3. Scientific Cooperation - Department of Computer and Information
Kjell Bratbergsengen and Reidar Conradi (Eds.):
Self-evaluation of
Department of Computer and Information Science (IDI),
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Trondheim, November 10, 2001
http://www.idi.ntnu.no
Prepared for the Norwegian Research Council’s evaluation of Norwegian
ICT and Mathematics departments in 2001
Preface
The Department of Computer Science (a.k.a. IDI) at the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology (a.k.a. NTNU) has been asked by the Norwegian Research Council (a.k.a. NFR) to provide this document as part of NFR’s evaluation of Norwegian ICT and Mathematics departments, November 2001.
IDI has close to 120 employees, with 44 faculty members (including 10 part-time) and 41
Ph.D. fellows. It has produced about 800 M.Sc. graduates and 60 Ph.D. graduates during the past 10 years. The Department’s internal budget was 50 MNOK in 2000, in addition to 5
MNOK from external research projects. In 2000 IDI served 1100 full-time students, i.e. IDI served 11% of NTNU’s students with 5% of the NTNU budget and 3% of its faculty resources. IDI offers a traditional engineering program, a traditional “open” university program, as well as University-wide service and complementary education courses. IDI also has a small activity in continuing education.
IDI is loosely organized as four divisions where each division typically reflects related research groups. There are currently a total of 10 such research groups in the Department.
This document will, in general, be presenting the Department’s research activities group-wise, i.e. there will typically be a subsection for each research group which will reflect the activities associated with that group.
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Table of contents
2. Descriptions of the Department’s Research Groups ................................ 5
2.1 Algorithm Construction and Visualization Group (AV) – leader: Prof. Arne Halaas . 5
2.2 Computer Architecture and Design Group (DM) – leader: Prof. Lasse Natvig ......... 5
2.3 Database Systems Group (DB) – leader: Prof. Kjell Bratbergsengen ..................... 6
2.4 Graphics and Image Processing Group (BB)
– leader: Prof. Richard E. Blake ........ 7
2.5 Information Systems Group (IS) – leader: Prof. Arne Sølvberg ............................... 7
2.6 Knowledge Systems Group (KS)
– leader: Prof. Jan Komorowski .......................... 8
2.7 Software Engineering Group (SU) – leader: Prof. Reidar Conradi .......................... 9
2.8 HCI and Systems Development Group (SA)
– leader: Prof Torbjørn Skramstad ..... 9
2.9 Artificial Intelligence and Learning Group (AIL) – leader: Prof. Keith Downing ...... 10
2.10 Information Management Group (IF)
– leader: Prof. Ingeborg Sølvberg ............. 10
3.1 Scientific Cooperation of Algorithm Construction and Visualization Group (AV) .... 12
3.2 Scientific Cooperation of Computer Architecture and Design Group (DM) ............ 13
3.4 Scientific Cooperation of Graphics and Image Processing Group (BB) ................. 14
3.5 Scientific Cooperation of Information Systems Group (IS) .................................... 15
3.6 Scientific Cooperation of Knowledge Based Systems Group (KS) ........................ 15
3.7 Scientific Cooperation of Software Engineering Group (SU) ................................. 16
3.8 Scientific Cooperation of HCI and Systems Development Group (SA) .................. 17
3.9 Scientific Cooperation of Artificial Intelligence and Learning Group (AIL) .............. 18
3.10 Scientific Cooperation of Information Management Group (IF) ........................... 18
6. Strong and Weak Aspects of the Department .......................................... 22
7. Strategy and Plans for the Future ............................................................ 23
8. Major Investments in Recent Years ......................................................... 26
9. Other Information of Importance for the Evaluation ............................... 26
9.2 Some funding history, mainly about the Norwegian Research Council ................. 27
9.3 Appendix, section 9: Educational capacity in ICT, Norway, 1990-2010 ................. 29
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1. Organization of the department
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) was created in 1995-96 as the effective merger of four independent units of the “umbrella” University of Trondheim. The merged units were NTH (Norwegian Institute of Technology), AVH (the free or “open” university studies), DKNVS (Historical and Science Museum), and Medicine. The
Department of Computer and Information Science (IDI) at NTNU was formed during this reorganization from two previous departments: IFI (The Department of Informatics) from the
Lade campus and belonging to the previous AVH, and IDT (The Department of Computer
Systems and Telematics or “Datateknikk and Telematikk”) from the Gløshaugen campus and belonging to the previous NTH. About 1/3 of IDI’s current staff were originally with IFI. The resulting IDI in 1996-97 became part of a new Faculty of Physics, Informatics and
Mathematics (or FIM), having parts from three previous faculties.
Some history: IFI was established in 1983, and produced B.Sc.-level and M.Sc. candidates in the free studies of informatics. IDT was responsible for educating M.Sc. engineering candidates (“sivilingeniører”) in Computer Engineering (“Datateknikk”), and has roots back to 1972. IDT was in 1987-96 together with Telematics in the previous Faculty for Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science. In 1972-1987 it was called IDB under the previous
Science Faculty at NTH. The Telematics part of IDT is now a separate department, see below.
IDI now plays a central role in NTNU’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) strategy. Roughly 50 % of our resources are hence used to provide information technology service course for all of NTNU as well as to contribute to four interdisciplinary study programs. Last year (2000) IDI gave about 80 courses, served 1125 full-time students, and processed 8000 individual exams. This was accomplished with only 5% of the NTNU budget and 3% of its faculty resources.
Although IDI was formally established in July 1996, we were not physically united until we moved into some renovated Physics buildings this past summer (2001).
Within the Department, there are 10 research groups. These groups are now generally split among the following four divisions: Complex Computer Systems, Intelligent Systems, Data and Information Management, and Software and Information Systems.
In general, each division reflects a set of related areas (e.g. in database technology), and which are associated with the core courses typically taught by members from that division.
This organization is used since the teaching of core courses is the most stable part of our activities. A research group within a given division may, however, have overlapping research with a research group from another division (e.g. in medical informatics or ICT and learning).
Each division elects their respective leader, called Division Head. The divisions have mainly an administrative, strategic, educational and social purpose. The division should evaluate their needs and propose new courses and new faculty positions within their respective areas.
Hiring of new faculty and Ph.D. fellows, and deciding in which fields to work, constitutes a major part of our strategic research activities. The main setting for this type of analysis and discussions will be the divisions.
The divisions also play a research role, through working out new research initiatives, establishing research laboratories, and so on. However, as the divisions are relatively broad -
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the smaller research groups still play the more active roles here. Currently, research and research projects are mostly initiated by individual researchers and research groups, with little or no overall coordination.
The support staff is organized into two groups: Technical Support and Administrative
Support. The latter is lead by a Department Director (“kontorsjef”) who primarily has an administrative responsibility, but whom is also an informatics professional. This person is doing many of the day-to-day tasks which otherwise would have fallen on the Department
Head. The Department has four committees which help with planning and assists the
Department head:
The Committee of Research,
The Committee of Education,
The Committee of Physical Resources,
The Committee of Infrastructure and Research equipment.
