25 October 2007 - University of Helsinki; Department of Computer Science

Hannu Toivonen: Head of Department
www.cs.helsinki.fi

Background

University of Helsinki in a nutshell:
- 37,000 students
- 7000 employees
-
Department of CS:
- leading institution in CS in Finland
- 2,400 aiming at Master's degree
- 170 employees, 15% foreign
- Part of faculty of science

Teaching and research well connected in all specialization areas:
- Algorithms
- Bio-informatics
- Distributed systems and data communication
- Information management.
- Intelligent systems
- Software engineering

Learning and Teaching- Pedagogy

Appointed "Unit of Excellence in Higher Education" 2007-09 by the Ministry of Education

One feature of their unit's teaching style is the focus and emphasis on "student-centred" learning.

This is evidenced in practice by-
- Large, challenging, real world tasks given out weekly to students individually and in small groups. This replaced the previous practice of students having to complete small discrete tasks which lacked real world context.
- Large emphasis on peer-support
- Encouragement of deep learning rather than skimming over concepts.
- Introduction of flexibility in learning structures
o Learning materials and processes are online;
o Several custom-built tools in use to support study (including Moodle)

Examples of changed pedagogy

Tei Laine, Tomi Silander: Teachers of the Masters Class on Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Have redefined their AI course.

Traditional approaches in teaching AI
- Attack each AI system in isolation
- Present topics and systems as unproblematic, with completed solutions that the students had to 'find'
- Present systems in context of toy problems: static, and predictable
- Give assignments as drills, e.g. develop a simulation of an existing problem and solution.

They recognised the potential shortcomings of this approach-
- Putting isolated systems together does not result in intelligent behaviour
- Disembodiment: Physical dimensions are often ignored, body-environment interaction dismissed
- Approach meant that there was no uncertainty involved; gives the impression that many important and difficult problems have already been solved.

The revised teaching approach
- They now start with problems in contemporary AI, not solutions. Give the students the problems and demand an 'approach' to a solution.
- Assignments have open-ended outcomes.
- Lots of home assignments with the students encouraged to 'google' as much as they like.
- They focus on the learning process the student is undertaking and less on the actual result
- They try to provide what really is required to design and implement truly intelligent behaviour
o Context
o Embodiment
o Uncertainty in actions and perceptions
o Uncertainty in the environment

Results
o High rate of course completion; High rate of publications through post graduate programs-(700 refereed publications 2000-2006), high citation rates in other publications.
o High level of industry partnership- Nokia and others, development of internet standards, spin-offs, software, patents.
o Extensive collaboration international and domestic, in CS and across disciplines & other sciences.

Linux
- Linus Torvalds, inventor of the Linux operating system, studied and worked at the department 1988-1997
- Dept using Linux since 1994.


Research

The University of Helsinki is also part of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT). This is a joint research institute with the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK). At present HIIT have some 170 researchers and staff. www.hiit.fi

HIIT conducts internationally high-level strategic research in information technology and related multi-disciplinary topics, especially in areas where Finnish IT industry has a significant role. It works in close co-operation with Finnish universities, research institutes, and industry, aiming at significant scientific impact that also benefits the industry and the progress of the Finnish information society. HIIT has a strong network of international partnerships with leading foreign research universities and institutions.

Search in a Box

One project has been the "Search in a Box" work of Dr Ray Ballyntine (Australia) who is an authority in probabilistic modelling. (He consulted to Google at one stage). http://wikipedia.hiit.fi Search in a Box attempts to overcome one of the main downsides of Google- A frustration wit google is that you can't find something easily if it is not popular or does not have a specific 'key word' on the page.
Google works on the idea that you throw out the pages that don't have the search terms in it, and then ranks the remaining pages according to the number of times the search term is present.
But if you are looking for information that is not popular, google doesn't work that well. E.g., if you are looking for the website of a hotel in a particular city, you are more likely to get a list of hotel booking agencies such as Wotif.com, rather that the actual site you want.

Ray's idea was to do some text analysis to see what words appear together often. He has produced lists of common search phrases such as "William; Henry; George; Edward; James; Thomas; Sir; King Edward; King Henry; King George" and generates document results such as "Peerage of the United Kingdom; Peerage; House of Lords; Peerage of Ireland; Lord Chancellor; Peerage of Great Britain".

"Search in a Box" will be part of a larger open source project-
www.opensourcesearch.org



Key Learnings

Whilst student-centred learning is not a novel approach, it is interesting to see a faculty undertaking a change in pedagogy in such a wholesale fashion.

As we have implemented ICT in schools we have not really adjusted traditional pedagogy to leverage the tools available. The debate regarding Interactive White Boards is an example of this where many teachers may use them as a replacement blackboard and remain teacher-centred in their pedagogy.

The research work in information systems was of great interest particularly the looming value of tools such as "Search in a Box" for retrieving data from Intranet systems.