Studying

These pages contain information that is particular to The Center of Ubiquitous Computing. General information about studying Computer Science in our faculty can be found from the faculty pages. This information includes things like practical training, so make sure to check these pages if you have any uncertainties about your degree requirements.

Courses

The courses provided by our Center are listed below. All courses are taught in English.

Code	Title	Instructor	Credits	Period
521141P	Elementary programming	Mika Oja	5	1
521159P	Principles of Digital Fabrication	Georgi Georgiev	5	4
521145A	Human Computer Interaction	Jorge Goncalves	5	2
521151A	Applied computing project I	Simo Hosio & Hannu Kukka	10	1-4
521152S	Applied computing project II	Simo Hosio & Hannu Kukka	10	1-4
521148S	Ubiquitous Computing Fundamentals	Hannu Kukka	5	1-2
521150A	Introduction to Internet	Timo Koskela	5	4
521147S	Mobile and Social Computing	Denzil Ferreira	5	3-4
521260S	Programmable web project	Ivan Sanchez	5	3-4
521290S	Distributed systems	Timo Ojala	5	3
521283S	Big Data Processing and Applications	Susanna Pirttikangas	5	4
521286A	Computer Systems	Teemu Leppanen	8	1-2
523991A	BSc Thesis	n/a	8	4
521993S	MSc Thesis	n/a	30	3-4

Thesis Topics and Supervisors

Bachelor's Thesis Topics

Co-located Situated Crowdsourcing. Contact: Jorge Goncalves
In this project you will design, implement and analyse a co-located situated crowdsourcing deployment. More specifically, this consists of several tablet kiosks that will be co-located and enable users to complete crowdsourcing tasks cooperatively or competitively. English only.
Creativity and Surprise in 3D Fabrication Contact: Georgi Georgiev
Surprise and unexpectedness are important factors in creativity. This thesis will focus on development of framework of surprise and unexpectedness as contributors of creativity using objects created in the FabLab. English only.
Digital situated guestbook. Contact: Simo Hosio
Your task is to create an absurdly cool and funky, new type of digital guestbook that will be deployed in 3-4 meeting rooms / visitor facilities of Center for Ubiquitous Computing, at the University of Oulu. The guestbook should be an Android application (for tablets), and will have features such as visitor map (Google maps), photo collage and naturally some features traditional guestbooks.
Crawling and tracking touristical images through social media. Contact: Mourad Oussalah
The project aims to model how the key attractions are propagated in Twitter and facebook. The student is expected to design a crawler that explores the links found in core messages, and match a set of predefined locations to the content. English only.
Location Deja-Vu. Contact: Denzil Ferreira
In this project you will design, implement and evaluate a system to retrace someone’s movements and allow them to label the locations to meaningful places. English only.
Semantic and Network analysis of samples of social media dataset. Contact: Mourad Oussalah
The project seeks to apply advanced natural language processing and centric related analysis of publicly available social media dataset in order to track events of interest and model the user interactions. English Only.
Semantic Networks in Creative Design Contact: Georgi Georgiev
Human creative thinking can be analysed using semantic networks. This thesis will focus on analysis and visualisation of semantic networks in creative idea generation. English only.
Voice Interfaces for Multimedia. Contact: Mika Rautiainen
Student will design and develop conversational, voice operated interfaces for multimedia applications. The developed prototype system will be evaluated for performance and / or usability.

