In 2014, the department continued on its steady and successful course, while improving it on some levels. Some new records were broken, such as the total funding for the department, 12.19 Million Euros (M€), the basic funding making up 6.77M€ and external funding 5.42M€; the percentage of foreign employees, 31.9%; the number of completed credits, 29,954; and the number of refereed journal articles, 75.

Thus, we can say that, thanks to the straightforward budgeting practices of the university and faculty, and the active project managers, the department finances are stable. The increase in external funding has had a positive impact on the internationalisation of the department staff and a rise in the number of post-doc researchers, while having a negative effect on the continuously large number of research assistants and doctoral students (over 50% of the staff). Since the basic funding of the department has more or less stagnated at the same level, it has created a barrier for employing more professors, and the research at the department rests too much on junior researchers. In future, this problem should be addressed resolutely.

Unfortunately, the increase in credits has not manifested itself in a greater number of degrees, but rather the opposite; the number of Master’s degrees (51) fell radically compared to recent years, as did the number of doctoral degrees (8) slightly. Fortunately, the number of Bachelor’s degrees (76) increased considerably compared to the previous two years, so the next couple of years we can expect the number of higher degrees to rise to the level corresponding to the number of credits. Though the number of Master’s degrees was surprisingly low, we cannot blame the instructors at the department, since the number of credits per person-year also rose to a new level (740).

The teaching at the department was reorganised by changing the bioinformatics Master’s programme to the sub-programme of algorithmic bioinformatics. Another significant reformation was the combined data science course profile opened by the sub-programme of algorithms, data analytics and machine learning along with the networks and services sub-programme to educate specialists in ‘big data’ for research, industry and administration.

In the postgraduate sector, we saw the implementation of the university’s new doctoral education system in 2014, which led to all the department’s doctoral students to be organised into the new Doctoral Programme in Computer Science (DoCS), a part of the faculty’s new doctoral programme in science. At the same time, the old (national) doctoral schools were discontinued, such as Helsinki Doctoral Programme in Computer Science – Advanced Computing and Intelligent Systems (Hecse), a collaboration between the department and Aalto University. Unfortunately, the new system caused the department to lose several of the externally funded research school slots, which we compensated for by organising the funding for some postgraduates from the department’s allocated funds.

The long-term spearhead of research at the department, the national centre of excellence, Algodan (The Finnish Centre of Excellence in Algorithmic Data Analysis) ended its period at the end of 2013. However, in 2014, research groups from the department still participated in three centres of excellence: the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Computational Inference (COIN), the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Cancer Genetics Research (CoECGR), and the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Inverse Problems. The scientific publications of the department have been more concentrated to journals than before, which lies in line with the national publication forum project, were the highest standard for publication channels, level 3, is not open for conference series. Within the field of research, another new advance that deserves mentioning is the new research laboratory, the Interaction Lab, for the study of the interaction between people, computers, and their physical environment.

Besides scientific merit, the research and teaching at the department gained national and international visibility in different media. In this significant societal work, the groups that especially made their mark were Discovery, the research group on computational creativity led by Hannu Toivonen, the group studying the power usage of mobile devices led by Sasu Tarkoma, and RAGE, the group developing agile teaching and learning methods for computer science, led by Jaakko Kurhila.

The quality system of the University of Helsinki passed the international auditing in 2014. One of the targets for evaluation and visitation was the basic instruction at the department, which was given the highest grade, ‘advanced,’ of the auditing. The high standard of our basic instruction is emphasised by the fact that the only other area of operations gaining the ‘advanced’ level among those evaluated was the research, development and innovation of the university. In order to participate in the auditing, the department had to establish its own web pages on the university's internal digital desktop, Flamma.

On the staff frontier, a significant achievement was inviting Valtteri Niemi to be professor specialising in data security from the start of 2015. At the same time, we experienced the loss of a key employee at the end of 2014, when the department's head of studies and the chair of the Teachers' Academy at the University of Helsinki, Jaakko Kurhila, was elected to be the new director of the Open University. In 2014, the head of the department also changed, when Esko Ukkonen, whi had held the position for the four-year period 2010-2013 was elected vice-dean in charge of research at the Faculty of Science and deputy of the dean.

All in all, the workings of the Department of Computer Science in 2014 have held the same high standard in the same excellent atmosphere as before, for which I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to the staff and students of the department.

Jukka Paakki

Professor, Head of Department 2014