As mentioned, the department is led by the Department Head. The decisions and the responsibility of the Department Head are comparable to that of a general manager of a private company. This is due to testing new management models at NTNU. The Department
Head has a close consulting group: the deputy Department Head and the Department Director.
This group is sometimes extended to a larger group, which includes the Division Heads and the Head of Technical Support. The four committees also prepare issues and make propositions to the Department Head. Above the Department Head is the Department Board.
The Board has a strategic rather than operational role, and meets 4-6 times per year. The board decides on the budget, new faculty positions, and strategic plans.
As mentioned, IDI is currently part of the FIM faculty. The NTNU Board decided on
September 26 this year (2001) to reduce the number of faculties (“colleges”) from eleven to seven. Effective January 2002, IDI will hence be part of the new Faculty of IKT (ICT,
Information and Communication Technology). This faculty will house the following 7 departments:
1.
Computer and Information Science (IDI) – from FIM,
2.
Mathematics – also from FIM,
3.
Telematics,
4.
Telecommunication,
5.
Physical Electronics,
6.
Cybernetics,
7.
Electrical Power Engineering.
The departments listed from 3 to 7 above are all from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications (ET). This reorganization will certainly affect our department. IDI has a turbulent organizational history -- with major reorganizations in 1987, 1996 and a new one coming in 2002. However, it takes many years to form a new organization and develop smooth cooperation between the parties. Fortunately, we feel that this stage has now been reached between IDI and FIM. Nevertheless, we have great hopes and expectations for the new Faculty of IKT, since it compromises all the central ICT departments at NTNU.
We have also introduced a new track into our Ph.D. program, a special “Researcher school”, open to last-year M.Sc. students that want to continue straight to a Ph.D. It is a great recruiting tool - see Section 4 on recruitment for further details.
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2. Descriptions of the Department’s Research Groups
In Section 2 and 3, IDI’s ten research groups will be presented in the following order:
1.
Algorithm Construction and Visualization Group (AV), leader: Prof. Arne Halaas, www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/av/
2.
Computer Architecture and Design Group (DM), leader: Prof. Lasse Natvig, www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/dm/
3.
Database Systems Group (DB), leader: Prof. Kjell Bratbergsengen, www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/db/
4.
Graphics and Image Processing Group (BB) , leader: Prof. Richard E. Blake, www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/bb/
5.
Information Systems Group (IS)
, leader: Prof. Arne Sølvberg, www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/is/
6.
Knowledge Systems Group (KS) , leader: Prof. Jan Komorowski, www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/ks/
7.
Software Engineering Group (SU) , leader: Prof. Reidar Conradi, www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/su/
8.
HCI and Systems Development Group (SA)
, leader: Prof. Torbjørn Skramstad, www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/sa/
9.
Artificial Intelligence and Learning Group (AIL ), leader: Prof. Keith Downing, www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/ail/
10.
Information Management Group (IF), leader: Prof. Ingeborg T. Sølvberg, www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/if/
In addition, we have multidisciplinary research groups between the above groups as well as and with other Faculties and research partners – see Section 3.11.
2.1 Algorithm Construction and Visualization Group (AV)
– leader: Prof. Arne
Halaas
The Algorithm and Visualization Group has currently four faculty members: Arne Halaas
(professor), Anne C. Elster (associate professor; from January 2001), Torbjørn Hallgren
(assistant professor), Bjørn Olstad (adjunct professor), and Bjørn M. Sæther (adjunct associate professor). Their main research areas are as follows:
Algorithms, with focus on search engines / information retrieval. (Halaas / Olstad)
Algorithms for Telecommunication. (Elster)
High-Performance Scientific Computing. (Elster)
Medical Imaging, with focus on Ultrasound-based imaging. (Olstad, partly Sæther)
Computer Graphics, visualization and virtual reality. (Hallgren)
This small group attracts many and excellent students at the M.Sc. (“diploma”) level. The number of M.Sc. students per professor is very high compared to the average for the
Department. The group has currently 3 active Ph.D. students, plus a Ph.D. track student in our
“Researcher school”. The group is involved in about 10 courses.
2.2 Computer Architecture and Design Group (DM) – leader: Prof. Lasse Natvig
The research emphasis for this group is within computer architecture and design focusing on evolvable hardware and parallel computer architectures. The research in evolvable hardware
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and associated areas is led by Pauline Haddow and is part of the Complex Adaptive
Organically-inspired Systems group (CAOS) . The projects in the CAOS group are varied but unified by a general interest in the use of bottom-up, individual-based and evolutionary techniques in both the design of efficient systems and tools and in the investigation of biological phenomena. Ph.D. students within Evolvable Hardware are financed by IDI, The
Research Council, and Belgian funds.
The research in parallel computer architectures is led by Lasse Natvig and is currently focusing on the BSPlab project, a virtual laboratory (simulator) for parallel computer architectures . The main goal is an improved understanding of the interplay between application, algorithm and architecture in parallel computers. The methods used are simulation and analysis, performance evaluation of parametrised applications and benchmarks. (http://www.idi.ntnu.no/bsplab )
The research project RENNS completed in 1997. It focused on building a special-purpose multiprocessor for rapid execution of neural network models using reconfigurable hardware and also on running neural network models. However, the focus on reconfigurable technology is continued in the research in evolvable hardware, and the multiprocessor research is continued in the BSPlab project.
The faculty consists currently of professor Lasse Natvig, associate professor Pauline Haddow
(50% this year), university teacher (“unviversitetslektor”) Steinar Line, and partly professor emeritus Olav Landsverk. We have four full-time and one part-time faculty position that are vacant. The group has four active Ph.D. students (one in Belgium), and teaches seven courses.
2.3 Database Systems Group (DB) – leader: Prof. Kjell Bratbergsengen
The group covers a much broader aspect of computer science than the name might indicate.
Our main fields of interest are: Databases, Database Technology, Distributed Systems,
Operating Systems, Storage Systems, and Performance Evaluation.
The current research areas are:
Application platforms, data models, access methods, synchronization, recovery, distribution, replication, and interoperability.
Distributed and heterogeneous data, parallel and object databases, multi-media and geographical database systems.
Continuously available and reliable databases, and high capacity transaction-oriented databases.
Management of large data volumes, homogeneous data volumes, multi version databases, sorting and searching, relational algebra, information retrieval, and data warehousing technology.
Exploitation of parallel technology and parallel methods in database systems.
The number of faculty members has doubled in 2001. The current group members are four full professors (Bratbergsengen, Bratsberg, Hvasshovd, Nygård), two associate professors
(Midstraum, Nørvåg), one adjunct full professor (Hughes) and one Post.Doc. (Ramampiaro).
The group has seven active Ph.D. students and teaches 20 courses.
