Annual Report 2013
FICS
The Finnish Doctoral Programme in Computational Sciences (FICS) is a network of 22 departments in 9 universities in Finland. The Graduate School in Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, and Biometry (ComBi) co-ordinated by the Department of Computer Science joined with FICS in 2010. FICS is currently co-ordinated by the Helsinki Institute of Information Technology (HIIT) at Aalto University. Due to the change in the funding system of the Finnish doctoral programmes at the end of 2013, FICS does not provide any new funded positions.
Computational science forms a new "third pillar" of scientific inquiry, complementing theory and experimentation. FICS brings together the core methodological topics and important fields of application of computational sciences: (1) Computational Statistics and Information Technology (2) Numerical and Applied Mathematics (3) Computational Physics (4) Computational Biology and (5) Future Computational Sciences (economics, medicine, agriculture, humanities, ecology, neuroscience etc.). FICS educates Doctors with high-end methodical expertise, who apply it in their thesis work while developing methods for solving computational, data-analysis and modelling issues in application areas. This work is carried out in close co-operation with one or more research groups in the application fields. In 2013 FICS had a total of 69 full-time doctoral students, of which 23 (33%) were foreign and 22 (32%) were female. At the end of 2013, there were two students from the Department of Computer Science in FICS.