Mikko Kolehmainen

• Professor
• Professor at University of Eastern Finland

Aims We investigated the combined effects of pipe materials and disinfection chemicals on bacterial community and its active RNA fraction in water and biofilms in a pilot-scale premise plumbing system. Methods and Results The changes in bacterial communities were studied within four pipelines using copper and cross-linked polyethylene (PEX) pipe w...

Many factors, including microbiome structure and activity in the drinking water distribution system (DWDS), affect the colonization potential of opportunistic pathogens. The present study aims to describe the dynamics of active bacterial communities in DWDS and identify the factors that shape the community structures and activity in the selected DW...

The knowledge about the members of active archaea communities in DWDS is limited. The current understanding is based on high-throughput 16S ribosomal RNA gene (DNA-based) amplicon sequencing that reveals the diversity of active, dormant, and dead members of the prokaryote (bacteria, archaea) communities. The sequencing primers optimized for bacteri...

We investigated the common wasp, Vespula vulgaris as a bioindicator and biomonitor of metals in the industrial area. Using traps, we collected 257 yellowjackets along a pollution gradient in the Harjavalta Cu-Ni smelter in Southwest Finland. Our method detected metal elements such as arsenic (As), cobalt (Co), copper (Cu), iron (Fe), nickel (Ni), l...

Background Psychological processes can be manifested in physiological health. We investigated whether acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), targeted on psychological flexibility (PF), influences inflammation and stress biomarkers among working-age adults with psychological distress and overweight/obesity.Method Participants were randomized into...

Background. Countries have adopted disparate policies in tackling the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. For example, China closed down large areas almost completely to increase social distance; South Korea started a vigorous campaign to suppress the virus by testing patients with respiratory symptoms and tracing and isolating all their contacts; and m...

Waterborne disease outbreaks are a persistent and serious threat to public health according to reported incidents across the globe. Online drinking water quality monitoring technologies have evolved substantially and have become more accurate and accessible. However, using online measurements alone is unsuitable for detecting microbial regrowth, po...

Dynamic system identification is commonly reduced to an optimization problem which is complex and multimodal. To find a global optimum of this problem, evolutionary algorithms are often applied. However, as it was shown in many studies, conventional evolution-based algorithms do not demonstrate the acceptable performance for this class of problems,...

Incorporating a restart operator into a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) yields its performance improvement. Restarting an algorithm aims at preventing stagnation and reaching solutions uniformly distributed along the whole Pareto front. The presented experimental results for two MOEAs with the restart operator demonstrate vast potenti...

Background: Eukaryotes are ubiquitous in natural environments such as soil and freshwater. Little is known of their presence in drinking water distribution systems (DWDSs) or of the environmental conditions that affect their activity and survival. Methods: Eukaryotes were characterized by Illumina high-throughput sequencing targeting 18S rRNA ge...

This review discusses the use of systems biology in understanding the biological effects of electromagnetic fields, with particular focus on induction of genomic instability and cancer. We introduce basic concepts of the dynamical systems theory such as the state space and attractors and the use of these concepts in understanding the behavior of co...

Data-driven prediction systems used in epidemiological studies are still unsatisfactory from a practical point of view. Different pitfalls should be considered while transferring technologies from research to practice. The proposed k-Nearest Neighbors approach is designed to make disease-related predictions in a more holistic manner: we detect case...

Objective: In real-world applications, implementation of an enclosure and negative pressurization is not always adequate to prevent the dispersion of dust from renovation sites. This study aimed to quantify the effect of local exhaust ventilation (LEV) in controlling the dust concentration within an enclosed renovation site to reduce the dust disp...

Background The redundancy of information is becoming a critical issue for epidemiologists. High-dimensional datasets require new effective variable selection methods to be developed. This study implements an advanced evolutionary variable selection method which is applied for cardiovascular predictive modeling. The epidemiological follow-up study K...

Solving a multi-objective optimization problem results in a Pareto front approximation, and it differs from single-objective optimization, requiring specific search strategies. These strategies, mostly fitness assignment, are designed to find a set of non-dominated solutions, but different approaches use various schemes to achieve this goal. In man...

Improvements in microbial drinking water quality monitoring are needed for the better control of drinking water distribution systems and for public health protection. Conventional water quality monitoring programmes are not always able to detect a microbial contamination of drinking water. In the drinking water production chain, in addition to the...

