The Department of Computer Science opens it's doors in the virtual world

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Starting this Friday, you can visit the Department of Computer Science virtually. An adapted facsimile of the Exactum building and the Kumpula Science Library based on their ground plans has been made for the Second Life virtual world. In Second Life, anyone can visit the premises of the Department of Computer Science.

The official opening of Virtual Exactum will be celebrated in Second Life on Friday 26 June at 13 o’clock. Members of department staff, student counsellors, alumni representative, and freshman tutors will attend.

To visit the department in Second Life, please go to: http://slurl.com/secondlife/EduFinland%20III/44/105/25

You can also experience Second Life and the opening in classroom B222, where Sami Palhomaa has set up a screen and virtual world.

 

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Created date

25.06.2009 - 00:00

Not just the local hero

For the Department of Computer Science, the well-being of international staff has a long history. Everyday communication in English is an essential part of this.

“It makes no sense to be just the local hero. If we want to develop further, we’ll need to follow international research standards” emphasises Juergen Muench. The German Professor has been leading the Software Systems Engineering research group at Helsinki University’s Department of Computer Science since 2011.

Linus Torvalds inspiring department students


Linus Torvalds – alumnus of the department, doctor honoris causa of the University of Helsinki, the best known representative of Finnish computer science internationally – visited the Kumpula campus on 23 October. He answered the questions of students and staff during an informal Q&A session attended by some 300 guests. As the floor was open, and Torvalds emphasized that all questions were welcomed, the queries ranged from extreme to extreme

Exactum rooftop greenhouse experiment grows herbs

A greenhouse has been built on the roof of Exactum in a collaboration by the Department of Computer Science and the Fifth Dimension science project. To begin with, sedum grass is growing on the roof and tomatoes, courgettes and chilli in the greenhouse. The greenhouse is 9.4 square metres large.

The motivation for the computer scientists is the estimation that 2% of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans are emitted by equipment using information technology. This is more than e.g. air traffic produces globally. To the scientists, this is reason enough to look into how to decrease the impact of information technology on global warming.

Study, teach and do what is fun

New postgraduates have recently been selected for the HeCSE graduate school that the department shares with Aalto University. One of the rising young researchers is Antti Laaksonen.

 

Antti finished his Master’s degree in spring 2011. Those whose job description includes reading lightweight Scrum theses written for the industry may be heartened by the fact that this student wrote his thesis on a most essential area of computer science, i.e. minimization of regular expressions. Antti chose his topic himself, because it was ‘interesting and suitably challenging.’