The University of Oulu has a Graduate School, the University of Oulu Graduate School (UniOGS) consisting of several doctoral programs. The Infotech Oulu Doctoral Program operates in three areas, corresponding to the major research fields of Infotech Oulu. These are electronics, communications engineering, and computer science and information engineering.

The Electronics section consists of electronic circuit and system design, microelectronics, electronics manufacturing technology, physical electronics, electronic and optoelectronic measurement technology, and testing and disturbance techniques in electronics.

Communications engineering covers telecommunication systems from the architectures and implementations of transceivers to telecommunication networks, systems and services. The main research themes include broadband wireless access, short range communications and sensor networks.

Computer science and information engineering emphasizes information processing methods, ubiquitous systems and human-computer interaction. The topics include machine vision, biosignal analysis, data mining, intelligent robots, software security, mobile computing, urban computing and ubiquitous internet.

Each of the main research areas is represented on the Infotech Oulu Doctoral Program Board, and the Technical research Centre of Finland, VTT has it own representative too.. Professor Markku Juntti is the Director of the program and the Chair of the Board. The representatives of the main areas on the Board are Professors Juha Kostamovaara (electronics), Matti Latva-aho (communications engineering), Juha Röning and Kari Kuutti (both computer science and information engineering). Professor Pentti Karioja is the representative of VTT.

In 2012, the Infotech Oulu Doctoral Program had 25 doctoral student posts funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture. The posts are for doctoral students working in the research groups that are full or associate members of Infotech Oulu. This funding has been confirmed until the end of 2013. The funding for coordination from the Ministry of Education and Culture ceased at the end of 2011, but the University of Oulu continued the funding with EUR 38 000. The doctoral student posts altogether represented about EUR 746 000 annually on salary costs. Additional funding has been obtained from the Academy of Finland for arranging doctoral courses and for other costs. The Academy granted EUR 430 000 for the years 2010–2013. EUR 107 500 were designated for the year 2012. Together with the annual direct financial support of EUR 20 000 from Infotech Oulu, the total budget of the doctoral program was EUR 911 000. In addition, Infotech Oulu supports its doctoral program by financing international workshops and researcher visits that include doctoral education, and through the work of the staff in the research groups.

The Infotech Oulu Doctoral Program had 168 students at the end of 2012. This includes all the doctoral students in our research area working in the full and associate member groups of Infotech Oulu.

The output was 15 doctoral theses. The funding from Infotech Oulu Doctoral Program positions was used for 11 of them: Giuseppe Destino, Simo Hietakangas, Jussi-Pekka Jansson, Johanna Ketonen, Ari Pouttu, Jaakko Suutala, Beatriz Lorenzo Veiga, Meng Wang, Oleg Davidyuk, Kimmo Halunen and Sami Myllymäki defended their theses in 2012. The last three theses were funded only for a few months through our short-term posts that are used specifically for completing doctoral theses. The theses can be found in electronic format on the web from http://www.infotech.oulu.fi/dissertations.

The annual Infotech Oulu Doctoral Program student meeting was held at VTT in April, including a poster session.

Strong research contacts with other universities and research institutes are utilized in arranging lecturers for the courses. In each of the three major areas covered by the doctoral program, several lectures (Infotech Oulu Lecture Series) and intensive courses are held annually. These all provide a valuable extension to the other doctoral courses in information technology provided by the university. The breadth of the courses below is expressed in ECTS credits.

The Infotech Oulu Lecture Series

To gain two credits, a graduate student must follow 20 hours of lectures and make a written summary of one lecture. The following lectures were held in 2012.

• Professor Sergey Vainshtein, University of Oulu - How does an avalanche transistor operate? 60 years old, but a modern device with new application advances
• Dr. Ian Oppermann, the Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Org. (CSIRO) ICT Centre, Australia - An overview of research on eHealth at CSIRO & Productivity in the digital economy - the role of ICT
• Professor Kithsiri Liyanage, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka - Smart grid - challenges and opportunities
• Dr. Shirish Nagaraj, Nokia Siemens Networks - Co-operating clusters based CoMP for high capacity dense small-cell networks and understanding mobile user outages: predictive analytics in wireless broadband networks
• Professor Jens Zander, The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden - Will it scale - on the commercial feasibility of secondary spectrum access
• Professor Rauno Kuusisto, Defence Forces Technical Research Centre, and University of Jyväskylä - Cyber space - security challenges
• FiDiPro Professor Xilin Chen, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China - AVS - A collaboration case between academy and industry