Objectives: The aim of this study was to assess the implementation of partitioning and the negative pressure method in limiting the dispersion of dust to areas adjacent to renovation sites. Methods: The pressure difference between the worksites and adjacent areas and PM10 concentrations in the both zones were measured in 12 renovation sites, and...

Physico-chemical and microbiological water quality in the drinking water distribution systems (DWDSs) of five waterworks in Finland with different raw water sources and treatment processes was explored. Water quality was monitored during four seasons with on-line equipment and bulk water samples were analysed in laboratory. Seasonal changes in the...

Improvements in microbial drinking water quality monitoring are needed for the better control of drinking water distribution systems and for public health protection. Conventional water quality monitoring programmes are not always able to detect a microbial contamination of drinking water. In the drinking water production chain, in addition to the...

The potential of utilising exhaled breath volatile organic compound (VOC) profiles in studying diet-derived metabolic changes was examined. After a four-week initial diet period with white wheat bread (WW), seven participants received in randomised order high-fibre diets containing sourdough whole grain rye bread (WGR) or white wheat bread enriched...

In this paper we raise the question of using evolutionary algorithms in the area of Big Data processing. We show that evolutionary algorithms provide evident advantages due to their high scalability and flexibility, their ability to solve global optimization problems and optimize several criteria at the same time for feature selection, instance sel...

This research analyses accessibility for different age population groups in the Great Helsinki Region (GHR). After discussing previous approaches done in the GHR, the authors use the Structural Accessibility Layer (SAL) as a tool for accessibility categorization for a grid with 8,325 zones. SAL method was applied to assess accessibility categories...

We present a software system for automated projection of situational knowledge for disease outbreak in agriculture. The system supports farmers and agricultural advisers in obtaining and maintaining awareness of present and future disease outbreaks in crops grown at agricultural parcels. It models objects such as plant pathogens and agricultural pa...

In radioecology, transfer of radionuclides from soil to plants is typically described by a concentration ratio (CR), which assumes linearity of transfer with soil concentration. Nonlinear uptake is evidenced in many studies, but it is unclear how it should be taken into account in radioecological modeling. In this study, a conventional CR-based lin...

Credit risk evaluation is an integral part of any lending process, and even more so for financial institutions involved in lending to SMEs. The importance of credit scoring has increased recently because of the financial crisis and increased capital requirements for banks. There are, however, only few studies that develop credit coring models for S...

Even though industry consumes nearly half of total energy production, the relative share of total energy consumption related to heating and operating buildings is growing constantly. The motivation for this study was to reveal the differences in electricity use and district heating consumption in school buildings of various ages during the working...

In the coming years, the share of hybrid electric vehicles is expected to grow significantly in personal transportation. Vehicles that can be charged from the electrical grid, such as plug-in hybrids, could introduce problems for the distribution network, especially if the vehicle adoption is spatially concentrated and the charging happens unmanage...

In this paper we compare a number of two-criterion filtering techniques for feature selection in cardiovascular predictive modelling. We design two-objective schemes based on different combinations of four criteria describing the quality of reduced feature sets. To find attribute subsystems meeting the introduced criteria in an optimal way, we sugg...

The design of ontologies for sensor data and metadata has received considerable attention. The most prominent is arguably the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology. For persistence and retrieval of sensor observations, systems that adopt the SSN ontology most obviously build on an RDF database (triple store). However, large volumes of collected se...

The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies has changed dramatically not only the way users perceive the Internet and interact on it but also the way they influence a community and act in real life aspects. With the rapid rise in use and popularity of social media, people tend to share opinions and observations for almost any subject or event in their ev...

Over the past decades, sensor networks have been deployed around the world to monitor over time and space a large number of properties appertaining to various environmental phenomena. A popular example is the monitoring of particulate matter and gases in ambient air undertaken, for instance, to assess air quality and inform decision makers and the...

The use of multivariate methods is popular in indoor air quality applications such as prediction of indoor air quality, ventilation control and classify comfort Indoor air quality data used in this study was collected continuously in a family house in Kuopio, Eastern Finland, during ten months long period. Indoor parameters were temperature, relati...

