Software Factory Speeds up Ruby on Rails

Software Factory, the experimental R&D laboratory at the University of Helsinki, successfully continues its open source collaboration with the software industry, open source community, and leading universities like Stanford University and MIT.

Experiencing Real Work Life in the Software Factory

The Software Factory provides an environment for research and education in software engineering, and that was established by the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki and is operated by the Software Systems Engineering Research Group. Since the first project in 2010, the Software Factory has been used as a platform for teaching software engineering in close collaboration with industry. The goal is to provide students with a realistic environment in which to integrate previous knowledge of computer science and software engineering with experiential insights about conducting real software projects. Close customer involvement, intensive teamwork, and the use of modern software development tools and processes add realism and working life relevance for the students.

Learning from an Experienced Mentor

One Software Factory student team is currently contributing to the Ruby on Rails web framework. Rails is used by many websites, including Twitter, Hulu, and GitHub. GitHub also hosts the code for the Rails project and many other open source projects. The student team has the pleasure of being mentored by Rails core developer Aaron Patterson. During the project experience, students learn important skills for communicating and collaborating in distributed software development environments. The involvement of an experienced mentor has been very beneficial for both the project goals as well as the educational learning goals. Students have been working on the Active Record database access component. Active Record is an object-relational mapper that allows for abstracting an underlying relational database and working with the data in a high-level Ruby syntax. Using Active Record, developers can access and process data using interfaces that are similar to other parts of the application code. Thus developers do not need to write database queries directly.

Speeding up Ruby on Rails

The project has now reached an important milestone by implementing a statement cache for Active Record. The statement cache makes Active Record faster by reusing data structures that would otherwise be re-generated on each database query. This improvement paves the way for faster database access in all Rails applications, since the new code is executed every time a database query is performed. Further improvements are planned with more expressive query construction that allows the use of parameters in the cache. The ultimate goal is to get closer to native database query performance while still maintaining the expressiveness of Active Record. The new statement cache has been merged into the upcoming release of Ruby on Rails 4.0, which is the next major update to the web framework. Further information can be found here.

Created date

15.05.2013 - 15:26

Inter-university research and training centre on information security

The University of Helsinki and Aalto University have set up a joint research centre focusing on information security. The new centre, HAIC (Helsinki-Aalto Centre for Information Security), will coordinate the Master’s-level security education between the university and Aalto, with links to research and doctoral education.

The idea is to build bridges to the industries and gain their support for the education, and e.g. grants for MSc students coming from outside the EU, the head of the Department of Computer Science, Sasu Tarkoma, says.

Computer science undergraduate Petteri Timonen awarded in US science competition

Petteri Timonen, 19, came second in his category of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in Phoenix, Arizona.

 

On Friday, 15 May, Timonen, who is studying computer science at the University of Helsinki, was awarded a grant worth 1500 USD, some 1330 euros, in the Systems Software category of the Intel ISEF science competition.
 
As his entry, Timonen submitted a software tool he developed for Finland’s Red Cross to make mobile blood runs around the country as cost-effective as possible. Timonen implemented his tool in cooperation with the Blood Service.

The tool has gained international attention, as no tool like it seems to have been developed anywhere else. Timonen has also negotiated with the American Red Cross by email.

Renewed Carat App Gives a Smart Boost to Battery

 
The Carat Project Team at the University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, has published a new version of the popular mobile energy-awareness application.

After launch in June 2012, Carat has helped over 850,000 users, of which 41 per cent have been Android and 59 per cent iOS users, respectively. The new user interface follows modern application design guidelines and presents battery information in a more intuitive and easy to use manner.

- In addition to the new user interface, we have increased the accuracy of the energy saving recommendations of Carat, says Professor Sasu Tarkoma, the leader of this research done at the university.

The user interface features the number of energy intensive applications (Hogs), energy anomalies (Bugs) and user recommendations (Actions) at a glance on the main screen as well as global energy statistics for the device community.

Cover Song Identification Using Compression-based Distance Measures

M.Sc. Teppo E. Ahonen will defend his doctoral thesis Cover Song Identification Using Compression-based Distance Measures on Friday the 1st of April 2016 at 12 o'clock in the University of Helsinki Exactum Building, Auditorium CK112 (Gustaf Hällströminkatu 2b).  His opponent is Academy Professor Petri Toiviainen (University of Jyväskylä) and custos Professor Esko Ukkonen (University of Helsinki). The defence will be held in Finnish.

Measuring similarity in music data is a problem with various potential applications. In recent years, the task known as cover song identification has gained widespread attention. In cover song identification, the purpose is to determine whether a piece of music is a different rendition of a previous version of the composition. The task is quite trivial for a human listener, but highly challenging for a computer.