Department in statistics
Staff
In 2008, a total of 158.6 person-years were completed at the department. On external funding, 73.9 person-years were completed, which is 8.8 person-years less than in the previous year. A total of 84.7 person-years were completed on budgeted funding, which is 2.5 person-years less than in the previous year. During 2008, a considerable number of vacant posts were declared open at the department. Some of these posts have still not been filled.
In the past five years, the department staff salaried by budgeted funding has been reduced significantly due to the termination of complementary funding (for the IT-industry programme and remedial education). At the same time, the proportional share of person-years completed on external funding has increased.
Funding
In 2008, 10.22MEUR was spent at the department. The funding at the department has been extremely good during the past few years thanks to considerable additional funding based on results and other criteria. The department receives complementary funding on the basis of such criteria as the highest possible grade given in the evaluation of research and being awarded the status of national centre of excellence in teaching. The department has also had considerable amounts of allocated funds carried over from previous years.
The proportion of external funding in the department's total funding is nearly half; these past years it has been over 4MEUR. Such a large percentage of external funding brings a degree of instability to the department's economy since the competition for external funding is extremely severe. On another note, we do not yet know how the general financial depression, the transferral to the total-cost model, or the university reform will affect the amount or distribution of external funding.
Most of the department's funding was used for staff expenditures in 2008, but a significant number of investments were also made during this year. The increase in investments is geared towards preparing for the VAT duty brought on by the university reform, as well as for the new budgeting model.
Studies and teaching
The reform of the degree system in summer 2008 resulted in a considerable increase in completed basic degrees, evident as early as 2007. However, since the quota of new students accepted to the department has been decreased since 2006, there are fewer teachers than before. Due to the flood of Master's theses the total of credits per teacher is uncommonly high. The situation will normalize during this year.
Research and publications
The focal areas of research at the department during the 2007-2009
strategy period are data analysis and mobile computing – areas that the
research at the department is largely centred on – and areas that will
be built up are collaborative networking, empirical software research,
and ubiquitous computing.
Algodan, a centre of excellence in research, operates at the department, as do a large part of HIIT (Helsinki Institute for Information Technology) and some 20 research groups.
The number of researchers remains at around one hundred. Nearly 20% of researchers with a Doctoral degree come from abroad. One Academy Professor and four Academy Fellows are working at the department.
Publications at the department have continued in the same vein as previous years, and in 2008, some 130 refereed publications were put out.