blocker into the nucleus tractus solitarii showed a significant potentiation or a marked blunting of the exercise tachycardia, respectively, without any change in the pressure response to exercise. It is proposed that the long-descending vasopressinergic pathway to the nucleus tractus solitarii serves as one link between the two main neural controllers of circulation, i.e., the central command and feedback control mechanisms driven by the peripheral receptors. Therefore, vasopressinergic input could contribute to the adjustment of heart rate response (and cardiac output) to the circulatory demand during exercise.

Learning information technology business in a changing industry landscape. Introducing Team Entrepreneurship in Renewing Bachelor Education in Renewing Bachelor Education in Information

Speed, uncertainty and complexity are increasing in the business world all the time. When knowledge and skills become quickly irrelevant, new challenges are set for information technology (IT) education. Meta-learning skills – learning how to learn rapidly - and innovation skills have become more essential than single technologies or other specific issues. The drastic changes in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector have caused a need to reconsider how IT Bachelor education in Universities of Applied Sciences should be organized and employed to cope with the change. The objective of the study was to evaluate how a new approach to IT Bachelor education, the ICT entrepreneurship study path (ICT-ESP) fits IT Bachelor education in a Finnish University of Applied Sciences. This kind of educational arrangement has not been employed elsewhere in the context of IT Bachelor education. The study presents the results of a four-year period during which IT Bachelor education was renewed in a Finnish University of Applied Sciences. The learning environment was organized into an ICT-ESP based on Nonaka’s knowledge theory and Kolb’s experiental learning. The IT students who studied in the ICT-ESP established a cooperative and learned ICT by running their cooperative at the University of Applied Sciences. The students (called team entrepreneurs) studied by reading theory in books and other sources of explicit information, doing projects for their customers, and reflecting in training sessions on what was learnt by doing and by studying the literature. Action research was used as the research strategy in this study. Empirical data was collected via theme-based interviews, direct observation, and participative observation. Grounded theory method was utilized in the data analysis and the theoretical sampling was used to guide the data collection. The context of the University of Applied Sciences provided a good basis for fostering team entrepreneurship. However, the results showed that the employment of the ICT-ESP did not fit into the IT Bachelor education well enough. The ICT-ESP was cognitively too tough for the team entrepreneurs because they had two different set of rules to follow in their studies. The conventional courses engaged lot of energy which should have been spent for professional development in the ICT-ESP. The amount of competencies needed in the ICT-ESP for professional development was greater than those needed for any other ways of studying. The team entrepreneurs needed to develop skills in ICT, leadership and self-leadership, team development and entrepreneurship skills. The entrepreneurship skills included skills on marketing and sales, brand development, productization, and business administration. Considering the three-year time the team entrepreneurs spent in the ICT-ESP, the challenges were remarkable. Changes to the organization of IT Bachelor education are also suggested in the study. At first, it should be admitted that the ICT-ESP produces IT Bachelors with a different set of competencies compared to the conventional way of educating IT Bachelors. Secondly, the number of courses on general topics in mathematics, physics, and languages for team entrepreneurs studying in the ICTESP should be reconsidered and the conventional course-based teaching of the topics should be reorganized to support the team coaching process of the team entrepreneurs with their practiceoriented projects. Third, the upcoming team entrepreneurs should be equipped with relevant information about the ICT-ESP and what it would require in practice to study as a team entrepreneur. Finally, the upcoming team entrepreneurs should be carefully selected before they start in the ICT-ESP to have a possibility to eliminate solo players and those who have a too romantic view of being a team entrepreneur. The results gained in the study provided answers to the original research questions and the objectives of the study were met. Even though the IT degree programme was terminated during the research process, the amount of qualitative data gathered made it possible to justify the interpretations done.

Palvelun hankinnan prosessi ja laatu. Case: Espoon kaupungin koulukuljetukset

Palvelujen hankinta on yhä kiinteämmin osa yritysten liiketoimintaa, kun kiristyvässä kilpailussa yritykset pyrkivät siirtämään keskittymistään enenevissä määrin ydintoimintojensa tuottamiseen. Yleisiä ohjeistuksia palveluiden laadun kehittämisestä ja hankintaprosessin läpiviennistä on olemassa runsaasti, mutta palveluihin keskittyvän hankinnan kokonaisvaltaista kuvausta on tutkimuskentästä vaikea löytää. Tämän tutkimuksen tavoitteena on tutkia palvelun hankinnan prosessia ja laatua, sekä paikata olemassa olevaa tutkimusaukkoa tunnistaen hankintaprosessista lopputuloksen laadun kannalta kriittisiä elementtejä. Tutkimusaihetta lähestytään tarkastelemalla ensin olemassa olevaa tutkimusta palvelujen hankintaprosessista ja laadusta. Lisäksi tutkimusta varten on haastateltu hankinta-asiantuntijoita, sekä suoritettu case-tutkimus Espoon kaupungin koulukuljetusten hankinnasta, jossa hyödynnetään QFD-matriisianalyysiä kriittisten tekijöiden tunnistamiseksi. Lopputuloksena tutkimus esittää hankintaprosessiin perustuvan listan niistä laadukkaan lopputuloksen kannalta kriittisistä tekijöistä, joihin keskittymällä palveluhankinnan laatua on mahdollista parantaa. Keskeisimpinä tekijöinä tuloksissa esiin nousevat hankintatiimin kokoaminen, yrityksen tahtotilan tunnistaminen, palvelusisällön ja sen tavoitteiden ymmärtäminen, sanktiomallien hyödyntäminen, sekä yhteistyön vaaliminen hankinnan suunnittelussa ja sopimusseurannassa.