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Infotech Oulu 10 years

Prof. Matti Pietikäinen

Scientific director of Infotech Oulu

Focus Area: Information technology and wireless communications

• Infotech Oulu coordinates and spearheads the focus

area

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Infotech Oulu

• An umbrella organization for information

technology research

• Mission: to promote long term research and

researcher training in information technology

• Consists of research groups which are selected

based on international scientific evaluation

A Brief History

Establishment of Infotech Oulu:

• Information technology is chosen as one of university’s three focus areas (1994)

• Umbrella organization is proposed in the strategy plan of IT (1995)

• Infotech Oulu is founded 21.2.1996

• Prof. Pietikäinen is nominated as its first scientific director (1996)

Selection of research groups:

• 9 groups are selected for 1997-1999 on the basis of external evaluation

• 1 additional group joins Infotech after a new selection process (1998)

• Second 3-year term of Infotech starts in 2000 (9 groups)

• Third 3-year term starts in 2003 (8 full members, 3 associate members)

• A 4 year Infotech period starts in 2006 (6 full members, 3 associate members)

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A Brief History (cont.)

Infotech Oulu Graduate School:

• Graduate school is established with internal funding (1997)

• Ministry of Education provides 20 doctoral student posts for 1999-2002

• Graduate school gets 10 additional posts (2002-2005)

• 20 posts + coordinator for 2003-2006

• 10 posts for 2006-2009

• Continuation for 15 posts (of 20) for 2007-2009 and coordinator for 2007-2011

Organization

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Administrative Staff

• Scientific Director: Professor Matti Pietikäinen

• Graduate School Director: Professor Risto Myllylä

• Coordinator: Dr. Tapio Repo

• Secretary: Heli Lämsä

Selection of Groups

• For a four-year period

• Based on international external scientific

evaluation of the research

• For the period 2006-2009

6 groups were selected as full members and 3 as

associate members

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Main Research Fields of Current Groups

• Electronics

– electronics, photonics, nanotechnology

• Communications engineering

– wireless communications, radio engineering,

telecommunication networks

• Computer science and information engineering

– machine vision, intelligent systems, ubiquitous

computing, mobile applications

Groups from

• University of Oulu

– Faculty of Technology

– Faculty of Science

• VTT

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Research Groups 2006 - 2009

Full member groups• Algebraic and Computational Methods in Information Science

(Prof. Keijo Ruotsalainen)• Circuits and Systems Group (Prof. Juha Kostamovaara)

• Electronics Materials, Packaging and Reliability Techniques(Prof. Heli Jantunen)

• Intelligent Systems Group (Prof. Juha Röning)• Machine Vision Group (Prof. Matti Pietikäinen)• Optoelectronics and Measurement Unit (Prof. Risto Myllylä)

Associate members• Human Interaction with Advanced Mobile Services and

Intelligent Environments (Prof. Kari Kuutti)• MediaTeam Oulu (Dr. Jaakko Sauvola)• Wireless Communication Systems (Prof. Matti Latva-aho)

Personnel (end of 2006)

441276total

11976others

217130graduate students

6445other doctors

4125professors

allfull members

Personnel

55

162

217

25%internal funding

75%external funding

Person years (full members)

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Funding of Umbrella Organization

Annually about EUR 400 000 from the university

• to research groups over EUR 300 000

– to hire senior researchers, graduate students and

support personnel

– to advance their international activities

• to international researcher exchange

• for scientific workshops and summer/winter schools

• for the activities of Infotech Oulu Graduate School

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External Funding (2006, EUR)

18 928 0009 653 000total

(19.2 %)3 637 0001 269 000EU + other internat.

(16.3 %)3 088 0001 059 000domestic private

(7.9 %)1 487 0001 054 000other public sources

(41.7 %)7 901 0004 137 000Tekes

(5.7 %)1 075 000878 000Ministry of Education

(9.2 %)1 741 0001 256 000Academy of Finland

all

full members

Source

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Infotech Oulu Graduate School

• Mission– to develop post graduate education on information

technology in the university

– to systematize curricula and intensify doctoral studies

– to organize lecture series, courses and summer/winter schools

• The teaching is closely related to the research fields of Infotech Oulu

• The school operates in three areas (major research fields)– Electronics

– Communications engineering

– Computer science and information engineering

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Graduate School Funding

• The Ministry of Education (annually EUR 727 100)

– 10 doctoral student fellowships (2006–2009)

– 15 doctoral student fellowships (2007–2009) and a

coordinator position

• The Academy of Finland

– EUR 78 500 for arranging courses and traveling

expenses of graduate students (2007)

• Additional support from Infotech Oulu

– administration

– funding for courses and workshops

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Significant Progress in Research

• Excellent progress in scientific results- 90 journal papers in 2006 (36 in 1997)- The quality of publication forums has significantly improved

