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Windows Azure CodeCamp
In early March, the Department of Computer Science and Innofactor organized a week-long Windows Azure CodeCamp for students. The course was held 1-11.3.2013, during which the students were asked to produce small-scale applications utilizing the Windows Azure platform - Microsoft's cloud computing platform for building, deploying and managing applications and services, like Amazon's AWS or the Google App Engine.
Matias Ärje from Innofactor gave the starting lecture on the Windows Azure platform after which the students formed groups of three. Each group was given a Windows Azure ID which they could use to access Windows Azure’s services. The lecture covered the basic principles of cloud computing as well as a couple of small examples on how to develop cloud based applications. This gave the students a good starting position on how to start developing their application. Students were given a little over a week to develop their applications.
After a week had gone by, a demo session was held where each group presented the applications they had developed during the course. The diversity of the applications that were created was quite impressive. Each group had a distinct idea for an application and there were only little overlap in the style of applications that were created. Among the applications, there were two different types of games, video services and image galleries. Other applications included an online drawing tool, a book club and few different types of data visualization applications.
Students generally thought that developing for cloud platform was relatively easy. Most problems arose from setting up development environments and deploying the code to the cloud. The services provided by the Windows Azure platform themselves were simple and easy to use.
Microsoft Azure CodeCamp was organized as part of the EASI-CLOUDS project. The aim of the EASI-CLOUDS project is to develop a European cloud infrastructure that is capable of competing with businesses such as Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure. The aim is also to promote awareness of clouds and the cloud-themed CodeCamps are a good example of this.
Text and Photos are contributed by Tomi Ronimus.
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.
Ksenia is a Research Assistant at the CS department and HIIT in Complex Systems Computation group. She is working on Reinforcement Learning problems for interactive tasks. Ksenia is a Master student in Algorithms and Machine Learning program.
Giulio is a Professor at the CS department. His area is Human-Computer Interaction. For more information, please find his homepage here
Tomi is a Professor at the CS department. His area is Software Engineering. For more information, please check
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.