A one week long summer school on cloud computing was arranged in Otaniemi for the second time at the beginning of June. Totally 36 participants – mainly PhD and Master¹s students from the EIT ICT Labs core or affiliate institutions attended the summer school. Cloud computing, which moves computing from personal devices to huge data centers in the Internet, is one of the hottest technology trends in ICT. Some of the key topics of the summer school were scalable cloud computing, energy saving in cloud data centers and the business opportunities opened by cloud computing.
The program consisted of lectures by local and visiting experts from academia and industry, group works generating business ideas around cloud computing topics, a visit to the CSC, a poster session and social
events. The visiting speakers included Johannes Helander from Microsoft, Norbert Kikuchi from Google, Pan Hui from Deutsche Telekom Labs, Rushil Dave from Warrantifier and Corentin Dupont from CREATE-NET in Trento. The CSC provided even a chance to “see the cloud” via a visit to their data center.
In the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Event on Wednesday afternoon Prof. Antti Paasio and Prof. Pasi Malinen from the University of Turku, Business and Innovation Development BID inspired the audience on entrepreneurship, starting-up and growth, open innovation and new business models. On Friday Will Cardwell from Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship (ACE) gave a speech on the topic: “How to build an ambitious company” and the student groups pitched their business ideas. Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship promised coaching for the two winning groups: Region Rank and Agilefant. The business idea of Region Rank is to utilize public sector open APIs to review city areas. Agilefant is a tool for managing complex expert work, such as software development. Based on more than a decade of research collaboration with the top Finnish software companies, Agilefant scales from a single person and his ToDo-list to handling the project portfolio as well as all non-project work of an entire organization complete with linking small daily tasks to the long-term goals of the organization.”
The summer school was organized by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Aalto University School of Science and the EIT ICT Labs Helsinki Node. The Scientific Director of the summer school was Prof. Jukka Nurminen.