- Citations to our papers have significantly increased

• International contacts are now much wider

• Some groups have already very international staff- WCS/CWC, MVG, …

• Research has led to various applications in industry

• Research has given birth to many spin-off companies- Codenomicon, Clarified Networks, Intopii, Neagen, Visidon, Laser Probe LP,

Sensinode, Icecom, Brieftec, Atomia, Nelilab, Specim, Silecs, BraggOne, …

• Success in getting research professorships- Academy Professor Juha Kostamovaara (2006-2011); FiDiPro Professors: G.E. Jabbour, B. Aazhang, R. Kohno, T. Matsumoto

Examples of Scientific Achievements

• State of the art fully integrated CMOS Time-to-Digital Conversion (J.

Kostamovaara et al.)

• Local binary pattern methodology for computer vision (M. Pietikäinen et al.)

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State of the art fully integrated CMOS Time-to-Digital Conversion(TDC)

• single shot precision <10ps– IEEE JSCC June 2006

• development of reference recycling, multi-

level interpolation techniques

• 0.35 µµµµm CMOS

• fref = 6 MHz

• recycling factor = 40

• int.ratio = 17280

• LSB = 9.645ps

• rms = 10.6ps

• rms with INL cor = 6ps

• range 0.8ns – 1ms

• drift <0.4ps/°°°°C

• pdiss = 35mW

• 2.2 * 2 mm2

Single shot precision (rms)

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• optical receivers including timing discrimination

– several techniques and IC realizations

– walk error at best <50ps in a range of <1:10000 for 5ns

laser pulses

– development of leading edge, AGC, uni-to-bip*,rise time

measurement* discrimination methods

– see e.g. JSSC June 2005, IEEE TCAS I March 2006

• laser radar prototypes based on the above circuits

– e.g. for traffic control

* Under patenting

”Seeing chips”

4 TDCs

4 photo

detectors

4 receiver

channels4 time-to-digital

converters

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Local binary pattern (LBP) methodology for computer vision

• Texture is a fundamental property of surfaces in images

• LBP method is computationally simple and tolerant to illumination changes

• LBP is frequently cited and used around the world in various applications

• Our recent results include novel face descriptors, interest region

descriptors and descriptors for dynamic textures

• Publications: 17 journal papers (IEEE PAMI 2002, 2006, 2006, 2007), 7

book chapters, a large number of refereed conference articles

Face analysis using local binary patterns

• Face recognition is one of the major challenges in computer vision

• We proposed (ECCV 2004, PAMI 2006) a face descriptor based on LBP’s

• Our method has already been adopted by many leading scientists

- e.g. T.S. Huang, J. Kittler, S.Z. Li, W. Gao, H. Ai, B. Triggs, S. Gong, S.

Marcel

• Outstanding results in face recognition and authentication, face detection,

facial expression recognition, gender classification

• Our approach will have a significant role in a new EU project ”Mobile

Biometry” (2008-2010) coordinated by IDIAP (Switzerland)

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Dynamic texture descriptors for motion analysis

• Dynamic (or temporal) textures are textures in motion

• We proposed (PAMI 2007) simple spatiotemporal LBP descriptors for

dynamic texture recognition outperforming the state-of-the-art

• This approach has been applied to facial expression regonition (PAMI

2007), face recognition from video sequences (AMFG 2007) and visual

recognition of spoken phrases (HCM2007) with excellent results

• Our approach has potential for significant contributions in many

applications and fundamental problems of motion and activity analysis

Demo for facial expression recognition

� Low resolution

� No eye detection

� Translation, in-plane and out-of-plane

rotation, scale

� Illumination change

� Robust with respect to errors in face

alignment

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Demo for visual speech recognition

Future Opportunities

• ICT will find new applications in important areas such as

ubiquitous computing, smart homes and offices, health

and care of elderly, safety and security, environment

monitoring etc.

• The research within Infotech Oulu has a wide scope

• The university offers very good possibilities for

interdisciplinary research

• The 7th Framework programme of EU offers new

opportunities

• ICT has an excellent infrastructure in Oulu region

• By combining its expertise Infotech Oulu has unique

potential e.g. in ubiquitous computing and its

applications

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Threats

• Decreased budget funding of the participating

departments

• Competition for basic research funding is very tough

• Mathematics and physics are not popular enough

among high school students – more effort is needed to

get top-class students

Final Comments

• ICT is a central area of R&D in Oulu region

• Infotech Oulu has played an important role in promoting

long term research and researcher training

• Novel ideas with high risk level are needed for

continuing the success of Oulu region in the future

• Leading-edge long term research of wide scope is

needed for producing such novel ideas

• Research in Infotech Oulu groups plays a key role, but

the prospects for more stable and increased long term

funding should be improved