After Facebook visit, studying looks like work

University research and education laboratory Software Factory has launched a new kind of Open Source collaboration with the software industry and leading universities like Stanford University and MIT.

How do we keep students engaged until graduation, and how could young people be offered something they cannot already learn at work? These are big enough challenges for more than one university.

– When I think about working life and my own experiences of it, this start in Silicon Valley definitely boosted my motivation to study, says computer science student Janne Laukkanen.

He recently returned from a study-related field trip to San Francisco.

By providing working-life connections through education and research, the Department of Computer Science offers one answer to the question. And its newest means to connect started in 2010 with Software Factory, which has now networked both within Finland and across the globe.

Software Factory's newest collaboration centers on Open Source, and launched with a Hackathon event at Facebook's San Francisco campus in late January. More than 150 students from around 10 universities participated.

– With collaborators from Stanford University, MIT, University of Tokyo, National University of Singapore, and other universities in China, USA, Canada, and Europe, our students are in good company and the experience is unique, says laboratory operational coordinator Fabian Fagerholm.

Working online, student teams participate in development efforts like the well-known Ruby on Rails application framework and the Kotlin programming language compiler project.

– Especially this close collaboration with top developers from the Open Source world is hard to get elsewhere. Many of these developers are legends in their own communities. During our trip, we worked hand in hand under their instruction, says student Olli Rissanen.

University-level theory and relevant practice through international collaboration

The idea of Open Source projects is to offer students a unique learning experience, and also to try out new teaching methods.

Department Head of Studies Jaakko Kurhila is enthusiastic:

– More of this is needed all the time. Students who want something extra in their degree, and are willing to put in the work, will benefit from this tremendously.

– Students learn teamwork and skills that are difficult to convey in traditional lectures. Software Factory is also an excellent environment for conducting empirical research, says FiDiPro professor Jürgen Münch, who leads the Software Systems Engineering Research Group at the University of Helsinki.

The Open Source endeavor ends in June 2013. After that, participating universities will use the experience in developing their own computer science education.

Software Factory

Software Systems Engineering Research Group

Committed blog

Course description: Software Factory Project

Text: Minna Meriläinen-Tenhu
31.1.2013

Created date

01.02.2013 - 12:55

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.

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.