Browsing by master's degree program "Tietojenkäsittelytieteen maisteriohjelma"

Telecommunication companies are moving towards even more digitalized and agile ways of working. They are expanding their business in other fields, such as television, thus moving further away from the traditional telecommunications model. Recently, Telia has become the largest television company in the Nordics. One of the their main products in the field of television is channel packages, which allow customers to access specific television content. In this study, a benefit analysis for Telia Finland Oyj was conducted to inspect the benefits that test automation brings for the channel package testing process. 8 interviews in total were conducted with Telia employees with knowledge on channel packages. To receive both a business and a technical perspective, the interviewees were divided into two groups fitting their expertise. In general, test automation was seen as a useful tool. The main business related benefits of test automation mentioned were a faster and cheaper testing process, and a faster time-to-market. It was also seen that test automation could help achieve a more efficient testing process, and increase confidence in test automation. Based on the interview results, an epic was defined and analyzed according to the principles of Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). This included describing the solution in detail and defining a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). By using example variables and generalized values, several calculations were made to present a framework on the costs of implementing the MVP and the estimated reduction of channel package testing costs. By utilizing the MVP as a part of the channel package testing process, the return on investment (ROI) was not as desirable as expected. With more automated tests compared to the number of test cases, combined with regular use of test automation, the investment would pay itself back and start generating additional savings faster. Based on the epic analysis, a Lean Business Case was defined.

Context: The Bank of Finland, as the national monetary and central bank of Finland, possesses an extensive repository of data that fulfills both the statistical needs of international organizations and the federal requirements. Data scientists within the bank are increasingly interested in investing in machine learning (ML) capabilities to develop predictive models. MLOps offers a set of practices that ensure the reliable and efficient maintenance and deployment of ML models. Objective: In this thesis, we focus on addressing how to implement an ML pipeline within an existing environment. The case study is explorative in nature, with the primary objective of gaining deeper insight into MLOps tools and their practical implementation within the organization. Method: We apply the design science research methodology to divide design and development into six tasks: problem identification, objective definition, design and development, demonstration, evaluation, and communication. Results: We select the tools for the MLOps based on the user requirements and the existing environment, and then we design and develop a simplified end-to-end ML pipeline utilizing the chosen tools. Lastly, we conduct an evaluation to measure the alignment between the selected tools and the initial user requirements.

Many real-world problem settings give rise to NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. This results in a need for non-trivial algorithmic approaches for finding optimal solutions to such problems. Many such approaches—ranging from probabilistic and meta-heuristic algorithms to declarative programming—have been presented for optimization problems with a single objective. Less work has been done on approaches for optimization problems with multiple objectives. We present BiOptSat, an exact declarative approach for finding so-called Pareto-optimal solutions to bi-objective optimization problems. A bi-objective optimization problem arises for example when learning interpretable classifiers and the size, as well as the classification error of the classifier should be taken into account as objectives. Using propositional logic as a declarative programming language, we seek to extend the progress and success in maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT) solving to two objectives. BiOptSat can be viewed as an instantiation of the lexicographic method and makes use of a single SAT solver that is preserved throughout the entire search procedure. It allows for solving three tasks for bi-objective optimization: finding a single Pareto-optimal solution, finding one representative solution for each Pareto point, and enumerating all Pareto-optimal solutions. We provide an open-source implementation of five variants of BiOptSat, building on different algorithms proposed for MaxSAT. Additionally, we empirically evaluate these five variants, comparing their runtime performance to that of three key competing algorithmic approaches. The empirical comparison in the contexts of learning interpretable decision rules and bi-objective set covering shows practical benefits of our approach. Furthermore, for the best-performing variant of BiOptSat, we study the effects of proposed refinements to determine their effectiveness.

Quantum computing has an enormous potential in machine learning, where problems can quickly scale to be intractable for classical computation. A Boltzmann machine is a well-known energy-based graphical model suitable for various machine learning tasks. Plenty of work has already been conducted for realizing Boltzmann machines in quantum computing, all of which have somewhat different characteristics. In this thesis, we conduct a survey of the state-of-the-art in quantum Boltzmann machines and their training approaches. Primarily, we examine variational quantum Boltzmann machine, a specific variant of quantum Boltzmann machine suitable for the near-term quantum hardware. Moreover, as variational quantum Boltzmann machine heavily relies on variational quantum imaginary time evolution, we effectively analyze variational quantum imaginary time evolution to a great extent. Compared to the previous work, we evaluate the execution of variational quantum imaginary time evolution with a more comprehensive collection of hyperparameters. Furthermore, we train variational quantum Boltzmann machines using a toy problem of bars and stripes, representing more multimodal probability distribution than the Bell states and the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states considered in the earlier studies.

In the world of constantly growing data masses the efficient extraction, saving and accessing that data for business intelligence and analytics has become increasingly important to businesses. Analytics and business intelligence software is offered by many providers in the market for all sizes of organizations and there are multiple ways to build an analytics system, or pipeline from scratch or integrated with tools available on the market. In this case study we explore and re-design the analytics pipeline solution of a medium sized software product company by utilizing the design science research methodology. We discuss the current technologies and tools on the market for business intelligence and analytics and consider how they fit into our case study context. As design science suggests, we design, implement and evaluate two prototypes of an analyt- ics pipeline with an Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) solution and data warehouse. The prototypes represent two different approaches to building an analytics pipeline - an in-house approach, and a partially outsourced approach. Our study brings out typical challenges similar businesses may face when designing and building their own business intelligence and analytics software. In our case we lean towards an analytics pipeline with an outsourced ETL process to be able to pass various different types of event data with a consistent data schema into our data warehouse with minimal maintenance work. However, we also show the value of near real time analytics with an in-house solution, and offer some ideas on how such a pipeline may be built.