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2.4 Graphics and Image Processing Group (BB)
– leader: Prof. Richard E. Blake
The Image Processing Group was created in 1988 under a professorship that is designed to integrate these two subjects. The group originally contained one professor (Richard E. Blake) and one 50%-adjunct assistant professor (Torbjørn Hallgren, now in the AV group) who assumed a full time post in 1993. An associate professor (Jørn Hokland) joined the group in
1997.
The group covered the image processing and graphics courses on the Gløshaugen campus from 1988 until 1999 and contributed to other courses. In addition, the group was central to the organization of the 1993 Scandinavian Image Analysis Conference held in Tromsø.
Hallgren was the General Chair and Blake was the Program Chair. The group has also run doctoral courses on pattern recognition and physics of image formation and measurement.
Since 1998, Assoc. Prof. Jørn Hokland has been the project leader of “The body in motion in cultural, natural, and simulated environments”, supported by NTNU, and including faculty members and Ph.D. students from psychology, movement science, computer science, dance research, and philosophy. In this project, K. Audsen (philosophy) and J. Hokland have studied the explanatory limitations of CNS models. A. Pedersen and G. Toussaint (both Ph.D.students at IDI) and J. Hokland have suggested how MRF models may explain exploratory behavior as random bursting in neurons, and Prof. B. Vereijken (movement science) and J.
Hokland have recently proposed a new methodology for testing CNS models by performing purely simulated ecological experiments.
Doctoral work in the group has included:
camera calibration and identification of camera defects, examined 1991;
fitting of quadratic patches to range image data, examined 1996;
representation of aspects of a solid object with a level of detail appropriate to the faces visible, as part of a method to compile a reliable recognition strategy, started 1994 and continuing;
use of neural nets in pose estimation, started 1997 and continuing;
use of machine learning to model the early stages of the vision system in living creatures, started 1998 and continuing;
creation of animation of clothing, worn by a human figure, for use in VR, started 1997 and continuing;
representation of images from a graphics display at varying levels of detail, started
1999 and continuing.
The group has five active Ph.D. students, and teaches seven courses.
2.5 Information Systems Group (IS)
– leader: Prof. Arne Sølvberg
The research profile of this group is in IS Engineering, including Model-based Design of User
Interfaces and some aspects of Electronic Commerce.
IS Engineering comprises modeling languages for information and information management systems, and associated analysis approaches for workflow systems and business processes, requirements engineering and software design. Current research in IS Engineering is concerned with semantic modeling of information, in order to capture the meaning of data,
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and with information management processes and their relationship to the external world of organization and business processes. Support systems for developing Information Systems are central concerns, as are modeling aspects of human/computer interaction. We aim at providing a framework that comprises the modeling of information, workflow and userinteraction, in a unified modeling language. Research in e-commerce is in a starting phase. Ecommerce is regarded as a particular type of information system, and our interest is in limited aspects of e-commerce as a whole, e.g., agent technology for electronic market places. The research in information management for business processes is based on using Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) systems for supporting the information systems. We concentrate on problems of the requirements engineering phase of information systems development. Our research in information modeling makes use of phrase structures and linguistic relations to allow the end-users to search for documents using natural language phrases.
We have recently discontinued our research in co-operation technology in order to concentrate on a more limited number of research issues. The willingness on the part of the
Norwegian Research Council to fund research in this area has been minimal over many years, so we decided discontinue this line of research.
The faculty includes one full-time professor (Sølvberg), one associate professor (Sindre), and three adjunct associate professors (Krogstie, Gulla, Rønneberg). It has seven active Ph.D. students, and teaches eleven courses.
2.6 Knowledge Systems Group (KS) – leader: Prof. Jan Komorowski
KS focuses on modeling intelligent behavior in complex systems using incomplete and uncertain data. One of the unifying factors in our research is the use of various logic-based methods. T. Amble’s work (Natural Language Processing) is oriented towards understanding and processing of queries to various information sources and through a variety of media (e.g.
Internet, speech and SMS). Text mining and information extraction from articles and encyclopedic sources are also researched. M. Matskin’s work (Intelligent Agents) centers on modeling facilities for trading of knowledge by electronic commerce and on modeling cooperation among humans. They may be geographically differently located, may live in a global information space and are coupled by a global network of interconnected computers. J.
Komorowski (Computational Biology Laboratory) focuses on modeling complex biomedical phenomena using rough set theory and various statistical approaches. The Lab has been instrumental in creating a university-wide Microarray Gene Expression Facility, an important tool in Functional Genomics research.
The group teaches seven M.Sc. courses with a focus and use of logic and other formal methods, and two Ph.D. courses. The group easily attracts excellent Ph.D. students, now eight such, and has a stable grant situation. Our research production measured in significant international publications is rather good. Our Ph.D.’s have been recognized internationally
(S. Vinterbo became a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, A. Øhrn was nominated for the best Ph.D. thesis in Artificial Intelligence in Europe in year 2000).
Most recently, the KS and AIL groups moved together with the Image Processing Group to form the Division of Intelligent Systems, and thus providing a wide spectrum of expertise in this area.
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2.7 Software Engineering Group (SU)
– leader: Prof. Reidar Conradi
IDI has had a software engineering group for 15 years. The scientific profile is:
Software quality: safety and reliability, software process modeling and improvement, experience bases. Special challenges: combining conflicting qualities and in unstable business conditions.
Component-based development and software architecture: object-orientation, software architecture, evolution, versioning and configuration management. Special challenges: the relation between incremental and component-based development, impact of COTS.
Cooperative work: Web-based development and CSCW using agents and XML. Special challenges: how to support integration, evolution and customization, how to assess usage, and on applications in above processes.
In all the above, we apply systematic empirical studies – our laboratory is industry and students.
The share of papers based on empirical studies are 50% over the last 3 years, and 25% have an international co-author. Special challenges: how to combine quantitative and qualitative methods, and to use own students in this.
Both basic and industrial research projects in the above topics contribute to creating and sustaining a research-based education. That is, we mobilize M.Sc./Ph.D. students in ongoing projects (lighthouse effect of factor 3), and we exploit industrial results and scenarios back into in our education.
The group has four faculty members (Conradi, Stålhane, Jaccheri, Divitini), two Post.Doc.s
(Wang, Torchiano), and six active Ph.D. students. Since 1990 the group has produced 14
Ph.D. candidates (plus two in the near future) and tutored 150 M.Sc. theses. The group now teaches eight M.Sc.-level and two Ph.D.-level courses.
2.8 HCI and Systems Development Group (SA)
– leader: Prof Torbjørn
Skramstad
The roots of the HCI and Systems Development group starts back in 1986. Until 1998 the
Lade part of IDI (previously IFI) was only one research group. The HCI and systems development group was established in 1998/99. The scientific profile for the group is as follows:
Large scale integrated systems: This activity focuses on the development and use of highly integrated systems in large public and private organizations. The set of issues that are addressed include; what are the constraints of existing collection of systems how does the systems restructure work and organizations; how does the IT strategies work out in practice? The work addresses the sosio-technical interplay of development, use and subsequent uptake of information systems in organizations.
