A link to the university

The Linkki centre opened at the Helsinki University Department of Computer Science last Friday. The centre offers all kinds of fun activities like games programming, and an online programming course open to all upper-secondary students, starting at the beginning of next year.

 

 

 

 

At the centre's opening, Arto Vihavainen, Linkki coordinator, demonstrated computer games made during the games programming summer camp. Photo: Sakari Tolppanen.

What exactly is computer science? What this discipline actually entails is often unclear even to new undergraduates at the Helsinki University Faculty of Science. However, many of them find themselves in this field of work in the end.

 
To spread information, we have now started the Linkki centre, which offers good, fun opportunities to acquaint yourself with the world of computer science. Linkki is a physical science classroom in the Exactum building on the Kumpula campus, but it is also where people are and where it is needed, says Jaakko Kurhila, director of the Linkki resource centre.
 
Linkki was officially opened last Friday, but it has already organised a games-programming summer camp for children and teenagers last summer. This autumn’s games-programming club is in full swing. ‘We only have to give young people opportunities, and after that there are no bounds,’ Arto Vihavainen says of Linkki.
Visitors at the Linkki opening could try out games that were programmed during the summer camp. Game programming is a nice introduction to computer science, but it can also become your profession. According to some calculations, the computer-game industry is already larger than the film industry.
 
‘The future and work opportunities are ours,’ Esko Ukkonen, the head of the Department of Computer Science said at the opening of Linkki. He was referring to all kinds of software engineering in addition to the game industry.

 


Linkki has been decorated with familiar characters from Angry Birds and SuperMario.Director Jaakko Kurhila in the right-hand photo. Photos: Sakari Tolppanen.

It is not the first time the University of Helsinki has given gifted upper-secondary students the opportunity to take computer science courses while they are still at school. Next spring, anyone can take the courses.

This is a whole new kind of online course, MOOC (massive open online course), which is equivalent with the nine-credit university courses Introduction to programming and Advanced programming.

MOOC hooks its participants and steers them forward, you can have the course credits recognized at the university, or they can be incorporated in your upper-secondary degree. In addition, anyone who completes the course with distinction may be accepted to the Department of Computer Science purely based on this course.

Linkki is one of seven resource centres in the national LUMA centre and its website is at: linkki.cs.helsinki.fi. Signing up for the MOOC course starts on 10 January 2012.

 

Article: Elisa Lautala

Translator: Marina Kurtén

 

 

Created date

18.10.2011 - 10:55

Mobile cloud computing makes data centres obsolete

Researcher Eemil Lagerspetz intends to move computing from computers to pocket devices and from data centres to homes.

Implementing cloud computing with mobile devices is being studied at the University of Helsinki. Mobile cloud computing refers to computing with smartphones or other mobile or Internet of Things devices in the environment, such as smart TVs or smart fridges. Without mobile devices, cloud computing means carrying out large tasks on computers linked together by network connections. In traditional computing, the tasks are carried out with computers that are physically located in the same space.

 

Workshop on Mobile Services and Edge Computing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 3rd Helsinki-HKUST-Tsinghua workshop was chaired by Professor Sasu Tarkoma from University of Helsinki and Dr. Aaron Yi Ding from Technical University of Munich. The workshop was held at the University of Helsinki from July 27th to 29th, 2016.

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Professor Esko Ukkonen invited to the Estonian Academy of Sciences

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Esko Ukkonen has had contacts to the computer science community in Estonia from the beginning of the 1990s, and he has supervised the work of several Estonian postgraduates. The Estonian Academy of Sciences has 78 ordinary and 21 foreign members.

The First Europe-China Workshop on Big Data Management

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This one-day workshop organized by Prof. Jiaheng Lu (University of Helsinki), Prof. Xiaoyong Du (Renmin University of China), and Prof. Christian S. Jensen (Aalborg University, Denmark). The aims of this workshop were to gather experts in big data management to exchange views on cutting-edge data management problems and create opportunities for establishing new collaborations between EU and China computer scientists.