Musical pattern discovery refers to the automated discovery of important repeated patterns, such as melodies and themes, from music data. Several algorithms have been developed to solve this problem, but evaluating the algorithms has been difficult without proper visualisations of the output of the algorithms. To address this issue a web application named Mupadie was built. Mupadie accepts MIDI music files as input and visualises the outputs of musical pattern discovery algorithms, with implementations of SIATEC and TTWIA built in the application. Other algorithms can be visualised if the algorithm output is uploaded to Mupadie as a JSON file that follows a specified data structure. Using Mupadie, an evaluation of SIATEC and TTWIA was conducted. Mupadie was found to be a useful tool in the qualitative evaluation of these musical pattern discovery algorithms; it helped reveal systematically recurring issues with the discovered patterns, some previously known and some previously undocumented. The findings were then used to suggest improvements to the algorithms.

The Web has become the world's most important application distribution platform, with web pages increasingly containing not static documents, but dynamic, script-driven content. Script-based rendering relies on imperative browser APIs which become unwieldy to use as an application's complexity grows. An increasingly common solution is to use libraries and frameworks which provide an abstraction over rendering and enable a less error-prone declarative programming model. The details of how web frontend frameworks implement rendering vary widely and can potentially have significant consequences for application performance. Frameworks' rendering strategies are typically invisible to the application developer, and may consequently be poorly understood despite their potential impact. In this thesis, we review rendering strategies used in a number of influential and popular web frontend frameworks. By studying their implementation details, we discover ways to categorize and estimate rendering strategies' performance based on input sizes in update loops. To verify and measure the effects of these differences, we implement a number of benchmarks that measure different aspects of rendering. In our benchmarks, we discover significant performance differences ranging up to an order of magnitude under some conditions. Additionally, we confirm that categorizing rendering strategies based on input sizes of update loops is an effective way to estimate their relative performance. The best performing rendering strategies are found to be ones which minimize input sizes in update loops using techniques such as compile-time optimization and reactive programming models.

The rapid progress of communication technologies combined with the growing competition for talents and knowledge has made it necessary to reassess the potential of distributed development which has significantly changed the landscape of the IT industry introducing a variety of cooperation models and making notable changes to the software team work environment. Along with this, enterprises pay more attention to teams’ performance improvement, employing emerging management tools for building up efficient software teams, and trying to get the most out of understanding factors which significantly impact a team’s overall performance. The objective of the research is to systematize factors characterizing high-performing software teams; indicate the benefits of global software development (GSD) models positively influencing software teams’ development performance; and study how companies’ strategies can benefit from distributed development approaches in building high-performing software teams. The thesis is designed as a combination of a systematic literature review followed by qualitative research in the form of semi-structured interviews to validate the findings regarding classification of GSD models’ benefits and their influence on the development of high-performing software teams. At a literature review stage, the research (1) introduces a team performance factors’ model reflecting the aspects which impact the effectiveness of development teams; (2) suggests the classification of GSD models based on organizational, legal, and temporal characteristics, and (3) describes the benefits of GSD models which influence the performance of software development teams. Within the empirical part of the study, we refine the classification of GSD models’ benefits based on the qualitative analysis results of semi-structured interviews with practitioners from IT industry, form a comparison table of GSD benefits depending on the model in question, and introduce recommendations for company and team management regarding the application of GSD in building high-performing software teams. IT corporations, to achieve their strategic goals, can enrich their range of available tools for managing high-performing teams by considering the peculiarities of different GSD models. Company and team management should evaluate the advantages of the distributed operational models, and use the potential and benefits of available configurations to increase teams’ performance and build high-performing software teams.

Various Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are common phenomena in the Internet. They can consume resources of servers, congest networks, disrupt services, or even halt systems. There are many machine learning approaches that attempt to detect and prevent attacks on multiple levels of abstraction. This thesis examines and reports different aspects of creating and using a dataset for machine learning purposes to detect attacks in a web server environment. We describe the problem field, origins and reasons behind the attacks, typical characteristics, and various types of attacks. We detail ways to mitigate the attacks and provide a review of current benchmark datasets. For the dataset used in this thesis, network traffic was captured in a real-world setting, and flow records were labeled. Experiments performed include selecting important features, comparing two supervised learning algorithms, and observing how a classifier model trained on network traffic on a specific date performs in detecting new malicious records over time in the same environment. The model was also tested with a recent benchmark dataset.

The MOOC Center of University of Helsinki maintains a learning management system, primarily used in the online courses offered by the Department of Computer Science. The learning management system is being used in more courses, leading to a need for additional exercise types. In order to satisfy this need, we plan to use additional teams of developers to create these exercise types. However, we would like to minimize any negative effects that the new exercise types may have on the overall system, specifically regarding stability and security. In this work, we propose a plugin system for creating new exercise types, and implement it to production system used by real students. The system's plugins are deployed as separate services and use sandboxed IFrames for their user interfaces. Communication with the plugins occurs through the use of HTTP requests and message passing. The designed plugin system fulfilled its aims and worked in its production deployment. Notably, it was concluded that it is challenging for plugins to disrupt the host system. This plugin system serves as an example that it is possible to create a plugin system where the plugins are isolated from the host system.