Interaction design: The focus is on human-computer interaction and user-centered design processes. Special attention is given to the development of tools and methods for concept development, prototype building, usability testing, and user involvement in the design process. The activity is strongly multi-disciplinary, with links to product design, psychology, art, and philosophy.
Pedagogical software: This activity focuses around all aspects from distance learning via classroom infrastructure and software as learning aides. It involves methods for participatory design and user interfaces for children.
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Software Risk and Software Quality: This activity covers areas from software project risk management, software product and process quality, as well as the reliability and safety aspects of software.
The group has since 1992 had the same faculty members: two full professors (Skramstad,
Monteiro – on sabbatical in 2002/2002), one associate professor (Svanæs – on 80% leave in
Italy for two years till June 2003), and one assistant professor (Rydland). The group has three local Ph.D. students and five external ones. Since 1993 the group has produced four Ph.D. graduates (two in 1996-2000), and tutored 70 cand. scient. (M.Sc.) theses. The group also have teaching and tutoring co-operation with the Universities of Oslo and Bergen, Hedmark
College, Sør-Trøndelag College, and Nord-Trøndelag College. The group is responsible for teaching eight courses at the undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D. level.
2.9 Artificial Intelligence and Learning Group (AIL) – leader: Prof. Keith
Downing
The Artificial Intelligence and Learning (AIL) group spans a wide range of research activities from both the core and periphery of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The focal research areas are machine learning, knowledge representation, intelligent interfaces, internet-based learning, image processing, evolutionary computation (EC) and artificial life (AL). Important specializations of the above where AIL researchers have published papers and/or developed products, include case-based reasoning (CBR), knowledge-based on-line learning, knowledge-based image understanding, genetic programming, and ecosystem simulation.
In general, AIL members share an interest in developing new AI techniques and applying them to challenging problems in education, engineering and basic science. Thus, AIL projects have one of two general motivations: 1) to produce useful software, such as casebased decision-support systems, adaptive user-friendly interfaces, knowledge-based learning systems and adaptive robot controllers, or 2) to shed light on interesting scientific questions, such as the utilization of case-based information in human cognition, psychological and pedagogical constraints in the design of intelligent interfaces and learning systems, neurophysiological mechanisms of human vision, and the evolution of homeostatic ecosystems.
AIL has two full professors (Aamodt, Downing), two associate professors (Nytrø in 50% position, Staupe), two assistant professors (Thomassen, Holme), and two adjunct professors
(Öztürk, Bø), and seven active Ph.D. students. The group teaches 14 courses.
2.10 Information Management Group (IF)
– leader: Prof. Ingeborg Sølvberg
Information management includes acquisition of information, how to process it in order to make information and knowledge available and re-usable in information systems, as well as evaluation, maintenance and utilisation of the information resources in organizations and user communities, and corporate learning. The group was established in 1996. Due to the personnel situation in the group the main focus of research is now within the area of Digital
Libraries: architecture of Digital Libraries, collection development, modelling and linking of information objects, information seeking and retrieval, and how to use and integrate Digital
Libraries into a working environment.
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Digital libraries comprise persistent digital information in every medium (text, images, sounds; static and dynamic images) and make the information resources available in distributed networks. The research field of Digital Libraries is multidisciplinary and extends, enhances, and integrates, the results and experiences from, e.g., information retrieval, librarianship, information systems, database technology, and human-computer interaction.
The content of digital libraries include data, metadata that describe various aspects of the persistent information, e.g., its representation, creator, owner, reproduction rights, and metadata consisting of links and relationships to other information objects and other metadata, whether internal or external to the digital library. A digital library offers a set of tools and capabilities to locate, retrieve, and utilize the information resources.
Members of the group: Professor Ingeborg Torvik Sølvberg, two vacant positions as associate professors, and one Ph.D. student (Monica Divitini was in the group from March 1999 till
June 2001, now in SU-group). I. Sølvberg has tutored 10 cand.scient. theses, while 6 cand.scient. theses in IF has been tutored by Holme from the AIL-group. 8 cand.scient. students are currently affiliated with the IF-group. The group is responsible for 4 courses.
3. Scientific Cooperation
3.0 General Cooperation for Entire Department
Cooperation on education and basic research:
For offering continuous education we have an agreement with SINTEF (NTNU’s official external research organ) and University of Oslo in the context of Bedriftsuniversitetet (the
Corporate University). Four faculty members
1
have part-time positions with other Norwegian universities and colleges. Two staff members 2 have cooperation with the Simula Research
Laboratory outside Oslo (part-time positions).
Industrial cooperation:
IDI has a long tradition for industrial contacts and co-operation. Our M.Sc. and Ph.D. graduates work in almost all sectors of Norwegian industry, public organisations, and research institutions. The external involvement in student projects and theses ensures relevance of our education and fast industrialization. IDI has 12 adjunct faculty members, all being Ph.D. candidates from IDI and now working in ICT-based enterprises. IDI has close to 50 domestic partners in ongoing research projects. The city of Trondheim supports two research parks, the
Leiv Eriksson center and Teknostallen, with totally 50,000 m
2
of rental space and over 1000 employees, mostly in the ICT area. A tripling of this seed-corn activity is planned before
2005.
IDI also participates in the NTNU incubator, currently with one project around ICT and
Learning (Staupe and Holme) and DigiMed (Nytrø).
In Trondheim, Clustra and FAST are high-tech companies established on research results from IDI during the last 20 years. They introduce IDI to advanced R&D topics. There is a cooperation agreement between IDI and Fast Search and Transfer (FAST), and one with
Clustra is in process. FAST is providing financing of a full professor position, part-time positions, and research projects. The professor position has been advertised, but no qualified
1 Kjell Bra tbergsengen, Eric Monteiro, Mads Nygård and Tor Stålhane
2 Reidar Conradi and Letizia Jaccheri
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person applied. One IDI staff member
3
has a part-time position with FAST. Two IDI staff members
4
have part-time positions with Clustra. Clustra has raised 50 million US$ in international investment capital for R&D in Trondheim since 1995. We can also mention the
Troll start-up in Oslo, making competitive graphics solutions. Lastly, IDI has had very good contact with Vingmed who specializes in Ultrasound equipment for medical diagnosis (now a part of General Electric) through Bjørn Olstad (in his previous job) and Jan Komorowski.
NTNU has general agreements of research cooperation with e.g. Telenor, Norsk Hydro and
Alcatel. IDI has for a long time cooperated with Telenor, which has financed Ph.D. fellows, part-time faculty positions, and research projects. One IDI staff member 5 has a 20% part-time position at Telenor. There are regular meetings between research staff at Telenor and IDI staff. The exchange of ideas is of mutual benefit. Accenture and Norsk Hydro are also financing Ph.D. fellows.
SINTEF is financing one full professor position and a 20% part-time position
6
. We have had a formal cooperation agreement with SINTEF Telecom and Informatics until 1992, but now the cooperation is more on an ad-hoc level, involving e.g. the AIL and SU groups. One 7 person from IDI staff has an agreement with SINTEF Telematics and Informatics as scientific advisor.