Master's Thesis Topics

Co-located Situated Crowdsourcing. Contact: Jorge Goncalves
In this project you will design, implement and analyse a co-located situated crowdsourcing deployment. More specifically, this consists of several tablet kiosks that will be co-located and enable users to complete crowdsourcing tasks cooperatively or competitively. English only.
Creative Gadgets Using Fab Lab Contact: Georgi Georgiev
FabLab allows fast and custom implementation of creative ideas for gadgets. This thesis will focus on framework for creation of custom gadgets for individual’s wellbeing. English only.
Device Awareness. Contact: Denzil Ferreira
In this work the student will design, implement and evaluate a system that allows devices to recognise each others’ sensing capabilities and exchange information in a private and secure way. English only.
Development of a driving simulator for Virtual Oulu. Contact: Ekaterina Gilman
In this work you will connect a gaming steering wheel to Virtual Oulu 3D platform to make it possible to drive in virtual Oulu. Particular tasks include enabling of the navigation in Virtual Oulu 3D environment with a gaming steering wheel and displaying basic driving dashboard indicators (like in a normal car). The driving simulator could be placed in CAVE and provide researchers means to study driving behavior. Requirements for the candidate: enthusiasm to create a cool project, knowledge of JavaScript (three.js knowledge is plus), skills in 3D modelling are advantageous.
Digital situated guestbook. Contact: Simo Hosio
Your task is to create an absurdly cool and funky, new type of digital guestbook that will be deployed in 3-4 meeting rooms / visitor facilities of Center for Ubiquitous Computing, at the University of Oulu. The guestbook should be an Android application (for tablets), and will have features such as visitor map (Google maps), photo collage and naturally some features traditional guestbooks.
End user programming for IoT edge computing. Contact: Ivan Sanchez
This project aims to build an authoring tool to create simple distributed applications for the IoT. Student will built a GUI to be used by end-users (not developers) to build their own personalized IoT applications. The student’s work includes a survey on the state-of-the-art of end-user programming in IoT.
Hybrid Interaction. Contact: Matti Pouke
This topic seeks to enhance interaction capabilities in Hybrid City concept. Interaction capabilities are one of the defining qualities of any virtual environment. The student studies and implements ways for rich interaction between avatars (social interaction) as well as between the user and the (hybrid) environment. While interaction models relying on traditional input methods are welcome, the student is encouraged to seek and implement new modalities as well (webcam, Kinect etc).
Medical Text categorization. Contact: Mourad Oussalah
The project seeks to build an ontology for automatic categorization of users’ blogs containing medical wordings, e.g., smoking, cancer, according to MESH (medical subject heading) database in order to enhance the classification accuracy and our understanding of user’ behaviour with respect to medical treatment. English only.
Routine Learning from Self-Driving Cars. Contact: Susanna Pirttikangas or Denzil Ferreira (TSTS361)
How about studying the data collected from a self-driving car? We need a statistically oriented person to study the nature of these data and derive knowledge on the situations the vehicle is in. Expertise on R is a plus.
Security solutions for the IoT edge computing. Contact: Teemu Leppänen
The student will first make a survey of feasible security solutions for IoT edge computing with very resource-constrained embedded networked devices. The student will implement a real-world prototype solution that is then evaluated based on selected metrics.
Semantic Mashup for Web of Things Contact: Xiang Su
This topic seeks to develop an lightweight semantic mashup architecture to offer novel functionalities by combining raw or processed data from things, as well as existing web data and services. Main design requirements include scalability, lightweightness, unique identification, and stream processing. This is a collaborative topic with researchers from TU Munich. English only.
Semantic Networks for Augmenting Creative Problem Solving Contact: Georgi Georgiev
This thesis will focus on analysis and interactive visualisation of semantic networks that can augment creative idea generation. English only.
Social Big Data Analysis. Contact: Jorge Goncalves
This project consists of analysing and extracting meaning from Big Data datasets. Such datasets include a 8-year Reddit comments dataset or a Stack Exchange dataset depending on student interest. English only.
Software agent Chatroom. Contact: Mourad Oussalah
The project seeks to develop and implement a software agent -robot- that can be introduced in public chatroom / forum in order to interact with users and help in shifting the discussion as well as retrieving key information about the users / chatters in a way to contribute to intelligence gathering and users’ behaviors analysis. English only.
Text summarization using wikipedia. Contact: Mourad Oussalah
The project seeks to develop and implement new techniques for automatic text summarization using wikipedia as a tool to tackle disambiguation, matching the word document with wikipedia concepts and use Google normmalized distance to rank relevant sentences. English only.
Virtual Library. Contact: Hannu Kukka
The objective of the thesis is to create an application that allows a library customer to interact remotely with the library staff using an interactive public display and virtual reality technologies. This is a paid position for 6 months, see details on how to apply from this document
Voice Interfaces for Multimedia. Contact: Mika Rautiainen
Student will design and develop conversational, voice operated interfaces for multimedia applications. The developed prototype system will be evaluated for performance and / or usability.
Wearables Capturing Design Process and Making in Fab Lab Contact: Georgi Georgiev
The thesis will focus on development of system to capture and analyse data obtained with wearables. The particular focus will be on data gathering during the processes of design and making in the FabLab. English only.

