Staff

In 2012, 158.9 person-years were completed at the department, which is 18.9 person-years less than in 2011. Compared to the previous year, the person-years on basic funding as well as those on external funding increased significantly: those on basic funding from 77.0 to 86.7 and those on external funding from 63.0 to 72.2. However, the number of person-years completed on basic funding was still decidedly lower than in 2010.

In the slump year of 2011, there were several vacancies at the department, as well as new professors. Thus, the increase in person-years in 2012 is partially due to filling the vacancies. However, a more significant factor is that the research groups of the new professors have grown stronger, bringing in more external funding.

If we consider the person-years on the scale of the four-step structure for teaching and research staff, we can see that the increase in external funding has strengthened the first step of the career track considerably. Person-years on basic funding have mainly increased on the 2nd-4th steps (professors, university lecturers and post-doctoral researchers) of the tenure track.

In 2012, some significant recruitment processes were underway at the department, such as the call for a software engineering professor and the department’s first call for a tenure-track professor, which has resulted in the appointment of two assistant professors during spring 2013 due to the highly merited group of applicants. The units of new professors have been complemented with doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers, and the administrative team with a new planner.

In 2012, the average age of the department staff was 34.2. During the past five years, the average age has varied between 33.3 and 36.4.

The forceful internationalisation process of the department is evident in the staff statistics. In 2012, employees from abroad already completed more than one fourth (25.5%) of the person-years at the department, while the number was only 11% in 2007.

Funding

The total funding in 2012 was 11.24 Million Euros. The total funding grew by 0.84 Million compared to year 2011. As in previous years, the funding mainly went towards salaries and facilities.

The basic funding received by the department the past three years has mainly been distributed in accordance with the previous year’s funding. This means that the basic funding has remained at around 5.3 Million Euros. In 2012, as in previous years, the department’s financial status improved considerably by external backing gained as a reward for its highly appreciated research and teaching. However, this is fixed-term backing (centre-of-excellence funding, funding for centre of excellence in university education, and funding based on the evaluation of research) that will end for the most part in 2012.

External funding has run up to over 4 Million Euros the past years. However, the external backing in 2012 (4.79MEUR) increased significantly compared to 2011 (4.14MEUR). It is especially the funding from the Finnish Academy and EU that has increased, but other funding sources are also showing signs of increasing their contributions. External funding has especially been boosted by the successful funding applications of the new professors and principal investigators.

External funding is important to the department, and it is also evidence of our success in a toughening competition. Having such a large part of the total funding depending on external backers, however, makes for added insecurity, especially when making long-term plans. The changes brought about by the 2010 university reform is still also making long-term compilation of statistics and planning more difficult.

Teaching

The amount of teaching offered in 2012 – excluding part-time teaching – increased compared to previous years, though the number of instructors and funds allocated to part-time teaching were cut back. Studies progressed at a record rate again in comparison to the number of instructors, as the amount of credits gained was very large. The 2012 result of 684 credits per person-year was a new record since transferring to the two-stage degree structure, though some of the instructor person-years were directed towards completely different duties than teaching.

The number of completed BSc degrees by very long-term students declined significantly in comparison with the peak years. The decreased acceptance rate is starting to affect the number of BSc degrees, but the increase in direct acceptance into the MSc programmes has stabilized the number of MSc degrees at a relatively high level. The emphasis on the MSc degree stage follows the whole university’s strategy. In practice, a significant part of the BSc graduates enter directly into the job market.

Research

The focal areas for research at the department during the current strategy period 2010-12 were data analysis, data networks and services, and software research. During year 2012, the research in all the department’s focal areas was still very actively described in writing. In 2012, the researchers at the department produced 177 refereed publications and a total of 242 publications. Three articles written by the researchers at the department received an award for the best conference paper in 2012:

• Puneet Kaur, Lea Kutvonen and Sini Ruohomaa (ACHI 2012),
• Lea Kutvonen, Alex Norta and Sini Ruohomaa (EDOC 2012), and
• Mika Göös and Jukka Suomela (DISC 2012).

In addition to that, Mika Göös received PODC 2012 Best Student Paper Award and Matti Järvisalo KR 2012 Distinguished Student Paper Prize. Joonas Paalasmaa, Aurora Tulilaulu, Hannu Toivonen and Mikko Waris from Discovery group, in turn, received IDA 2012 Frontier Prize for the most novel and visionary contribution of the IDA 2012 symposium.

Research at the department received quite a lot attention in different media. Sasu Tarkoma and Eemil Lagerspetz published together with an international group of researchers a mobile application called Carat, that allows users to follow the usage of the battery in their mobile devices. Carat is a part of a research project where the researcher of the department collaborate with researchers from UC Berkeley. Media was also interested in Mikko Perviläs and Jussi Kangasharjus research on how the excess heat from servers can be used for maintaining a greenhouse, and in research on computational creativity, for example, on composing music out of sleep measurements and computational humor, by the Discovery Group led by Hannu Toivonen.

During 2012, researchers at the department also participated actively in editorial and reviewing tasks in different conferences and journals. Two conferences, CPM 2012 and SWAT 2012, were organised at the department. In addition to that, researchers from the department participated in the arrangements of the SIGCOMM 2012 conference, where Aalto University was the main organiser.

All research-related information at the University of Helsinki is gathered into the TUHAT research database system. In addition to their publications, researchers also enter other activities (awards, visits, editorial work, conference participation and organisation, memberships in committees, thesis supervision including doctoral theses, and public appearances in different forums) into the Tuhat system. The information in Tuhat was utilised for the gathering of information for the evaluation of research and postgraduate education at the university (2010-2012), which served as an incentive for researchers to keep their Tuhat data up to date. The final results of the evaluation for the groups of the department of computer science were very good. Two of the participating groups, ALKO and NODES, were found to be the top of their classes, and the third group, SOFTSYS, received credit for the promising concept of Software Factory.

In June 2011, the Academy of Finland selected new centres of excellence in its national programme for years 2012-2017. These new centres of excellence include the CoE of computational inference in Finland COIN, the CoE of research into cancer genetics, and the CoE of inverse problems; researchers from the department are members of each of these CoEs. Petri Myllymäki and his team participate in the COIN unit, Veli Mäkinen and his team in the cancer genetics group, and Aapo Hyvärinen and his team in the inverse-problem group. From before, the department unit for algorithmic data analysis (Algodan), headed by Professor Esko Ukkonen, has been a part of this centre-of-excellence programme during the years 2008-2013.