3.1 Scientific Cooperation of Algorithm Construction and Visualization Group
(AV)
Two group members are heavily involved in research activities run by Fast Search & Transfer
(FAST): Bjørn Olstad as a General Manager in FAST and Arne Halaas as Scientific Advisor
(part-time, 20%). Olstad is presently an adjunct Professor (20%) at NTNU/IDI. See Halaas and Olstad’s CVs for details.
Anne C. Elster joined the AV group in January after 20 years in the United States. She has hence strong ties to The University of Texas at Austin as well as many other colleagues throughout the United States. In particular, she supervised an Honors Project at the
University of Texas this past summer (2001) and expects future collaborations with students and faculty members there and elsewhere. She has also done joint work with Prof. Robert
Strandh at the University of Bordeaux in France, and we expect to extend this through the
Aurora Program next year.
Elster also serves on the Committee of Computation Science and Engineering at NTNU as is also involved on the Norwegian High Performance Computing Consortium (NOTUR) Board
(vara). She is one of two Norwegian Board Members of SIMS (The Scandinavian Simulation
Society) and was one of the original members on the MPI (Message Passing Interface) Forum, an international standards committee related to high-performance computing. While at the
University of Texas, she helped organize the Fourth IMACS International Symposium on
Iterative Methods in Scientific Computations and was a co-editor of a book based on the contributions from this conference.
3 Arne Halaas
4 Svein Olaf Hvasshovd and Svein Erik Bratsberg
5 Roger Midtstraum
6 Tor Stålhane in full position and Pinar Øzturk in 20%-position.
7 Agnar Aamodt.
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Torbjørn Hallgren has been a driving force in establishing an advanced visualisation laboratory at NTNU. The resources of the laboratory are being distributed with the cooperating parties. A SGI Onyx graphics computer is the node in the graphics network. The strategy is to have a widest possible choice of resources available. This is attained by equipping each of the partner’s laboratories with different types of equipment. Besides giving access to a multitude of advanced pieces of equipment totally seen, this is supposed to encourage cooperation of both practical and scientific nature between the partners. There are indications that there will be funding available also for the coming years. Cooperating partners are for the time being petroleum and geophysics, medicine, art and media, architecture and product design.
Hallgren also has active contacts with archaeologist at NTNU and Norwegian museums interested in virtual heritage and more occasional contacts with archaeologists and computer scientists in England, Spain and Greece in the same area. He is presently discussing matters of common interest with Professor Norman I. Badler, University of Pennsylvania, Professor
Dimitris Metaxas, University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers, and Professor Bernd Frölich,
Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar.
3.2 Scientific Cooperation of Computer Architecture and Design Group (DM)
The DM group will be organising the 5 th
International Conference on Evolvable systems: from Biology to Hardware in Trondheim, 17-20 March 2003. The committee consists of
Andy Tyrrell (York), Jim Tørresen (U.Oslo), and Pauline Haddow, Keith Downing, and
Gunnar Tufte (all the latter from IDI). Haddow is the “driving force” in this initiative.
Haddow is co-supervisor with Bernard Manderck (Brussels) for Ph.D. student Piet Van
Remortel, is cooperating with Adrian Thompson (Sussex) in research on Evolvable Hardware
(EHW), and is currently working on establishing a “
Virtual Centre for Computational
Modelling of Biological Processes with Smart Materials
” together with Peter Bentley
(London) and Julian Miller (Birmingham).
On the national arena, Haddow leads the NFR project. “
Applying artificial evolution to reconfigurable hardware to achieve modelling of signal transduction
” (Nov. 2000- Oct.
2003). Natvig participates in the Webtek program at NTNU, being responsible for Computer
Architecture . He also participates in the NOTUR project, a national initiative in supercomputing, and is part of a committee to coordinate the teaching at NTNU in supercomputing and related areas.
The group has a long tradition of active cooperation with Norwegian industry in teaching and student projects and diplomas. Our computer design course has been given by specialists from
Atmel and Nordic VLSI for the last 4-5 years, and our students have participated in a large variety of projects at FAST, Nordic VLSI, Tandberg Television, Atmel, Clustra, Falanx, and many others. Two of our students won the 2nd prize among 150 start-ups in the Norwegian
Venture Cup 2000.
3.3 Scientific Cooperation of Database Group (DB)
International
Faculty members have had sabbaticals at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Sperry
Univac in Minneapolis (Kjell Bratbergsengen), and with Imperial College in London, and the
Page 13 of 33
University of Cape Town in South Africa (Mads Nygård). Some of our Dr.Ing. students have visited foreign research groups for a period from 6 to 12 months: Erlend Tøssebro at
FernUniversität Hagen in Germany, Heri Ramampiaro at University of Lancaster, England,
Petter Moe at Philips in Eindhoven, Øystein Torbjørnsen at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, Steinar Kvitsand at INRIA in Grenoble, and Oddvar Risnes at the University of
East Anglia in England). Kjetil Nørvåg has just ended a one-year Post.Doc. period at INRIA in Paris. We have also had exchange students from University of Twente in the Netherlands.
Three faculty members have had educational assignments for a month or more in foreign countries. Kjell Bratbergsengen and Mads Nygård have taught in China, while Roger
Midtstraum and Mads Nygård have taught in Thailand. Kjell Bratbergsengen has been a member of several VLDB program committees. We have been asked to host the VLDB2005 conference. Two faculty members (Hvasshovd and Bratsberg) have a broad international experience and network in the database and telecom industry due to their recent former positions with the international database company Clustra. Although Clustra is based in
Trondheim, it has its majority of owners in the United States and Clustra’s market is world wide.
National
Five faculty members have part-time positions either with industry (3) or with universities and regional colleges (2). We are participating with other IDI groups on two NFR-funded projects,
CAGIS and MOWAHS.
Industrial
Since the group was established in 1972, it has been involved in research and development projects for Norwegian industry. Some partners are: SINTEF, Kongsberg Våpenfabrikk,
BIBSYS, Norsk Data, Sysscan, Kvatro, Telenor, Hypra, and Clustra. All these projects have been on developing core database technology. During the last ten years, the group has been active in applying database technology in cooperation with Ullevål Sykehus, SDS, Norsk folkemuseum, Norsk Regnesentral, Nasjonalbiblioteket in Mo i Rana, and Telenor. Our
English faculty member enables us to keep in touch with the British IT industry.
Faculty members have given continuing education courses to several companies like Norges
Bank, Gjensidige Forsikring, NOVIT and Clustra. We have held continuing education courses in database technology almost every year over the last 20 years.
3.4 Scientific Cooperation of Graphics and Image Processing Group (BB)
Members of the group have contributed to courses and student supervision in other universities and have acted as external examiners for doctoral theses of other universities.
Members of the group have had close connections with industry, acting as consultants and supervising project students working in an industrial environment.
The group has hosted guest researchers and guest professors from Italy, Russia and Lithuania.
