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

 -- from the most beautiful code in Linux to the classical conflict between free and open source code.  Torvalds replied: ‘there is very little beautiful code in the core; some of it is downright scary' and ‘the debate is still on-going, but that Torvalds guy won.’

Photo by Millennium Technology Prize / TAF

 

The large auditorium at the department was full and the discussion lively (photo by Tuomas Puikkonen).

Torvalds had nothing but good memories of studying at the Helsinki University Department of Computer Science, where he, according to his own words, was given pretty free reign to work on Linux. He praised the Finnish education system and did not consider the top universities of the world to hold any special advantage over the University of Helsinki. However, he stressed that, if the chance arises, students should visit Stanford or other universities.

Before the session, Linus Torvalds sampled the ambience of the break room (photo by Tuomas Puikkonen).

There is a short (1:06 min) video compilation with subtitles of Linus Torvalds sharing his views on the birth of Linux, programming, and programming languages (video by Sakari Tolppanen, editing by Jaakko Turkka/LUMA centre).

The video of the whole session (83:27 min) is available in the department’s video archive: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/video/linus-torvalds-qa-session-23rd-oct-2012

Our sincerest thanks for organising the visit go to the awarder of the Millennium Technology Prize, the Technology Academy Finland.
 

 

Created date

21.11.2012 - 15:15

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.

Read more

 

Professor Esko Ukkonen invited to the Estonian Academy of Sciences

Professor Esko Ukkonen has been invited to the Estonian Academy of Sciences as a foreign member.

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

Some attenders of this workshopThe first Europe-China workshop on big data management was successfully held on the 16th of May, 2016 at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. 

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.