International Master’s programmes a welcome challenge

The Department of Computer Science can face a new era next autumn, as two out of three specialisation programmes at the Master’s level are planning to adopt English as their teaching language. In future, the courses of Algorithms and machine learning as well as Distributed systems are considered to be given in English, while Software systems continues in Finnish.

Annually, only an estimated 60-70 students graduate as Masters from the Department of Computer Science, while nearly double that amount complete their Bachelor’s degree.

Since Finnish students do not continue to the Masters level, we wish to attract students from abroad by internationalising the teaching. With this reformation, it will be easier for them to attend lectures and exercise sessions instead of studying by themselves.

The goal is not to exclude Finnish students from their studies with a language barrier. The department hopes that most of the students will still be Finns in future. Perhaps some 25% of graduates could be foreigners.

- The larger number of Master’s students ensures that we can offer teaching based on research and a wider range of courses, says Hannu Toivonen, former chair of the department, who supported the reformation.

Jesse Lankila, student and in charge of studies in the student union TKO-äly, thinks the reformation is a good thing. He recommends that students try working in English.

- There are some who may experience difficulties when studying in English. If you are truly interested in a subject, I don’t think the language will pose any problems. The terminology in this field is mainly based on English, and in working life we will inevitably interact with foreigners, so I think it is a valuable experience for students to study in a foreign language and with people from other countries.

Lankila believes that the language change will diversify the teaching more and more.

- Teachers may come from other countries, and the department will gain more fame abroad if students graduate from here.

Though the teaching will be given in English, students will still be able to take separate exams in Finnish. Pirjo Moen, who has participated in the reorganisation, promises that there will still be seminars conducted in Finnish every year. Whether exercise sessions will be given in Finnish remains to be seen.

According to Moen, the internationalised Master’s programmes have attracted attention already, as witnessed by the increasing number of applications.

- Studying and teaching in English is a challenge that we may all benefit from.

 

by Viivu Toikka

Created date

22.02.2010 - 01:00

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.