CSC (Finland)

Not many people could be described as a rainmaker quite as literally as Hannele Korhonen. Korhonen, a research professor at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, is heading a project that aims to improve artificial rainmaking in the United Arab Emirates.

Although approx. 2555 km apart, theatre students from The University of Tampere, Finland, and Coventry University, UK, are rehearsing Shakespeare together, sharing a “virtual learning theatre” made possible by powerful videoconferencing equipment and high-speed connectivity.

The Nordic research and education networks are preparing to put a whole new network infrastructure in place for EISCAT 3D, as the powerful new radar is situated in remote northern Scandinavia to assure a minimum of background noise. For the next 35 to 40 years to come, it will be the centerpiece of the international network of instruments monitoring the Earth’s upper atmosphere and space environment.

As social media like Facebook and Twitter become increasingly influential in the decision making of the voters, social scientists take an interest in scrutinizing, how discussions and debates emerge and evolve in the intersection between traditional media and social media. Finnish researchers have enlisted a supercomputer to crack the data.

As computer simulations go, Vlasiator is as huge as they come. Developing Vlasiator, Minna Palmroth, professor at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, has succeeded in doing what many of her colleagues thought impossible: Simulating weather in near-Earth space, showing how solar wind affects us, using high performance computing and high speed networks to do so.

Swedish researchers are incorporating sensitive register data in their cross-border analyses of the interaction between genetic and environmental factors for schizophrenia. Thanks to Tryggve, a new Nordic initiative to advance the utilization of sensitive biomedical data.

Finnish post-doctoral researcher Tuomo Hiippala is part of a new generation of humanist researchers, using powerful computational resources to boost their research. Combining a PhD in English Philology with a keen interest in computer vision and machine learning Hiippala is developing new ways of handling large collections of images.

Academy Professor Petri Toiviainen's research team at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, has set out to understand what happens in the brain when listening to music. Their experiments utilize Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and a supercomputer cluster provided by the Finnish research and education network CSC.