Linus Torvalds made honorary alumnus in Kumpula

The Faculty of Science invited Linus Torvalds to be its honorary alumnus in Kumpula. During its alumni event, the faculty also named one of its lecture halls after Linus Torvalds. On the event held on Thursday 17 March, young researchers were the main speakers, and the 350 guests on the science campus gave them their full attention.

Linus Torvalds is the most renowned Finn working in the field of computer science. He is the first honorary alumnus of the faculty, and also Doctor Honoris Causa of the university’s Faculty of Philosophy. During the faculty’s alumni event, auditorium B123 in Exactum was named after him.

Version 1.0 of the Linux operating system, developed by Torvalds, was published at the Helsinki University Department of Computer Science in March 1994. Torvalds, who took his MSc degree in 1997 and later settled in the USA, could not attend the alumni party in person, but he conducted a video conference with computer science professor Jukka Paakki.

‘I was also interested in mathematics and physics, so the University of Helsinki was a very natural choice for me as a Helsinkian,’ Torvalds said.

 The 350 visitors to the science campus were also treated to some very topical presentations as the young researchers described their work. Nina Huittinen, Jani Kotakoski, Rami Ratvio, Teemu Roos and Mikko Salo presented themes on nuclear waste, graphenes, the metropolis, algorithms, and reverse mathematics.

After the joint programme, the five departments at Kumpula presented their own events.

The Department of Computer Science had a book launch for Jukka Paakki’s "Rupisia bittejä, karmeita kaavioita, unelmia ja toimistohommia" (‘scabby bits, grisly formulas, dreams and office work’) In this history over the department, which was established in 1967, we meet both present and former employees at the department, as well as its students. The future is also included as the writer describes happenings at the department in 2017.

The photograph shows (l-r) the head of the department, Esko Ukkonen, Dean Keijo Hämäläinen, and Nils Torvalds, Linus Torvalds’ father.

Photograph: Juha Taina

 

Text: Minna Meriläinen

 

Translation: Marina Kurtén

 

 

Created date

21.03.2011 - 12:58

The university’s team Game of Nolife won Western European programming contest for students

In the finals in Thailand in spring 2016, the students from the University of Helsinki will face the best teams in the world.

The University of Helsinki has won the inter-university NWERC 2015 programming contest that was held in Linköping recently. It was attended by 95 teams from Western Europe. The Game of Nolife team from the University of Helsinki consisted of computer-science and maths students Tuukka Korhonen, Olli Hirviniemi and Otte Heinävaara.

The Carat research team has published a dataset focusing on collaborative energy diagnostics of mobile devices and applications

 

 

The Carat research team from University of Helsinki publishes a dataset from the Carat project (http://carat.cs.helsinki.fi/) focusing on collaborative energy diagnostics of mobile devices and applications. The dataset was presented at the IEEE PerCom’15 conference last spring in the publication "Energy Modeling of System Settings: A Crowdsourced Approach" that won the Marc Weiser Best Paper Award given at the conference.

Eemil Lagerspetz was awarded a grant by the Jorma Ollila fund of Nokia Foundation on November 24, 2015

 

 
 
Eemil Lagerspetz was awarded a grant by the Jorma Ollila fund of Nokia Foundation on November 24, 2015. Congratulations!
 
The fund was launched in year 2014 to support post doctoral research career development. 
The title of Eemil’s post doctoral research is “Mind The Gap: Combining Trajectory Datasets for a Holistic Picture of Human Mobility” and the research will be carried out at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2016.
 

Collaborative Networking (CoNe) group researchers got the best paper award at 2nd ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2015)

 

Collaborative Networking (CoNe) group researchers got the best paper award at 2nd ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2015), one of the most prestigious venues for ICN research. The article entitled Pro-Diluvian: Understanding Scoped-Flooding for Content Discovery in ICN is lead by Liang Wang - a recent PhD graduate from CoNe research group, and is the outcome of collaboration with Suzan Bayhan and Jussi Kangasharju from UH, Jörg Ott from Aalto University, Arjuna Sathiaseelan and Jon Crowcroft from Cambridge University.