WELCOME

The Distributed and Pervasive Systems (DPS) Group conducts cutting edge research that focuses on challenges surrounding the development of systems for distributed networking and pervasive sensing. Of particular interest is the design, development, and exploitation of these systems for scientific investigations. Key research challenges addressed by the group include:

WELCOME

HIGHLIGHTS!

We got awards at ACM SIGCHI/SIGMOBILE UbiComp 2025 and ACM SIGCHI ICMI

Our SpiKey paper got best student paper award at ICMI 2025; Our tiny but mighty paper got best paper award at UbiSense 2025; and we also got most creative student paper award at UbiComp/Student Challenge 2025.

PhD student Abdul-Rasheed Ottun is defending his thesis "Practical Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence with Human Oversight"

Opponents: Prof. Christian Becker (University of Stuttgart, Germany); Senior Researcher Alexander da Silva Veith (Nokia Bell Labs, Belgium) [news here]

Associate Professor Huber Flores gave a phone interview for TV3 news, [watch here]

PhD student Zhigang Yin is defending his thesis "Computing and Sensing in a Smart Ring"

Opponents: Prof. Marco Zuñiga (TU Delft, The Netherlands); Prof. Stephan Sigg (Aalto University, Finland) [news here]

PhD student Mayowa Olapade will travel to Barcelona for a 3-month internship with CARNET

Two of our PhD students are contributing as volunteers in the Annual ACM UbiComp/ISWC 2025 conference, taking place in Helsinki, Finland

IEEE Spectrum covered our tiny data centers research, thank you!

Research in Estonia featured our research in tiny data centers which re-purposes old smartphones

Our tiny data center's research was featured in Euronews, thank you!

Our tiny data center's research received media coveraged by Postimees, thank you!

Four of our PhD students are contributing as volunteers in the IEEE Wold Congress on Service 2025, Helsinki, Finland

Our PhD student Kevin Post got a travel grant award from ACM HoMobile 2025

Our project GENIE got funded by the Estonian Research Council for the period (2025-2029)

[PRG] GENIE: Foundations of Generative Calibration for Low-cost Pervasive Light Sensing (GENIE: Generatiivse kalibreerimise alused odava ja kõikjal kättesaadava valgusmõõtmise jaoks)

Our PhD student Abdul-Rasheed Ottun got a travel grant award from IEEE ICDCS 2024

Our PhD student Mayowa Olapade got a travel grant award from ACM UMAP 2024

Former PhD student got outstanding doctoral dissertation award by the University of Helsinki

Our nanodrones were featured by Novaator!

Our nanodrones for agriculture scouting were featured in Aktuaalne Kaamera!

Our research was featured in Research in Estonia!

Our nanodrones were featured by ERR in English!

Media Spotlight: AI Advancements in Marine Conservation—Enhancing Species Identification, Tackling Marine Plastics, and Amplifying Data for Protection

We are organizing a data science seminar on Trustworthy and Responsible AI

The venue travel guide can be found here.

Assoc. Prof. Huber Flores delivered a talk in Data Science Seminar about Sustainable Development

The title of the talk is "Low-cost Sensing for Environmental Sustainability". The video recording is available here.

Explore our latest MOOC courses: Two cutting-edge courses on Trustworthy AI and Advanced Trustworthy AI

Our new paper about the performance of dead reckoning techniques in aquatic environments is online now in ACM UbiComp/IMWUT

Our research demos regarding Smart Ring and Nanodrones garner attention from Finnish Media Outlet

Our smart ring technology was TV broadcasted by Kanal 2, Õhtu! Thank you!

Our PhD student (Zhigang Yin) is doing an internship at University of Helsinki (Kumpulan Kampus)

We are participating in the IT Academy Research Summit, May 18-19, 2023

Our smart ring Hedgehog got the best demo runner-up award at ACM HotMobile 2023

Our Hedgehog for drink spiking detection also was featured in ERR news in English

Our research work about drink spiking got TV broadcasted during Aktuaalne Kaamera and media coverage in ERR Novaator

Our PhD student Zhigang Yin got an ACM SIGMOBILE travel grant award to present his work in ACM HotMobile 2023

Assoc. Prof. Huber Flores got the researcher of the year award at our Institute

Zhigang our PhD student participated in a 3 min thesis competition

3-min video can be found here

The experiences of Abdul-Rasheed Ottun (PhD student) in EU SPATIAL are shared in an Editorial Letter

Abdul-Rasheed is investigating Explainable AI methods as part of his PhD studies, letter is here

Assoc. Prof. Huber Flores is delivering a talk in the exact science conference "Loodusteadlased kestlikust arengust: mis värvi on tulevik?"

The title of the talk is "Mega-scale enviromental monitoring for future smart cities". The event can be also follow online.

Our research about discovering hidden cameras got media coverage by ERR Novaator !

We are organizing research workshop on Pervasive Sustainability on 09 September, 2022, in collaboration with University of Helsinki

We are organizing a workshop on Autonomous Sensing Vehicles on 29 June 2022!

We are organizing a workshop on METAVERSE on 3 June 2022!

Our Master student (Souvik Paul) is joining Telefonica Research Team for a summer internship!

DPS is contributing to EU Horizon SPATIAL!

Link to UT press-release [here] , Link to consortium press-release [here]

UT insights about the importance of trustworthy training for AI models (EU SPATIAL)

Our work about Perceptive Ads got featured in HIIT news!

Link to the article [here]

New postdoc position available in our group

We are looking for a postdoc candidate to conduct research in Explainable AI and Distributed/Federated Machine Learning. Please apply [here]

Our work about marine pollution monitoring got featured in local Estonian news!

Links to articles here: [English-version],[Estonian-version]

We got a paper accepted in IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine.

Our paper investigates sensors that estimate the quality of fruits and vegetables over time.

We got a full paper accepted in ACM UMAP 2021 (Acceptance rate 23.3%)

Our paper investigates the usage of Intelligent Shifting Cues for improving aware of mult-device interactions.

Our paper GEESE is accepted in Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal.

GEESE is a novel-UAV system that is designed to transport and integrate portable cloudlets into any enviroment, such that it is possible to locate Edge computing services dinamycally. GEESE overcomes the scarcity problem of Edge computing deployments in the wild.

We are contributing to the EU Horizon project SPATIAL (Security and Privacy Accountable Technology Innovations, Algorithms and Machine Learning)

We are analyzing the execution of distributed and federated machine learning models, such that their execution behavior can be explained. A postdoc and PhD positions will be announced shortly.

Our paper MIDAS is accepted in IEEE PerCom 2021. (Acceptance rate 14.8%)

MIDAS identifies different types of materials by exploiting human-emitted thermal radiation.

HotPOST 2020 program is online!

We have a nice program for HotPOST 2020 (Co-located with INFOCOM 2020). Two technical sessions and one keynote entitled "Computation Distribution in a Cloud-Edge Architecture for IoT Applications"

We are presenting our latest research on aquatic plastic sensing in MobiSys DroNet 2020

Our paper PENGUIN proposes a monitoring solution to detect and classify plastic pollutants in aquatic environments using Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV)s.

We got a full paper accepted in ACM UbiComp/IMWUT

UbiComp 2020 is the International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing. UbiComp will be held in Cancun, Mexico.

PerCrowd 2020 program is online!

Our PerCrowd workshop got a nice program. One keynote about fulfilling the Promise of Mobile Device Crowds by Prof. Mostafa Ammar (Georgia Tech, USA), two technical sessions in Multi-Device Systems, and a panel about Edge Intelligence.