As environmental monitoring systems increasingly automate the collection and processing of environmental sensor network data, the technical components of such systems can automatically obtain and maintain higher levels of situation awareness—awareness of the monitored part of reality. In order to increase confidence in the correctness of situation...

We present an environmental software system that obtains, integrates, and reasons over situational knowledge about natural phenomena and human activity. We focus on storms and driver directions. Radar data for rainfall intensity and Google Directions are used to extract situational knowledge about storms and driver locations along directions, respe...

We discuss quality control of environmental measurement data. Typically, environmental data is used to compute some specific indicators based on models, historical data, and the most recent measurement data. For such a computation to produce reliable results, the data must be of sufficient quality. The reality is, however, that environmental measur...

The recent European Union and national level initiatives such as INSPIRE and PSI have increased the availability of public sector data, which provides interesting new opportunities to support decision making in electricity distribution network planning. With big amounts of available data, data mining methods can be utilised to produce improved spat...

Smart grid paradigm is hailed as the Holy Grail to manage the future electricity consumption in a sustainable manner, and demand response (DR) is a fundamental component in the realization of smart grids. However, DR requires active household participation and in the previous studies monetary benefit is identified as the main motivation for the hou...

Road vehicle detection and, to a lesser extent, classification have received considerable attention, in particular for the purpose of traffic monitoring by transportation authorities. A multitude of sensors and systems have been developed to assist people in traffic monitoring. Camera-based systems have enjoyed wide adoption over the last decade, p...

Information systems that build on sensor networks often process data produced by measurement of physical properties. This data can serve in the acquisition of knowledge for real-world situations of interest to information services and, ultimately, to people. Such systems face a common challenge, namely the considerable gap between the data produced...

A recurrent problem in applications that build on environmental sensor networks is that of sensor data organization and interpretation. Organization focuses on, for instance, resolving the syntactic and semantic heterogeneity of sensor data. The distinguishing factor between organization and interpretation is the abstraction from sensor data with i...

Situation assessment, i.e. the process of achieving situation awareness, is common in environmental monitoring, where assessment occurs predominantly on sensor data and awareness is for the state of environmental phenomena. For a particular location, an environmental monitoring system may measure and compute mean hourly PM 2.5 concentration to acqu...

Environmental knowledge systems that build on sensor-based environmental monitoring rely on techniques in knowledge acquisition and representation to interpret the numbers obtained in measurement for what they tell about the monitored environment. Languages and systems in knowledge representation and reasoning, specifically Semantic Web technologie...

Smart electrical grids refer to networked systems for distributing and transporting electricity from producers to consumers, by dynamically configuring the network through remotely controlled (dis)connectors. The consumers of the grid have typically distinct priorities, e.g., a hospital and an airport have the highest priority and the street lighti...

In this article we discuss how to improve the resilience of an existing control system. In recent years, our environment has become populated with numerous control systems due the to availability of low-cost technologies. For instance, modern home automation has become a cooperative network of multiple control systems, many of which communicate ove...

Over half of the global population lives in cities, and people spend 90 percent of their time in indoor environments. Broadly viewed indoor environment comprises of several main elements: the physical building, architecture, thermal conditions, indoor air quality, acoustics, lighting, maintenance and hygiene of indoor air and potable water. In addi...

Sensors are used in environmental science to monitor an increasingly large multitude of properties of real world phenomena. An important scientific aim of such monitoring is more accurate and more complete understanding of phenomena, with respect to, e.g., their formation, development, or interactions. Properties and phenomena may be, for instance,...

In this article, we discuss integration of distributed information services, to support the implementation of applications for fields of safety and security. Although there are standard interfacing technologies, such as SOAP and REST, there is very little architectural support for the development of personalized and case specific applications, wher...

In this article we discuss the route planning of Hazardous Materials (HAZMAT). For HAZMAT transportation, safety and security is of utmost importance. Because of this, the route planning needs to consider potential risks and costs to find an optimal route for the transportation. It has been shown that the route planning is an NP hard problem. In th...

In this article the diversity of environmental monitoring systems is studied. The number of such systems is steadily increasing each year, as systems are tailored to specific, growing needs of authorities, corporate users and citizens. Because of this, it becomes harder to compare systems and their functionality. Systems that appear to have the sam...

