The First Europe-China Workshop on Big Data Management
The 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.
The local host Prof. Jiaheng Lu delivered the opening speech and the department head, Prof. Sasu Tarkoma introduced the research achievements of the department. Then ten speakers gave high-quality talks, which covered diverse topics on big data management, such as big data implementations, big data cleansing, spatial data, social media data, cognitive data, cloud data, graph data, streaming data and real-life examples for big data. The invited speakers were Dr. Mohammad Hoque (University of Helsinki), Heikki Hämäläinen (Eficode Oy, Finland), Prof. Hua Lu (Aalborg University), Prof. Shuai Ma (Beihang University, China), Prof. Nikos Mamoulis (University of Ioannina, Greece), Prof. Jianliang Xu (Hong Kong Baptist University), Prof. Ge Yu (Northeastern University, China), Prof. Demetris Zeinalipour (University of Cyprus), Prof. Xiaofang Zhou (University of Queensland, Australia and Soochow University, China) and Prof. Yongluan Zhou (University of Southern Denmark).

Photo 2: Prof. Sasu Tarkoma talked on the research at the department.

Photo 3: Some audience in the workshop.
Big data management is the organization, administration and governance of large volumes of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. The goal of big data management is to ensure a high level of data quality and accessibility for business intelligence and big data analytics applications.
More than thirty professors and students joined this workshop. The organization of workshop was assisted by PhD students Pengfei Xu, Heli Helskyaho and Chao Zhang. The presentation topics and slides about this workshop can be found at http://udbms.cs.helsinki.fi/BigData2016/.

The instruction at the Department of Computer Science continues in the limelight; this time in the form of personal recognition, as the student union at the University of Helsinki has awarded the Magister Bonus prize of 2011 to University Lecturer Matti Luukkainen. Matti was interviewed about teaching and studying by Ella Peltonen from TKO-äly immediately after the festivities.
As announced by Nokia on Thursday 22 September 2011, Henry Tirri had been appointed Chief Technology Officer at Nokia and Executive Vice President of the Nokia Leadership Team, effective from that date. According to the bulletin, ‘As Chief Technology Officer, Tirri assumes responsibility for the CTO organization, charged with setting Nokia's technology agenda both now and in the future, and driving core innovation to enable business development opportunities.”
The Linkki centre opened at the Helsinki University Department of Computer Science last Friday. The centre offers all kinds of fun activities like games programming, and an online programming course open to all upper-secondary students, starting at the beginning of next year.