These overseas links have led to several research proposals to activities funded by various EU agencies. The competition for funds was very severe. Two successes were a partnership in a
Socrates CDA on soft computing (sadly truncated by the illness on the Principal Investigator from Spain), and a current partnership in a NORFA network on Wireless Information
Management. The contact with Lithuania has been particularly rewarding, leading to a
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number of joint publications and the shared supervision of a Ph.D. student working in Vilnius.
Successful research proposals within Norway have included participation in the CSE project and an internal project involving a wide range of departments in an unusual collaborative project.
3.5 Scientific Cooperation of Information Systems Group (IS)
The IS group has been active since the Department was initially organized in the early 70’s.
Most of the time there has been only one permanent full-time position in the group (Prof.
Arne Sølvberg) together with an average of five Ph.D. students and 2-4 part-time (20%) positions. International participation in IFIP-activities has been a cornerstone for the IS group, in particular participation in the IFIP working group WG8.1 for Information Systems
Design, where group members (including part-time staff) have held central positions during many years. Group members serve as PC-members for 10-12 international conferences every year, including major conferences like VLDB, the ER-conferences, and CAiSE. Group members also serve as key officers at well-reputed conferences, most recently for ER’01 in
Japan, and for CoopIS’98 in New York.
Over a 10-year period starting in 1988 the IS-group was heavily involved in EU-sponsored research, in the ESPRIT program, which funded almost all of the doctoral research in the group during the early 1990’s. From 1996 the changes in funding policy made EU-sponsored research less attractive, and since 1998 we have participated in EU-sponsored research only through one of our adjunct staff (John Krogstie of SINTEF).
Externally funded projects are
ElComAg, ADIS (new), CAGIS (in final stage) from the Norwegian Research Council of one
Ph.D. student each, and one Ph.D. student funded by Accenture.
We cooperate closely with external organizations both for teaching and research. Our three adjunct staff are from industry and research institutes (SINTEF, Statoil, FAST). We cooperate with DnB (the Norwegian Bank) and Se-bank for teaching e-commerce, and have a part-time teacher from Telenor for CSCW-teaching. Accenture provides one Ph.D. fellowship. A number of student projects are conducted in cooperation with industry.
Recent and future sabbaticals (for the two full-time staff) comprise one year at UCSB in
1998-99, planned one year in Australia 2002-2003, planned one year in USA in 2003-2004.
There is also frequent participation in evaluations of doctoral thesis and of candidates for scientific positions at other universities, altogether six such evaluations in 2001 at other universities. The group will have one foreign guest researcher in 2002, and we expect to have two foreign Post.Doc.s. We also expect that in 2002 five out of six Ph.D. students in the group will be undergraduates from foreign universities, and we try to keep in contact with their former teachers at their home universities
3.6 Scientific Cooperation of Knowledge Based Systems Group (KS)
KS cooperates closely with Prof. A. Skowron and his Group of Logic in Department of
Mathematics at Warsaw University in Poland
8
, Prof. L. Ohno-Machado in Decision Systems
Group at Harvard Medical School
9
Dr. K. Fidelis at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratories 10 in USA, Norsk Hydro Porsgrunn, Accenture, Oslo, Norway, and with Dr. A.
8 http://alfa.mimuw.edu.pl/logic/
9 http://www.dsg.harvard.edu/public/dsg/research.html
,
10 http://PredictionCenter.llnl.gov/
Page 15 of 33
Brazmas at the European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton in the UK. We previously cooperated with Vingmed Sound, AstraZeneca in Mølndal in Sweden and The Norwegian
Radium Hospital (RH), Oslo.
The most important results of our cooperation are: the Rosetta toolkit
11
which has been built in co-operation with Warsaw University, Poland. It has today over 2800 users worldwide.
Together with the Norwegian Radium Hospital in Oslo we have implemented the PubGene tool and published in Nature Genetics a full article on mining the bibliome. The PubGene tool
12
has over 1000 hits daily. Dr. Komorowski contributes to the Health, Science and
Technology Program at MIT and Harvard Medical School as an instructor in biomedical data analysis. He is often invited to teach short courses on the subject of gene expression analysis at various biomedical research institutes and meetings.
Within NTNU, we lead a computational biology/bioinformatics program involving IDI (KS and DM groups), the Faculty of Medicine (cf. A. Lægreid) Faculty of Chemistry and Biology
(cf. A. Bones, B. Johanssen), SINTEF UNIMED, and other departments at the Faculties of
Physics and of Chemistry and Biology. We analyze gene expression data and construct models of biomedical phenomena. KS researchers have also contributed to a Strategic
University Program in Computational Botany at the Faculty of Chemistry and Biology. In cooperation with our Computational Biology Laboratory this program has been funded by
NFR for 5 years.
The KS group is also active in EU projects, e.g. a research network project on Agent technology (Matskin) and linked to the the Norwegian ElComAg and ADIS NFR-supported projects. The group is also active in natural language technology, e.g. a speech interface system to obtain relevant bus schedules in Trondheim, in cooperation with Linguistics and
Telecom (Amble).
3.7 Scientific Cooperation of Software Engineering Group (SU)
The group is and has been engaged in a large number of international and national R&D projects. Each external project will have two seniors and 1-2 Ph.D. students. See each group member’s CV, publication lists etc. in the appendices for details.
Academically, there are person exchanges and ongoing research activities with University of
Maryland and the CeBASE project (OO design inspections and experience bases); Fraunhofer
IESE/Univ. Kaiserslautern and ISERN -- International Software Engineering Research
Network (empirical software engineering); RWTH/Aachen and Grenoble (versioning and software architecture); Milano (cooperation technology); Manchester, Politecnico di Milano,
Politecnico di Torino, Pisa and Beijing (process support); London (software metrics and software evolution), Lancaster (software reengineering and reuse); Aalborg, Milano, Toulouse and Bar-Ilan in Israel (cooperation technology); and Lisboa and Groningen (software architecture and UML). Conradi spent his sabbatical in 1999/2000 in Maryland and
Politecnico di Milano. We have also done research and written papers with other IDI groups
(e.g. DB, IS and KS).
Internationally, we have since 1990 been involved in many, mostly applied EU projects around e.g. software reuse, software quality, versioning, cooperation technology, process support, and process improvement. Relevant projects are REBOOT and SER, PROMOTER /
11 http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~aleks/rosetta/
12 http://www.pubgene.org/
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PROMOTER2, PROTEUS, PERFECT, ASSET, RENAISSANCE, COMIC and Campiello,
CMEX / ATEX, TELMET, QiS, and now ESERNET - with five books published so far. We have ongoing contacts with European IT companies such as Q-Labs, Bull, Siemens, Cap
Gemini, ICL, and Intecs.
Nationally, we have similarly been involved in applied research projects like EPOS, SPIQ and PROFIT on software process improvement (the two latter with Telenor, Ericsson, Alcatel,
Mogul, Genera, and 15 other IT companies). Through SINTEF we have been consulting with almost 20 mostly Norwegian companies. Several M.Sc./Ph.D. theses have been industrialized, e.g. served as additions to commercial CASE tools. We have also run several eight continuing educational courses for industry the last ten years.
