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.

 

n addition to Timonen, Finland was represented at the Intel ISEF competition by Maisa Virtanen and Kaisla Kääriäinen from the Päivölä Institute, who had developed an urban ecological teaching game, and by two 9th graders from Helsinki, Emma Järvi and Ella Forsman, who had studied pre-treating stains with different detergents.
 
Bonus prize – a star named after you
 
Timonen also received a bonus prize worth more than money can measure. Along with all the first- and second-prize winners, he will have an asteroid discovered by the LINEAR programme (Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) named after him. Asteroids that might collide with earth and cause damage will not be named after the young winners.
 
Succeeding internationally via national competition
 
Timonen entered his work in the Finnish Tutki-Kokeile-Kehitä competition in spring 2015 and won the category for high school students. Based on that, he was selected to represent Finland in the EU Young Scientists in Milan. There he was awarded the Intel ISEF special prize, which was the trip to the science fair in Arizona.
 
The Tutki-Kokeile-Kehitä competition is organised by Development Centre Opinkirjo and Academic Engineers and Architects in Finland TEK. The number of participants has been growing steadily during the past years. The annual Intel ISEF event is the largest international science and technology competition for upper-secondary students. The six-day fair attracted over 1700 young scientists from 77 different countries. The projects of the finalists were assessed on-site by around one thousand judges representing different fields of science.

Created date

17.05.2016 - 15:35

Not just the local hero

For the Department of Computer Science, the well-being of international staff has a long history. Everyday communication in English is an essential part of this.

“It makes no sense to be just the local hero. If we want to develop further, we’ll need to follow international research standards” emphasises Juergen Muench. The German Professor has been leading the Software Systems Engineering research group at Helsinki University’s Department of Computer Science since 2011.

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

Exactum rooftop greenhouse experiment grows herbs

A greenhouse has been built on the roof of Exactum in a collaboration by the Department of Computer Science and the Fifth Dimension science project. To begin with, sedum grass is growing on the roof and tomatoes, courgettes and chilli in the greenhouse. The greenhouse is 9.4 square metres large.

The motivation for the computer scientists is the estimation that 2% of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans are emitted by equipment using information technology. This is more than e.g. air traffic produces globally. To the scientists, this is reason enough to look into how to decrease the impact of information technology on global warming.

Study, teach and do what is fun

New postgraduates have recently been selected for the HeCSE graduate school that the department shares with Aalto University. One of the rising young researchers is Antti Laaksonen.

 

Antti finished his Master’s degree in spring 2011. Those whose job description includes reading lightweight Scrum theses written for the industry may be heartened by the fact that this student wrote his thesis on a most essential area of computer science, i.e. minimization of regular expressions. Antti chose his topic himself, because it was ‘interesting and suitably challenging.’