Staff

In 2013, 163.0 person-years were completed at the department. The person-years completed on basic funding amounted to 91.7, which is 5.0 more than the previous year. The number of person-years on external funding was 71.3, i.e. 0.9 person-years less than the previous year.

If we consider the person-years on the scale of the four-step structure for teaching and research staff during the past two years, we can see that the increase in external funding has strengthened the first step of the career track (research assistants and doctoral students) considerably. Person-years on basic funding have mainly increased on the 2nd-4th steps (professors, university lecturers and post-doctoral researchers) of the tenure track.

During 2013, several recruitment processes were brought to their end at the department. At the beginning of January, the professorship for software engineering was filled, as was one of the assistant professorships in the department’s first tenure track system.  In April, the second of the assistant professor in the same application round started work. At the beginning of June, the invited machine-learning professor was tenured, and at the beginning of August, the university lecturership in bioinformatics was filled. At the end of 2013, the application process for the assistant professor in data management was started.

In 2013, the average age of the department staff was 34.3. During the past five years, the average age has varied between 33.3 and 36.4. The strong internationalisation drive continues at the department. In 2013, employees from abroad completed 27.3% of the person-years at the department, while the number was only 16.6% in 2010.

Funding

The total funding in 2013 was 11.70 Million Euros. The total funding grew by 0.46 Million compared to year 2012. The largest items of expenditure consisted of staff and facility expenses.  

The basic funding received by the department has mainly been distributed in accordance with the previous year’s funding.  This means that the basic funding has remained at around 5.3 Million Euros. In addition to the regular basic funding, the department received additional funding for such purposes as postgraduate schools and three centres of excellence in 2013. The faculty awarded the department additional funding for projects in the areas of improvement of instruction and data security.

In 2013, the department gained over 5 Million Euros in external funding. It was especially the funding from Tekes, the EU, and corporate partners that increased considerably. The funding the the Finnish Academy remained at the same level as before. External funding has especially been boosted by the successful funding applications of the new professors and principal investigators. External funding is important to the department, and it is also evidence of our success in a toughening competition. Having such a large part of the total funding depending on external backers, however, makes for added insecurity, especially when making long-term plans.

Teaching

Studies progressed at a record rate again in relation to the number of instructors, as the number of credits gained rose considerably. The result of 2013, 693 credits per person-year, is a new record after transferring to the two-tiered degree system.

The number of BSc degrees sank significantly, as the number of BSc degrees has always been considerably higher than the number of MSc degrees since transferring to the two-tiered system. There are two reasons for this decrease: the number of international students accepted directly into the MSc programme has settled the number of MSc degrees at a comparatively high level, while a considerable number of Finnish BSc students enter the workforce completely after finishing their degrees. The courses at the BSc stage have been streamlined in the past years, so an increase in BSc degrees is expected in the next few years. This is also impacted by the greater number of BSc students accepted through separate admissions - especially the MOOC programming course.

Research

During the 2013-2016 strategic period, the research at the department still focuses on three key areas: machine learning and algorithms, networks and services, and software systems. During year 2013, the research in all the department’s focal areas was still very actively described in writing. In 2013, the researchers at the department produced 198 refereed publications and a total of 248 publications. There was a considerable increase in the number of refereed conference papers. The prize for best conference paper in 2013 was awarded to the writers of two articles: Teemu Roos (ACM CHI 2013), as well as Matti Luukkainen and Arto Vihavainen (ACM SIGITE 2013). Jouni Sirén, in his turn, received the PhD thesis award of 2013 from the Finnish Information-Processing Research Foundation. Sini Ruohomaa was Finland’s candidate and finalist in the Cor Baayen competition for young researchers organised by ERCIM (the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics).

The researchers of the department also attended many different conferences and participated in the editing staff of journals very actively. Department researchers headed by Docent Matti Järvisalo were in charge of organising the 2013 SAT conference (International Conferences on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing, SAT 2013), as well as auxiliary programme. In the autumn, researchers headed by Professor Hannu Toivonen organised the International Autumn School on Computational Creativity 2013.

The research of the department gained visibility in different media during 2013. Sasu Tarkoma and his team, in cooperation with an international research group at Berkeley, have implemented the Carat program, which is available for users to monitor the energy usage of their mobile devices. It continued to be popular among users of mobile devices. Other areas of the department that gained media attention were the MOOC course, and especially the research into computational creativity carried out by Hannu Toivonen's Discovery group.

All the information on research carried out at the University of Helsinki is gathered into the Tuhat research data system. In addition to their publications, researchers also enter their other activities (awards, visits, editorial work, conference participation and organisation, memberships in committees, thesis supervision including doctoral theses, and public appearances in different forums) into the Tuhat system. The information in the Tuhat system is utilised for various reports, the evaluation of research results, etc.

In 2013, department research groups were part of four national centres of excellence selected by the Finnish Academy. Three of these units are the CoE for computational inference, COIN; the CoE for research into cancer genetics; and the CoE for inverse problems, which have been elected to the centre-of-excellence programme 2012-2017. Petri Myllymäki and his team participate in the COIN unit, Veli Mäkinen and his team in the cancer genetics group, and Aapo Hyvärinen in the inverse-problem group. From before, the department’s unit for algorithmic data analysis (Algodan), headed by Professor Esko Ukkonen, has been a part of this centre-of-excellence programme during the years 2008-2013.