What five research streams of FinEst Twins have published

During two first years (11/2019 - 11/2021) of Finest Twins project, the number of (funded) researchers have grown from about 60 to about 100. The academic range of them goes (mostly) from PhD students to full professors. During the mentioned period of time, we have produced 170 peer-reviewed publications.

Check my own listings here or Cordis site by the European Commission here.

The European Commission and the project is very happy with the total volume of the publishing activity. However, the amount of the aimed "teaming" effect of the project, i.e., research done and, thus, publications prepared in collaboration between Taltech and Aalto, needs to be improved - a lot. Actually, there are much more papers published by very international author groups, having Aalto OR TalTech writers with Middle/South European, North/South American, Chinese, Middle-Eastern, South-East Asian and African authors, than Finnish-Estonian author groups. Another thing is that a deep theoretical article handling large societal issues takes much more time to write not to mention to publish than, say, a short technical conference presentation dealing with a case study. So far, all sorts of publications of streams have been put in the same list. This must be changed in the future. First step to this direction is to separate the teaming papers (authors from TalTech AND Aalto) from other publications. Oh! Yes! Proposals! The blood line of the FinEst Centre for Smart Cities. The mentioned people, well, we, have also submitted 40 new research & innovation proposals to competitive national or international calls. Approximately that means eight proposals per stream, which was also the aimed amount of them during the first year (Obs! 11/2019-11/2020 was solely for preparations). However, the activity of streams in this sense has been very different. Streams of Smart Mobility, Smart Energy and Smart City Governance were the main carriers, whereas streams of Urban Analytics & Data, and Built Environment submitted only few proposals. It might be worth noting that all five research streams have got equal funding for the first three years. It is highly probable that the structure and meaning of streams will be changed in the future. We must admit that for example a professorship is much stronger hub than a stream in academic circles. Furthermore, the concept of a stream does not even fit with the administrative structure of universities, not to mention other research & innovation centres. Below there are three tables and figures indicating the types and amounts of proposals, publications and collaborative topics of the research streams.

*Several foreign (non-FinEst) authors ** Aalto-Taltech (+ some Finnish-Estonian) authors

As you can see, articles and conference papers are ruling the volumes, and that the explicit aim of the Finest Twins has been to emphasise upper master level work.

Total number of publications is nice but only the fully openly accessible publications (117) are eligible ones in the books of the European Comission. This needs to be improved heavily.

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Main topics of the publications

"Main topics" here means that there are some concentration of topics among the all publications by the stream. Of course, the concentration is more probable when the stream has tens of publications, compared to a few.

Research stream: Smart Energy

Research stream: Smart Mobility

Research stream: Smart City Governance

Research stream: Built Environment

Research stream: Urban Analytics & Data