Kronqvist, J., Salmi A., Pöyry-Lassila, P. (12.1.2011). “Start with a Small Ball of Snow –  Meanings as Tools for Participatory Innovation“, Participatory Innovation Conference. 13th – 15th January 2011 in Sønderborg, Denmark.

This paper presents results from an action research study into a strategic change process in an organization, which aims to establish new innovation practices through introduction of a new digital idea processing system. For the research we have interviewed employees in order to gather different meanings that have emerged once the new system has come in touch with actual work practices. The results are related theoretically to science and technology studies. Based on the results we propose a participative co-design method for providing a platform for the negotiation of these meanings.

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Salmi, A., Kronqvist, J., Pöyry-Lassila P., 2010. “Supporting Empathy in Business Process Simulation with Scenarios“, 14th International Academic Conference MindTrek – Envisioning Future Media Environments, ACM

This paper examines the employment of scenario-based design approach in combination with SimLab business process simulation method in the context of studying the fuzzy-front end innovation process in a real-world technology business setting. In this paper we aim to show how these divergent techniques of inquiry can be combined in order to produce knowledge on the one hand about people’s experiences, feelings and practices, and on the other hand, about the business process, its bottlenecks and improvement opportunities. Furthermore, our objective is to study how these different modes of knowledge can complement each other in creating an understanding about innovation-related activities as well as in facilitating the building of a shared vision among project participants. Our primary interest is in exploring if scenarios, combined with small-scale personas and business process simulation method have the potential to evoke empathy in a co-design setting. In this paper we present early insights from an ongoing research project with an emphasis on the methods and techniques employed.

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Saadatmand, M., Gholami, K. (2010). Implementing an Electronic Portfolio System in a Graduate Course: A Learning and Assessment Tool. Poster presentation accepted for ‘AAEEBL Annual World Confe-rence: ePortfolios & the Emergent Learning Ecology’, July 19‐22, 2010, Boston, US.

J. Perkiö, A. Tuominen, T. Vähäkangas and P. Myllymäki, Image Similarity: From Syntax to Weak Semantics. Multimedia Tools and Applications, DOI: 10.1007/s11042-010-0562-7, July 14, 2010.

Measuring image similarity is an important task for various multimedia applications. Similarity can be defined at two levels: at the syntactic (lower, context-free) level and at the semantic (higher, contextual) level. As long as one deals with the syntactic level, defining and measuring similarity is a relatively straightforward task, but as soon as one starts dealing with the semantic similarity, the task becomes very difficult. We examine the use of simple readily available syntactic image features combined with other multimodal features to derive a similarity measure that captures the weak semantics of an image. The weak semantics can be seen as an intermediate step between low level image understanding and full semantic image understanding. We investigate the use of single modalities alone and see how the combination of modalities affect the similarity measures. We also test the measure on multimedia retrieval task on a tv series data, even though the motivation is in understanding how different modalities relate to each other.

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Pöyry-Lassila P., Haukola T., Salmi A., 2010. Facilitation and Problem-Based Learning in Virtual Teams: Global Virtual Collaboration Project Course, The 14th International Workshop of the IFIP WG 5.7 Special Interest Group on Experimental Interactive Learning in Industrial Management

This paper reports a case study that aimed to explore the effects of facilitation in the context of a global virtual collaboration project (GVCP) course. The case data was collected from the students of this course in 2009-10 through two online survey questionnaires. To be able to detect the effects of facilitation, the respondents were divided into two groups for comparison, the facilitated and non-facilitated group. The differences between these groups were analysed with the help of t-test. As a result of this analysis a couple of statistically significant differences were found, but in general the differences were smaller than the required level of statistical significance. However, on the basis of this case study it seems that facilitation has a positive effect on virtual team processes, even though further research is needed on this topic.