Intensive courses and workshops

• Oulu Bio Imaging (OBI) Network Workshop ¹⁾

Electronics

• Professor George Palasantzas, University of Groningen, the Netherlands - Casimir effect: from surface and materials science to table-top laboratory cosmology
• Professor Shinji Nakagomi, Ishinomaki Senshu University, Japan - FET devices, general principles and gas sensors, 1 credits
• Professor Nikolay A. Pertsev, A. F. Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute, Russia, and University of Kiel, Germany - Spintronics, graphene, and other hot topics in modern solid state physics: Paving the way to advanced electronics
• Professor Andreas Schütze, and Christian Bur, Saarland University, Germany - Smart operation and data evaluation of gas sensing systems, 3 credits
• Dr. Pietro Andreani, Lund University, Sweden - Integrated LC oscillators, 3 credits
• Professor Ronald Österbacka, Åbo Akademi University - Organic transistors, 2 credits
• Professor Sergey Vakhrushev, A. F. Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute, St.Petersburg, Russia - Neutron and X-ray scattering and ferroelectics
• Infotech Oulu Workshop Optoelectronic Devices and Instrumentation, Summer School in Flexible Solar Cells - novel approaches ^2,3), 7 credits
• Dr. Uli Würfel, Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, Freiburg, Germany - Physics of solar cells
• Dr. Tom Aernouts, IMEC, Leuven, Belgium - Organic photovoltaics: operating principles and room for improvements
• Dr. Arman Ahnood, University College London, UK - Thin-film silicon photovoltaics
• Dr. Yuji Suzuki, University College London, UK - Implementation of ZnO, MOx, SnO and Cu based nanostructures into thin film electronics
• Professor Felipe Rudge Barbosa, CTI, Campinas, Brazil - Optoelectronic packaging - principles and applications, 2 credits
• Dr. Eugene Avrutin, University of York, UK, and Dr. Boris Ryvkin, A.F.Ioffe Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia (tutorials) - Physical foundations and principles of semiconductor optoelectronics, 4 credits

Communications engineering

• Assistant Professor Lorenzo Mucchi, University of Florence, Italy - Physical layer security, 2 credits
• Assistant Professor Dusit Niyato, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore - Coalitional game theory and applications in mobile cloud computing and mobile social network, 2 credits
• Alexander von Humboldt Professor Gerhard Kramer, Technische Universität München (TUM), Germany - Elements of multi-user information theory, 3 credits
• WiFiUS (Wireless Innovation between Finland and US) Summer School ²⁾

  • Professor Behnaam Aazhang, Rice University, USA - Managing interference in wireless networks
  • Professor Sennur Ulukus, University of Maryland, USA - Information-theoretic physical-layer security
  • Professor Luiz DaSilva, Virginia Tech, USA - Game theoretic modelling of resource management in cognitive radio networks
  • Professor Randall Berry, Northwestern University, USA - Economic models of dynamic spectrum sharing
  • Associate Professor Alhussein Abouzeid, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA - Design and optimization of cognitive network protocols using dynamic programming
  • Professor Savo Glisic, University of Oulu - Network optimization and stability

 Computer science and information engineering

• 3rd International UBI Summer School 2012 ⁴⁾, parallel workshops, 5 credits
• Professor Aaron Quigley, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, UK - Information visualisation for UbiComp data
• Dr. Keith Cheverst, Lancaster University, UK - Supporting community through interactive public displays
• Dr. Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes, Yahoo! Research - Urban sensoria: human-centered computing in practice
• Professor Matthew Turk, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA - Mobile computer vision, 2 credits
• IEEE SPS Summer School, 3D Media and User Experience (3DMUX) ⁵⁾
• Dr. Kari Pulli, NVIDIA Research, USA - Computational photography, 3 or 5 credits
• Professor Bogdan Filipič, Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia - Evolutionary algorithms with applications
• Dr. Lubor Ladicky, University of Oxford, UK - Graph cut based optimisation for computer vision

The following external organizations have provided co-financing or other support for the courses and workshops:

• Biocenter Oulu ¹⁾
• Graduate School in Electronics, Telecommunications and Automation, GETA ²⁾
• Graduate School of Modern Optics and Photonics, IEEE, TEK ³⁾
• Business Oulu, Council of Oulu Region, European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), Ubicom program of the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (Tekes), Ubiquitous Computing Cluster Programme, UrBan Interactions program ⁴⁾
• Tampere University of Technology, COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technolgy), Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Germany ⁵⁾

Information about the courses is distributed through our web-pages and by email. The web address for the doctoral program is http://www.infotech.oulu.fi/doctoral_program, where students can also register to the doctoral student mailing list.