Elimination of energy wastage is one of the main goals in the European Union. Healthy and energy efficient housing is affected by many factors which set challenges for continuous Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) and energy consumption monitoring, control and research, especially in old buildings. More energy efficient and air tight construction is thought...

In this paper we propose a unique idea to create a state-of-the-art adaptive building automation system. The goal can be achieved by combining the control points from building automation obtained data mining and machine learning as well as residents’ feedback. The system to be developed fulfills the needs of a new kind of building automation system...

Electric vehicles and hybrids are expected to become increasingly common in the coming years. The implications of growing adoption depend on its geographical extent. For instance, vehicles that are chargeable from the electrical grid, such as plug-in hybrids, can introduce problems for the distribution network especially if the vehicle adoption is...

Different registries of the society are constantly opening for free usage and can be utilized to enhance spatial load modelling needed in strategic planning of electricity distribution networks. The main innovation of this paper is that of demonstrating possibilities of public geographic data, namely socio-economic, building and meteorological data...

Full text available at: http://www.ipcbee.com/vol51/016-ICEEB2013-A10018.pdf The quality of indoor air is commonly measured by temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide (CO2) sensors. Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) are usually analyzed using air samples, but also sensors that detect odors and gases are available. In this study, Total Volatile Org...

Full text available at: http://www.ipcbee.com/vol51/004-ICEEB2013-A013.pdf Schools are suitable type of buildings for Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) measurements. This is justified by the fact that IAQ measurements can ensure a comfortable and healthy environment for educational purposes. The aim of this study is to assess IAQ measurement correlations in...

This paper presents an overview of an indoor air quality data analysis, using self-organizing maps. The aim of the study was to research quality variations in indoor air, and the suitability of the used method for large scale data analysis of indoor air quality. Research was conducted in a six floor apartment building (built in the 80’ies) located...

We illustrate the application of automated representation of knowledge acquired from sensor network data to quality of life services. Specifically, for a sensor network used to monitor a residential building we acquire knowledge about events of interest to occupants and represent such knowledge in ontology. An event of particular interest to qualit...

In environmental engineering, sensor measurement is a process undertaken with respect to an environmental domain, i.e. an area of interest, to measure a domain property. Knowledge of a domain, meaning its concepts and relations that hold among them, can be formally represented by means of ontology. Therefore, given an ontology for an environmental...

In this article we envision factors and trends that shape the next generation of environmental monitoring systems. One key factor in this respect is the combined effect of end-user needs and the general development of IT services and their availability. Currently, an environmental (monitoring) system is assumed to be reactive. It delivers measu...

Continuous measurements and multivariate methods are applied in researching the effects of energy consumption on indoor air quality (IAQ) in a Finnish one-family house. Measured data used in this study was collected continuously in a house in Kuopio, Eastern Finland, during fourteen months long period. Consumption parameters measured were the consu...

The continuous measurements of water pressure and temperature and multivariate methods are applied in researching of building water network, especially water hammer phenomenon. Measured data used in this study was collected continuously in an office building located in Rauma, Western Finland, during seven days long period. Parameters measured were...

Homebuyers are usually interested in both the accessibility of services and the quality of the local environment, and real estate agents frequently offer some web-based systems for home searches. There is however hardly any information about the quality of local living environment in those web-based systems. The purpose of this study was to develop...

World widely, demand for clean and safe potable water consumption is continuously increasing. However, there is a lack of clean potable water in several countries, as the quality of raw water is poor or there is lack of raw water. New legislation is under preparation in EU-level to diminish the used water and energy. Because of that, there is a nee...

The multivariate methods are widely used in researching of buildings and residential Indoor Air Quality (IAQ). Instead, one of the multivariate methods, namely selforganizing map (SOM) is applied only marginally in the study of correlations of outdoor weather conditions on IAQ. It is also worth noticing, that only few papers detail differential air...

A regional model for sustainable biogas electricity production was formulated and tested for a Finnish province, North-Savo. By using the model the aim was to support decision making for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and increasing renewable energy (RE) production in the studied region in the biogas electricity production system. The syst...

The use of neural networks is popular in various building applications such as prediction of heating load, ventilation rate and indoor temperature. Significant is, that only few papers deal with indoor carbon dioxide (CO2) prediction which is a very good indicator of indoor air quality (IAQ). In this study, a data-driven modelling method based on m...

