Information management
The teaching and research in the information-management sub-programme (formerly the information systems specialisation area) focus on the manipulation of large volumes of data. Typical information-management methods include traditional databases and structured representations, such as XML.
The teaching in the sub-programme covers database management, text and document management, information retrieval, as well as data mining and analysis. The courses of this sub-programme are designed to teach conceptual and physical data models, how to choose the information-management methods best suited to specific problems, and how to implement challenging information systems. In addition, the Advanced module (Laudatur-level) courses detail issues such as how to analyse large data collections and designing systems to manage text collections, and to design and maintain database systems. The annually changing seminar subjects allow us to broaden and deepen the scope of the sub-programme.
The research in information systems is strongly focused on data mining and document management, including language technology. In these areas, methods have been developed and applied in projects on gene technology (finding predisposition genes in case control studies) and bioinformatics (mining bio-databases), pro-active computing (recognizing context on the basis of user situation data analysis), and in different areas of text data usage (XML information retrieval, question-answering systems, isolating information from text bodies, text mining). In general, the methods are developed to automate information management, filtering and refinement to solve problems in the application areas. Management methods for database structures and transactions have been studied in the field of databases. The online teaching environment for databases has been developed further.
Contact persons: Professors Hannu Toivonen, Helena Ahonen-Myka and Seppo Sippu
Teaching and research: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/info/