Year 2012 was one of steady improvement at the department, with many of the key indicators swinging upwards. Records were broken in at least external funding (4.79 Million Euros), foreign employees (25%), course credits (nearly 26,000), and publications (242). The open-access online course in programming developed by the department won some excellent feedback.

In computer science, 80 Bachelor’s, 65 Master’s, and 9 Doctoral degrees were achieved. In other aspects, this was an expected result, but the decline in Bachelor’s degrees since the 2011 amount of 134 is quite steep. This points to a future lessening of Master’s degrees, as well. The quickly growing number of Master’s students from abroad will, however, probably compensate for this lessening. Judging from the good crop of course credits, student motivation is at a good pitch.

The number of person-years completed at the department was 159, meaning that we have returned to normal from the slump of 2011. The increase has mostly occurred among postdoctoral researchers and research assistants. This is an indication of the increased external funding, which now makes up around 43% of the total funding.

In keeping with international developments, the department produced its own MOOCs (massive open online courses) in 2012. The programming MOOC received a great deal of participants, including upper-secondary school students, and received excellent feedback, all the way to the Helsingin Sanomat letters to the editor: “While the MIT online course had only put up a book online, some videos of lectures, and some exercises, the Helsinki University course was truly based on pedagogical thinking. Learning was based on solving assignments that gradually grew harder, and in a way taught themselves.”   The department made this online course a new channel for selecting students in computer science.

The research at the department is still going strong: we are part of four national centres of excellence in the Academy of Finland, we are coordinating two ICT-SHOK research programmes, and we have been very successful in the university’s internal evaluations of research. Researchers at the department received several awards for best paper. Some examples that were noted publicly were the research into computational creativity by Professor Hannu Toivonen’s group, and the Carat application developed by Professor Sasu Tarkoma’s group in collaboration with UC Berkeley; it searches for energy bugs in mobile phones and has over 500,000 users already.

Some changes were made in the staff structure of the department. Among the professors, Seppo Sippu and Pekka Abrahamsson retired or moved on to new jobs, and Tomi Männistö was chosen as a new professor.

For the future of the department, an important achievement in year 2012 was the action plan for the new strategy period 2013-2016. In this plan, the department has set as its goal to become the best computer science department in the Nordic countries. Our work in 2012 gives us a good starting point for attaining this goal.

I want to thank all the members in our community for their excellent work carried out in good spirits.

Esko Ukkonen

Head of Department, Professor