Information Management (2005–08)

Note: This page will no longer be updated after spring term 2008. For teaching and research on information management, see Software Systems (for database systems) and Algorithms and Machine Learning (for data mining).

Overview

The specialisation area of Information Management (Information Systems) at the Department of Computer Science studies methods, techniques, and tools needed in processing large volumes of data, often implemented as a database, frequently also using structured representations such as XML. The education in the specialisation area covers database management, text and document management, information retrieval, and data mining.

The core of the curriculum of Information Management contains obligatory courses on database management, database applications, and data mining: Introduction to databases, Database application, Database design, and Data-mining methods. Besides these, special courses are offered on digital media technology, management of research data, the XML metalaguage, spatial data processing, query languages, data mining, information retrieval methods, transaction processing, distributed databases, data warehousing, processing of structured documents, processing of large document collections, statistics of text corpora, word senses. The courses are designed to teach conceptual and physical data models, how to choose the data-management methods best suited to specific problems, how to analyse large data collections, how to manage text and document collections, and how to implement challenging information systems. More specific subareas are covered by seminars on varying topics.

The research in information systems is strongly focused on data mining and document management, including language technology. Techniques of analyzing and mining data from various sources for useful information are the key research topics. The research includes both method development and applications, for instance in gene technology (gene mapping and diagnostics), bioinformatics (biological data mining), proactive computing (context recognition by user situation data analysis), and information retrieval and publishing industry (cross-language question answering, information extraction in text, knowledge-support systems, topic detection and tracking). Research in the database area is focused on database structures and transaction management. Computer-aided teaching environments have been developed for database courses.

Research

Much of our research is done within the From Data to Knowledge research unit, a Center of Excellence in Research, and Basic Research Unit of Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.

Pages of individual projects and research groups:

Education

Information about education available in Finnish only.

People

Helena Ahonen-Myka, Ph.D., professor
Ella Bingham, D.Sc.(Tech.), research scientist (HIIT BRU)
Antoine Doucet, Ph.D., researcher
Satu Eloranta, Ph.Lic., assistant
Hannu Erkiö, Ph.D., docent, assistant professor
Aristides Gionis, Ph.D., assistant professor (on leave), research scientist
Oskari Heinonen, M.Sc., assistant, researcher
Saara Hyvönen, D.Sc.(Tech.), researcher (HIIT BRU)
Teija Kujala, M.Sc., amanuensis, researcher (HIIT BRU)
Harri Laine, Ph.Lic., assistant professor
Miro Lehtonen, Ph.D., assistant
Antti Leino, Ph.D., assistant
Greger Lindén, Ph.D., research coordinator (HIIT BRU)
Jan Lindström, Ph.D., researcher
Heikki Mannila, Ph.D., academy professor (HIIT BRU), professor (Helsinki Univ. of Technology)
Pirjo Moen, Ph.D., assistant professor
Jussi Piitulainen, M.Sc., researcher
Juha Puustjärvi, Ph.D., professor (Lappeenranta Univ. of Technology), docent
Marko Salmenkivi, Ph.D., M.Th., docent, assistant professor
Seppo Sippu, Ph.D., associate professor, section head 2006–07
Reijo Sivén, M.Sc., designer
Hannu Toivonen, Ph.D., professor, chairman
Roman Yangarber, Ph.D., professor

Section head

Professor in charge of the section (2006–07) is Seppo Sippu.