The focal research areas of the department during the period 2007-2009 have been data analysis, mobile computing, interoperability, emptircal software engineering and ubiquitous computing. The research in data analysis is centred in the FDK research unit and HIIT. One strong application area of this research is analysis of biological data, one of the focal research areas of the whole faculty.

The research in mobile computing deals with issues of maintaining continuous connectivity to the Internet while on the move. Studies of issues in data security, spontaneous networking, and improvements in energy efficiency will be increased. The research into interoperability improves middleware services for e.g. collaboration between business networks. The research challenges include importing service-oriented software architectures into the collaboration management between business services and using modelling, verification and validation methods for ensuring the correctness and quality of the dynamic collaborations.

Empirical software engineering offers a good opportunity for new industrial cooperation. The new focal area of research into service interaction also promotes new cooperation opportunities for this new focal area. Ubiquitous computing amounts to a massive distribution of computing into our environment. Research questions include context-awareness, which focuses on automatically taking the user's environment into consideration, and personalization, where the user's special features and behaviour are automatically taken into consideration.

There are about 20 research groups working in these research areas.

Ten new Ph.D. degrees were completed at the Department of Computer Science in 2009. This picture is from Kimmo Hätönen's dissertation.