We also have been and are involved in more basic research projects such as E3 and CHAOS
(cooperation technology – in Italy), CAGIS (distributed agents), CSE (OO numerics w/
Mathematics), INCO (incremental and component-based development), MOWAHS (mobile process support), WebSys (how to combine “sooner” and “better”), Enterprise-critical IT systems (with NFR), and net-based education (w/ Telenor), and in the upstarting NTNU
Webtek program (cooperation and software technologies). In many of these projects we have cooperated with SINTEF and recently with Univ. Oslo (Prof. Dag Sjøberg). Since 2001 we have worked with Univ. Oslo through the software engineering part of the Simula Research
Laboratory outside Oslo. The Oslo/Trondheim groups consider themselves as a virtual, national competence center in software engineering .
The group has an internationally acknowledged position in software engineering, with many co-authored publications. The group has arranged the workshops SCM'3 (1991) and
EWSPT'92 in Trondheim. The group leader was program chair for SCM'7, EWSPT'2000, and
ECSQ’02. Other group members are very active in similar events.
3.8 Scientific Cooperation of HCI and Systems Development Group (SA)
The group contacts are mainly at personal level, and mostly related to ongoing or previous collaboration projects. The research projects are mainly funded by the Norwegian Research
Council, Nordic research funding, the European Union, and the European Space Agency.
Some of the most important co-operations are discussed below. In addition the group also has several co-operation projects with other faculties and departments within NTNU (faculty of medicine, faculty of humanities, faculty of social sciences).
International level:
Cooperation with Ultralab at Anglia Polytechnic University, England – development of learning aids for children.
Cooperation with LAAS, Isoscope, and Astrium Space all - in Toulouse in France,
Synspace in Switzerland, Intecs in Pisa in Italy – within software quality and software safety for the European Space Agency.
Co-operation on global infrastructure and globally dispersed teams. Partners include
Universities of Bologna, Gothenburg, Oslo, London School of Economics, MIT Sloan
School of Management and several major industry companies.
National level:
Co-operation with Telenor R&D and Industrial Design at NTNU on mobile IT, contextaware systems and tangible interaction for future mobile networks.
National co-operation on knowledge networks and co-operation in networks. Partners within NTNU, Norwegian School of Management, and major industry companies.
Page 17 of 33
Co-operation with ABB Automation on safety aspects related to process control systems.
Industrial level:
Several of the above mentioned cooperative activities also include industry and consulting companies in Norway and abroad.
3.9 Scientific Cooperation of Artificial Intelligence and Learning Group (AIL)
International and national cooperation is of extreme importance to AIL research, although the formal extent of these ties varies among the projects. Several of AIL's CBR activities involve
Norwegian companies (Statoil, Norsk Hydro and SINTEF) along with other European universities (in Brussels, Leipzig, Freiburg, Sao Paolo and Barcelona). Knowledge-based
Internet learning research directly includes many Norwegian high schools, along with national companies such as Cognita, Neoknowledge and Norsk elæring. Image processing has many local corporate connections such as Ceetron, Voxel Vision and Gjensidige. Conversely, AIL's
EC and AL research consists of many small projects with loose international connections (to universities in Aarhus, Odense, Skøvde and Linkøping) built around short visiting lectureships and longer-term student residencies. The sparsity of AI research in Norway makes cooperation, particularly international, a necessity, and AIL members are actively working to establish networks of appropriate sizes and diversities for the tasks at hand.
3.10 Scientific Cooperation of Information Management Group (IF)
International contact and cooperation is essential in this area. The national research activity is low, but increasing. The IF-group has been an active participant in the EU funded DELOS cooperation since the beginning ( http://www.ercim.org/delos/ ); DELOS Working Group
(1995-99) with the objective to promote research into the further development of digital library technologies, and DELOS Network of Excellence (1999-2002) aiming to provide an open context in which an international research agenda for future research activities in the digital libraries domain can be developed and continuously updated. A key objective of
DELOS NoE is the design of a European Digital Library Test Suite, where Prof. Ingeborg
Sølvberg is participating. DELOS has also close cooperation with NSF (National Science
Foundation) in USA. A special DELOS-NSF working group will be established shortly, with
6 European researchers and 6 US researchers. Prof. Ingeborg Sølvberg is participating in this work.
In 1998-99 Prof. Ingeborg Sølvberg was on sabbatical leave at the University of California in
Santa Barbara (UCSB), with the NSF-funded Alexandria Digital Library project (ADL). We are currently implementing the ADL-middleware to be the first external node to ADL and this will be an important infrastructure for our research. In addition to local test-collections, we will integrate external Norwegian systems/collections. We are in contact with professional
Norwegian content providers: libraries and publishers. In 2000, Assoc. Prof. Monica Divitini
(then in IF group) spent 6 months on the EU funded project Campiello at the University of
Milano Bicocca, Italy.
We cooperate with the Norwegian library and information community: BIBSYS, the National
Library, Riksbibliotektjenesten, Oslo University College and others: student tutoring, teaching, national projects. Several of the M.Sc. theses have been in cooperation with industry.
Page 18 of 33
National research resources are scarce. We have received a small grant from NFR’s
Biblioteks-forskningsprogram (Library Research Programme) for a “network project on
Digital Libraries”. NFR wants us to contribute to creating a Norwegian Digital Library
Community. As part of network building we have initiated and organized three national workshops in Trondheim, in 1998, 1999 and 2001; and have participated in international conferences and meetings. We are active in the ECDL conference community, and Professor
I. Sølvberg was PC co-chair for ECDL2001 in Darmstadt. She is European PC-chair for the
DELOS-NSF Workshop on “Evaluation and Metrics for Digital Libraries”, Budapest, Spring
2002, and General Chair for ECDL2003.
It has not been possible to get external funding for Ph.D.-students in the reported period.
3.11 Joint or Multidisciplinary Research Groups
The below research activities have strong IDI involvement, and are further described in
Sections 2 and 3 and in the Appendices.
Some shared research groups within IDI:
IT and learning, with AIL (Holme, Staupe), SA (Rydland), and SU (Divitini).
Computational Biology Lab (Microarray) , KS (Komorowski) and DM (Haddow).
Electronic commerce, with IS (Sølvberg) and KS (Matskin).
Distributed/mobile, cooperative systems, with SU (Conradi, Divitini) and DB (Nygård).
Enterprise-critical IT systems, with SU (Stålhane) and SA (Skramstad) and Abelia on behalf on Norwegian IT industry.
Some shared research groups between IDI and other departments and faculties:
Webtek , an upstarting, NTNU-level, basic research program in ICT chaired by Arne
Sølvberg at IDI and with many other partners at IDI and Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Telecommucations.
IT and learning , an NTNU-level, applied research program in ICT, with AIL group
(Holme, Staupe) from IDI playing a major part, and with other partners e.g. at
Pedagogics and from NTNU’s central educational office.