Find a Supervisor for Your Own Topic

Context-Awareness. Contact: Ekaterina Gilman
Context management to support decision-making for applications. Development of context-aware applications. English only.
Creative Design. Contact: Georgi Georgiev
Design creativity and design thinking topics, especially related to 3D fabrication, prototyping, and process of idea generation. Theses that connect ubiquitous computing and design creativity are of special interest. English only.
Crowdsourced Problem Solving. Contact: Jorge Goncalves
Thesis topics within this area will build systems or utilise current crowdsourcing platforms (e.g., MTurk, Crowdflower) that leverage intelligence of humans to solve challenging problems. English only.
Crowdsourcing Systems. Contact: Simo Hosio
Your thesis has to do with implementing and evaluating a prototype that is used to distribute tasks to crowds. Some focus areas within this context are e.g. worker quality assurance, detecting spam, designing effective interfaces, etc.
Data Science. Contact: Susanna Pirttikangas
Topics under data science, big data, machine learning and/or context awareness are familiar for me. If your thesis is related to any topic where data is collected, managed, analysed and/or visualized, I can guide you. My favorite application areas are intelligent transport, smart cities and wearable computing, but you don’t need to limit yourself to them.
Distributed Multimedia Communication. Contact: Timo Koskela
Your thesis will focus on some aspects of scalable distribution of multimedia content (e.g. 3D graphics) in a web browser. Comparing existing content delivery solutions, enhancing existing content delivery algorithms/protocols or creating entirely new ones are all suitable topics.
Intelligent Transportation Systems. Contact: Ekaterina Gilman
Data management, analysis, and application development for intelligent transportation domain. English only.
Interaction Design, User Experience. Contact: Minna Pakanen
You are interested in interaction design of a user interface. Thus you are eager to complete an iterative concept design process pursuing towards fulfilling user needs and desires for both interaction and graphical design of a user interface. You are also interested in conducting user studies investigating user’s subjective experiences of your concept design. In other words, you seek to understand user’s perceptions and responses resulting from use and or anticipated use of a system, service or product.
Mobile Sensing. Contact: Simo Hosio
Your thesis will be focused on creating an application (Android OS) to collect rich sensor data. The data are then analysed in the scope of the application’s purpose (endless possibilities).
Mobile/Smartwatch Instrumentation, Human-Computer Interaction. Contact: Denzil Ferreira
Thesis topics within this area will design, implement, and evaluate applications & services that leverage sensors, machine-learning, and data mining to build future operating systems (e.g., IoT platforms, context-awareness). English only.
Multimedia or Data Processing. Contact: Mika Rautiainen
Supervising topics involving multimedia technology development, information retrieval algorithms, unstructured data analysis for text and multimedia content, scalable data processing architectures, multimedia service design and new uses of multimedia in devices and applications.
Semantic Web Technologies. Contact: Xiang Su
Semantic reasoning, semantic interoperability, semantic mashup, and triple stores, especially focusing on developing pervasive applications with Semantic Web Technologies. English only.
Social Big Data Analytics. Contact: Jorge Goncalves
Thesis topics within this area will consist of analysing Big Data datasets. Analysing existing datasets or collecting data prior to analysis (e.g., from online social networks) are both acceptable topic approaches. English only.
Ubiquitous and Urban Computing Systems. Contact: Hannu Kukka .
You are interested in smart spaces large or small — smart home, smart office, smart street, smart city. You want to build and evaluate a system that people live and work with, situated in their everyday environments. Your work will combine both fixed resources such as sensors or displays found in the environment, and smart devices people own and carry with them. While technology is of interest to you, your focus is on understanding the human experience of living in a technologically augmented environment. This understanding is found through interviews, observation, and questionnaire studies conducted with real people, in real use settings, rather than through simulations conducted in the laboratory.
Urban Computing. Contact: Marko Jurmu
Human-computer interaction (HCI) challenges in accessing virtual city models (for example Virtual Oulu). Urban computing case studies, especially with interactive public display technologies. Topics regarding ubiquitous computing middleware are also possible.
Virtual and Mixed Reality. Contact: Matti Pouke
I welcome for supervision any students who want to work with game-like 3D virtual environments or mixed reality concepts and their applications. The student can research immersive virtual reality (utilising a HMD or CAVE), traditional desktop virtual environments or mixed reality concepts (augmented reality as well as augmented virtuality).
Web of Things. Contact: Xiang Su
Web of Things as an refinement of the Internet of Things by integrating smart things not only to the Internet, but also to the Web, ie. to the application layer. Your topic will focus on development of applications and services to allow real-world objects to be part of the World Wide Web. English only.
Interactive Spaces. Contact: Jukka Riekki
Topics in the domain of interactive spaces and internet of things that do not fit into any previously mentioned areas of expertise.
Ubiquitous Computing Systems. Contact: Timo Ojala
Topics in ubiquitous computing, mobile and distributed systems that do not fit into any previously mentioned areas of expertise.
I’m Still not Sure Who to Contact
Ok, so you’ve read through the list so far and none of the postdocs seem like a good fit for your topic. Maybe we can find your supervisor together, so please contact Mika Oja

Teaching

Studying

Courses

Thesis Topics and Supervisors