This week I took part in Helsinki University of Technology’s graduate school seminar in system analysis, decision making and risk management. The two-day seminar was filled with presentations on various research subjects from Ph.D. students from various universities in both Finland and Russia. The seminar also included a visit to the IT University near Stockholm.

I have to point out the reason I couldn’t live blog the seminar is simple. Even though both Finland and Sweden have excellent broadband access, there wasn’t any internet connectivity on the sea between them. Now I have to rely on the pencil-scribbled notes on various printouts.

The theme of the seminar was “Citations as impacts of research – who reads our papers?”. The main finding on this topic was that Google Scholar is coming more and more important research tool. Here’s a good introduction about citation analysis using Google Scholar. It’s quite surprising that many see free access to Google Scholar as a main advantage against the incumbent tool, ISI Web of Science. The other advantage of Google Scholar is that it indexes everything it can get its hands on but Web of Science only indexes around 8,700 scientific journals. The disadvantage of course is that Google’s tool also indexes a lot of “trash”.

There were many interesting presentations (you can find them all here). There was huge cultural difference in many of the Russian presentations, which were much more analytical than the Finnish ones. There was also a lack of certain presentation zen in some of the presentations as the slides had nothing else but just equations. The Russian research topics weren’t totally without applications and some of them might interest the readers of this blog.

Evgeny Ivashko from Institute of Applied Mathematical Research at Karelian Research Centre gave a highly mathematical presentation about “Best choice problems with disorder”. Apparently this method could be useful in defending against Denial of Service (DOS) attacks. The same model could be also used to maximize profits of selling real-estate in highly-volatile “hot” markets (where the prices are grossly inflated, but no-one knows exactly when the market will finally collapse). Interesting stuff.

Then there was a presentation about “Cooperation in Stochastic Games”. I’m not that familiar with game theory, but apparently this has some application for wireless networks. The main idea is that by cooperating, the wireless nodes can work more efficiently than by just acting greedy. I wonder if this model would be applicable for P2P networks such as Bitorrent.

It is always amazing to see the possibilities offered by the field of system analysis – from auctions, fish management and executive stock options all the way to elevator routing. It’s no surprise that many companies are interested in the research. As the director of the graduate school pointed out during the seminar that “Everything we can optimize [at TKK], Nokia wants to use”. At the IT University, the head of department of computer and system sciences (DSV) told that all the major telecom companies invest into their research. Just by skimming through the topics of this seminar you can see that that’s probably a really smart thing for them to do.

Oh, and I got a really cool USB hub that looks like retractable power cable. The Swedes are always so awfully nice.