The courses run by the CINCO group members fall under the specialisation lines of a) Networking and Services and b) Software systems. Thesis work can be applied from either line, with the expectation of an useful combination of supporting courses taken.

Courses

The course palet starts from Collaboration of autonomous business services which has a wide but thin overview of basic concepts on this specific area. The goal is to get started with thinking of computing platforms and application services in general from the business end, in terms of enterprise architectures and positioning of ICT in that frame. Key goals of learning include notions of service-oriented software engineering, enterprise architecture, open service ecosystems and global infrastructure architectures and their interwork. As this was the first course created, its material has little by little been split to followup courses now standing on their own: this course will change its setup during 2011-2012.

Service-oriented software engineering is focusing on the Software systems side of the big picture. It will soon be complemented by a separate model-driven engineering course.

The infrastructure and execution of services themes are studied at Business process automation course.

The timing of these courses is as follows: Collaboration of autonomous business services is a yearly course (with potentially an exception in 2011-2012). The course has traditionally been given in spring term but it will be in future located on period II, that is, in the late autumn. Service-oriented software engineering and Business process automation have been in interleaving years with each other, but in future, Service-oriented software engineering and Model-driven engineering will take turns. Business process automation will take place every other year, or as announced.

We also recommend courses of Software architectures, Interactive systems, P2P and overlay networks, just to mention a few from the same specialisation line. Courses supporting algorithmic skills, machine learning and formal methods give good basis too, as well as architecture design and evaluation skills.

CINCO laboratory

A web based laboratory is being put up during the academic year of 2011-2012. The laboratory will contain service-oriented tools for modeling, implementing, verifying and composing services and business processes. The laboratory will allow us to incorporate more hands on practice into coursework and will provide a larger scale of thesis topics.

The themes in the laboratory will include the following:

• service engineering methods and tools;
• inserting / improving features -- for example, privacy, trust and non-functiona properties, business rules  -- to the infrastructure layer;
• trying out and testing open service ecosystem behaviour.

Researchers with tools needing testers are wellcome to feed us with tools for evaluation with reasonable sizes of student groups.

Thesis work

 Thesis work topics include areas of

• eContracting
• trust, privacy, reputation
• service-oriented software engineering
• applications of web services, semantic web
• communication channel features (open bindings (i.e., modifiable communication protocols), configuring of non-repudiation, anonymisation, intercepting traffic)
• service monitoring 
• enterprise architectures, changes in them
• business processes
• model-driven engineering

More concrete suggestions can be found at the department's thesis topic pool.