M3S - Current projects

Current projects (partial list) of Empirical Software Engineering in Software, Systems and Services Research Unit.

Project description

Full Bachelor's programme in Software Engineering in Nanjing, China
M3S has prepared a Bachelor's Programme in Software Engineering in China in collaboration with Nanjing Institute of technology (NJIT). It will be a double degree programme in the Degree Programme of Information Processing Science. NJIT will recruit annually 100 students who will study in Nanjing, China. The education export project is the biggest in the university so far. It is also one of the biggest among all externally funded projects in the university.

NLP-TD - Detecting Technical Debt with Natural Language Processing - Academy of Finland
We think that by analyzing millions of source code files, we can capture the collective mind of software developers. Software developers’ thoughts can be analyzed from the natural language comments that provide opinions about source code. In this research proposal, we focus on thoughts about technical debt in the source code. Technical debt utilizes the concept of financial debt to illustrate the technical problems that result in unnecessary increases in software development costs. Gartner has evaluated that the cost of technical debt can be several hundred millions of dollars to the software industry. Currently, thousands of open source projects enable large-scale probabilistic reasoning on human thoughts about source code. We build a natural language processing (NLP) based technical debt detector. Our work is a part of a greater path that is on making computers understand source code as humans understand it.

CRITCAL - Technological and Societal Innovations to Cultivate Critical Reading in the Internet Era - Academy of Finland
One of the main challenges of our times is the spread of misinformation and disinformation on the Internet. The exposure to false information, in conjunction with poor critical reading skills, may endanger citizen’s decision-making on important issues. The CRITICAL project aims to develop technological and societal innovations to support adolescents (aged 10–17) critical reading skills required in the Internet era. The project increases understanding of development of critical reading skills and factors affecting development of these skills. The project develops the Critical Reading Lab service that includes critical reading assessments and games, teacher training materials, and system for crowdsourcing game content. The project applies adaptive teachable agent games to enhance critical reading skills and examine cognitive, motivational, and emotional aspects of learning. CRITICAL aspires to have a wide impact on preparing adolescents to deal with misinformation and disinformation.

Oxilate - Operational eXcellence by Integrating Learned information into AcTionable Expertise
Most societal and industrial innovations have become reliant on the deployment of software-intensive high-tech system technologies in one form or another. The challenge for the European high-tech systems industry is to accommodate these technologies to pursue a position as world-leader in their respective markets. In that process, industry is increasingly confronted with a need to reposition itself in its value chain. Whereas the traditional product manufacturing model is steadily becoming obsolete, the emphasis rapidly shifts to providing total end-user solutions. This requires high-tech systems companies to address an emerging role as both system integrator and service provider of smart systems and solutions that flawlessly can be integrated and serviced in the ever-changing customers’ operating environment. This challenge is taken up by the Oxilate project, which focuses on providing support for systems fully integrated in the customer’s operational workflow. This is done by development and integration of actionable data analytics with expert knowledge into widely available support and (independent) tools for professionals, creating direct business value in the product life-cycle they serve.

Visdom
Visualisation is a powerful method for communication, especially in cross-disciplinary communication with various stakeholders, as in operations. Many software development tools already provide some visualisations, but integrated views that combine data from several sources are still at research prototype level. The VISDOM ITEA3 project will develop new types of visualisations that utilise and merge data from several data sources in modern DevOps development. The aim is to provide simple “health check” visualisations about the state of the development process, software and use. Visdom is ITEA3 project funded by Business Finland.

SMAD
SMAD is a research project where different aspects of autonomous driving are studied. As its official Finnish name states it aims at creating ‘an intelligent, moving autonomous test environment’. The test environment consists of two identical Toyota Rav4 SUVs and a trailer, complemented with a broad palette of different sensors and research equipment of the members of the research consortium. SMAD covers the automotive and vehicle research done in the university of Oulu in a broad manner – six research teams from ITEE and two from the Faculty of Technology build the project consortium. The project is ranked under the 6G Flagship program umbrella and co-operation and information sharing is done with other activities of 6G Flagship. SMAD has a duration from late 2018 to the end of March 2021. It is funded mainly by European Regional Development Fund.

More Stamina
More Stamina is a Business Finland funded Research to Business project, which explores the potential of an eHealth app for people with Multiple Sclerosis. The project is a collaboration with Faculty of Medicine. The project will develop and study a digital health solution for persons with Multiple Sclerosis to help them better manage their fatigue and other MS-related symptoms.

WWData
The aim of WWData project is to help wastewater network management, by developing tools and methods for handling data in a safe way in e.g. cloud services. The most critical parameters are identified and the frequency of the measurements is evaluated against the needs for measurements in the networks.

Project scope includes the parameters outside of the networks that could be utilized in the management process. The project also aims develop new tools and methods for analysis and handling data for observing the slow, long terms changes in the processes. Using these methods predictability will increase, making it easier to identify deviations in the networks. The project is funded by European Regional Development Fund.

Reboot IoT Factory
Reboot IoT Factory brings together service and solution providers, industrial leaders and top research organizations to improve the competitiveness of Finnish manufacturing industry through digitalization. The Reboot operative model is based on agile co-creation and experience sharing within real-world production environments. Each forerunner factory commits as a research and development platform for proof-of-concept experiments, which combine technology research and factory digitalization needs. The project is Business Finland funded.

Smart Mask
Smart Mask project defines a groundbreaking new digitalized reusable mask to protect against corona with interchangeable filters, wireless upgradeable sensing service with health cloud analytics. Project utilizes new and smart materials to provide improved protection as well as comfortable use. Mask with integrated and replaceable sensors measures biosignals of the user and environmental variables. One of the most important measurements are related to safe use of mask, such as the air tightness of the mask and air filter quality. Sensor model can be changed in the mask according to needs of the user. Collected data is stored in distributed IoT platform, where analysis is performed in real-time with the help of advanced AI algorithms (e.g. data mining, machine learning). Based on the analysis results, real-time alerts, recommendations and long-term personal health data can be offered to users. With mobile application the data can be visualized in easily understandable manner. The first phase of the project aims at proof-of-concept that will be further developed in the following project. The results of the project will help to mitigate the Covid-19 epidemic as well as other infections that spread through respiratory droplets. In addition, the results advance the utilization of health data and development of new applications and services. In the first phase of the project participating organizations are University of Oulu and Oulu University of Applied Science. Project is funded by Business Finland.

CHAMELEONS
CHAMELEONS is a H2020 funded project to develop new and innovative educational interventions to improve the learning experience offered by higher education with the intention of shaping more adaptable, entrepreneurial, and employable graduates, ready to meet the challenges of the future. The consortium is led by University College Dublin. M3S leads a work package focusing on designing the educational modules with stakeholders.