The building sector is the largest energy consumer and CO2 emitter in the European Union (EU) and therefore the active reduction of energy consumption and elimination of energy wastage are among the main goals in it. Healthy housing and energy efficiency are affected by many factors which set challenges to monitoring, control and research of indoor...

Even if the industry consumes nearly half of the total energy production, the relative share of total energy consumption related to heating and operating buildings is growing constantly. The overall aim of this study is to compare energy (electricity and heating) consumptions of six school buildings in Kuopio, Eastern Finland. Selected case study s...

Reducing energy consumption, cutting greenhouse gas emissions and elimination energy wastage are among the main goals in the European Union (EU). The building sector is the largest user of energy and CO2 emitter in the EU, estimated at approximately 40% of the total consumption. However, the question is, how improving energy efficiency in buildings...

Element-specific concentration ratios (CRs) assuming that plant uptake of elements is linear are commonly used in radioecological modelling to describe the soil-to-plant transfer of elements. The goal of this study was to investigate the validity of the linearity assumption in boreal forest plants, for which only limited relevant data are available...

Ontology has become increasingly important to software systems. The aim of ontology learning is to ease one of the major problems in ontology engineering, i.e. the cost of ontology construction. Much of the effort within the ontology learning community has focused on learning from text collections. However, environmental domains often deal with num...

In this paper we propose a methodology consisting of specific computational intelligence methods, i.e. principal component analysis and artificial neural networks, in order to inter-compare air quality and meteorological data, and to forecast the concentration levels for environmental parameters of interest (air pollutants). We demonstrate these me...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that regulate transcriptional processes via binding to the target gene mRNA. In animals, this binding is imperfect, which makes the computational prediction of animal miRNA targets a challenging task. The accuracy of miRNA target prediction can be improved with the use of machine learning methods. Previo...

Methods for regional load prediction, capable of dealing with user-defined scenarios, are required in planning and managing electricity distribution networks. In this paper, the concept of scenario based tool is presented for the prediction of regional electricity loads in heating system scenarios. An innovation of the tool is that of self-organizi...

The recent technological developments monitoring the electricity use of small customers provides with a whole new view to develop electricity distribution systems, customer-specific services and to increase energy efficiency. The analysis of customer load profile and load estimation is an important and popular area of electricity distribution techn...

We describe a neural network model of a municipal wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) in which on-line total solids (TS) sewer data generated by a novel microwave sensor is used as a model input variable. The predictive performance of the model is compared with and without sewer data and with modelling with a traditional linear multiple linear regres...

nd Decade of the 3 rd Millennium ENHR 2010, 4-7 July, ISTANBUL 22 nd International Housing Research Conference Abstract Home buyers are often interested in both accessibility of services and the quality of the local environment, while real estate agents frequently offer some web-based systems for home searches. However, there is hardly any informat...

Parametric and nonparametric modeling methods have been widely used for the estimation of forest attributes from airborne laser-scanning data and aerial photographs. However, the methods adopted suffered from complex remote-sensed data structures involving high dimensions, nonlinear relationships, different statistical distributions, and outliers....

Karjakokojen kasvaessa on pakko turvautua yhä useammin eläintuotannon pitkälle menevään automatisointiin. Kiihtyvyysantureiden avulla voi olla mahdollista seurata tarkasti myös eläinten käyttäytymistä ja siten tehdä arvioita eläinten hyvinvoinnin tasosta. Tutkimme kiihtyvyysanturin käyttömahdollisuuksia lypsylehmien käyttäytymisen mittaamisessa. Tu...

Forest trees are exposed to increasing concentrations of O3 and CO2 simultaneously. The rise of concentration in these gases causes changes in the gene expression of trees, which can be small in acclimated trees, but yet pivotal for the metabolism of the trees. We have studied the response of paper birch (Betula papyrifera) leaf gene expression to...

Gene expression responses of paper birch (Betula papyrifera) leaves to elevated concentrations of CO(2) and O(3) were studied with microarray analyses from three time points during the summer of 2004 at Aspen FACE. Microarray data were analyzed with clustering techniques, self-organizing maps, K-means clustering and Sammon's mappings, to detect sim...