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Department summer trip, June 13th 2012
On a beautiful summer day, our department invited staff members to the idyllic located villages of Billnäs and Fiskars, which is about 80 km west of Helsinki, famous for their long tradition of iron works.
We started our trip from Billnäs with a guided tour through the ironworks area. Along a river lie the old, closed down factory buildings, several living houses, the oldest farming school of Finland, a hydroelectric power plant, and an art museum. Nowadays the factory buildings are owned by the Finnish millionaire Olli 'ant' Muurainen who wants to transform them into an outside old and inside new, modern congress centre.
Fiskars iron work, which is the oldest company still operating in Finland, is probably most famous for its orange scissors and knives. We also heard a nice story of Fiskars orange scissors during the half hour bus drive. Today, the village is home to many artists and designers, but also to traditional professionals such as glassblowers and blacksmiths, both of which we had the pleasure to see live in action.
In both villages we also had the possibility for some shopping in the stores offering local products, from arty decoration over designer clothes to the well known scissors and knives, as well as antic furniture and much more. Our culinary well-being was also taken care of, as we got, besides the lunch buffet, a taste of the famous sweet and delicious Ellen Svinhufvud almond cake.
All in all, it was a very nice and interesting excursion to a very interesting part of Finland. The sunny weather made the day complete. A big thank-you to the organizers for planing this trip.
Photo by Doris and Aaron
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The CS Blog Task Force
Sini is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the CS department, currently working on usable security in the Secure Systems group.
Aaron is doing his PhD in the NODES group at the CS department. His research focuses on mobile computing and energy efficient design for multi-interfaced mobile devices.
Giulio is a Professor at the CS department. His area is Human-Computer Interaction. For more information, please find his homepage here
Doris is a researcher at the CS department and HIIT, doing her PhD in the neuroinformatics research group. Her research interests include graphical models, causal discovery, and time series.
Laura is doing her PhD at the CS department. Her research interests include knowledge and link discovery, bioinformatics, and data mining.
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/en/people/langohr
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