A RAVE virtual reality laboratory, with IDI (Hallgren as initiator), Petroleum
Engineering and Applied Geophysics, Building Technology, Architecture, Art and
Media, Medicine, and with Norsk Hydro as sponsor and industrial partner.
Apertura Laboratory to study IT and organizational change, with Eric Monteiro (SA group) in cooperation with Department of Sociology (Per M. Schiefloe).
Multimedia lab , with Roger Midtstraum (DB) in cooperation with Telenor R&D.
Medical journaling systems
, with SA (Eric Monteiro) and AIL (Nytrø) in cooperation with Sociology and Medicine.
Computational Biology, with KS (Komorowski) and DM (Haddow) in cooperation with
Medicine, Chemistry and Biology, Physics, and SINTEF UNIMED.
Computational linguistics, with KS (Amble) and IS (Gulla) in cooperation with Telecom
(Svendsen) and Linguistics (Nordgård).
Human-Computer Interaction
, with SA (Dag Svanæs) and Centre for Industrial Design and Telenor R&D.
The body in motion in cultural, natural, and simulated environments , with BB (Hokland) and Psychology, Movement science, Dance research, and Philosophy.
Page 19 of 33
Improved learning processes – improved safety and uptime in oil drilling ("Forbedrede læreprosesser - økt sikkerhet og oppetid i boring"), with AIL (Aamodt) Norsk Hydro,
SINTEF Technology Management and Petroleum Engineering and Applied Geophysics,
NTNU
4. Recruitment of Researchers
Our recruitment situation has been difficult for many years, and in particular over the last 5 years. Obvious reasons are a hot labour market for IT professionals both in industry and at foreign universities, a long history of understaffing (with negative feedback signals), and lack of research grants in our field from the Norwegian Research Council (NFR). There are signs of an improved recruitment situation during the last few months of 2001, mainly due to a weakening of the labour market. Recruitment of female undergraduates, faculty and Ph.D. students has improved considerably during the past five years, see Section 6.
The understaffing is severe and is reducing our abilities to recruit new faculty members, since there is a perception of too much teaching and to little time for research. The understaffing got worse, since our financing did not allow expanding the faculty ahead of the mandated increase in number of admitted students starting in 1997. However, since 2000 we have had money to hire new faculty members provided that we find qualified applicants. Unfortunately, finding qualified applicants has been a major problem. Rather than hiring faculty member that are less qualified, we are relying on part-time teaching from our doctoral alumni who work in industry and research institutes. To improve the situation we have increased salaries for all faculty positions (especially the new ones), but still we pay only 70% of what is common for industrial salaries at that level in Norway. We now pay 50,000-100,000 NOK above the average pay at the University (which includes several non-science and non-engineering disciplines such as humanities). This has also been necessary to avoid loss of existing faculty members during the past two years.
There is a general shortage of Ph.D.s in IT in Norway, so there is, in any case, a limited supply of qualified domestic candidates for university positions. The national policy of creating research Centres of Excellence organized independent of the Universities, stiffens the competition for qualified staff, and leaves university departments with heavy teaching loads in an even less favourable competitive situation.
It has also been difficult to recruit Norwegian Ph.D. students, in particular during the past three years. It has been somewhat easier to hire foreigners. The foreign students are, as a rule, very gifted and contribute excellently to our research and teaching. Seven of our recent 12
Ph.D. students are foreigners, now constituting 40% of our Ph.D. student body.
Undergraduates have until recently had the good fortune of the overheated labour market of the dot.com economy, so our wage levels have been far from competitive. This may change when the next class of M.Sc. graduates finish in early summer 2002, and we hence expect the recruitment of new Ph.D. students to become somewhat easier next year. It is unfortunate that recent money for hiring extra faculty could not be used for Ph.D. students, since the supply of these has dried up. This happens in spite of increased starting salaries for Ph.D. fellows decided last year, up from public wage scale ltr. 35 (260,000 NOK per year) to ltr. 44
(300,000 NOK).
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To counteract on the weak recruitment situation, we have developed an alternative route to our Ph.D. program. The standard route is to be admitted into the Ph.D. program after an M.Sc. degree representing five years of undergraduate study. In the alternative route we admit undergraduate students as Ph.D. track fellows after the 4th year of the undergraduate study, and pay them half the current Ph.D. fellowship salary during the next two years, after which they continue with full-time Ph.D. studies. This program is known as the Researcher School .
We admitted the first three students this fall, and plan to expand this program to at least ten students next fall.
5. Scientific Leadership
Every faculty member in Norway has full freedom in choosing his/her research field, and has a duty to do research within the thematic field of the professorial position to which they were hired. Research leadership is consequently applied on a macro level when formulating the research field of new positions, and when choosing candidates from a selection of competent applicants. However, we sometimes have to announce “broad” fields just to fill vacant or new positions. There have been insufficient external funds to finance larger and cooperative laboratories that could attract several new faculty members, although several joint initiatives have been established as described in Section 3.11. The recent organization of IDI into four larger divisions is also expected to improve the scientific leadership and research cooperation within the Department.
ICT was in May 2000 identified by NTNU as one of its five strategic research areas. This lead toa Webtek basic research program ( www.webtek.ntnu.no
) and an applied ICT and learning program. In addition, we also have bioinformatics as an interdisciplinary research program at
NTNU, and have projects such as the
Microarray Gene Expression Laboratory at IDI.
IDI has leading roles in all these programs, and expects that new research resources at NTNU will be channelled to such programs in the future. IDI has also taken initiatives and leadership roles in many other interdisciplinary projects and activities at NTNU, see again Section 3.11.
Every member of the scientific staff has been expected to find external resources by which to strengthen the research within their field of responsibility. The department has followed the principle that every chosen field of teaching has to be supported by research, and has consequently distributed available resources thinly, by giving every research group a minimum of one Ph.D. fellowship, funding provided. This principle has now been extended to providing every full time professor and associate professor one Ph.D. fellowship each, e.g. as means to attract junior faculty. When judging this policy one should keep in mind that
Norway is a small country, and that each individual faculty member may quickly assume the role of a de-facto national expert in his/her field.
Because increased number of admitted undergraduate students we will have to hire many new faculty in the years to come. This will enable us to improve the supervision of Ph.D. students.
Each Ph.D. student currently has one supervisor, and some have an assisting co-supervisor.
We plan on letting every Ph.D. student have a supervising committee of three members. The committee and the student will together set up a plan for the studies and a number of checkpoints. If requirements are not met at the checkpoints, the student will get stronger advice, or might even have to abort the Ph.D. program.
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6. Strong and Weak Aspects of the Department
IDI’s faculty members are a good mix of age, gender and nationality: 15% are female, and
21% are foreigners. The table shows the age distribution. Faculty members also have diverse research backgrounds; from universities, research institutions, and private companies.
Collectively the faculty members have a wide network that spans the world.
Age 30-34 35-39 40-44 45-49 50-54 55-59 60-65
Faculty 1 8 5 6 2 9 2
Several faculty members have started new companies based on their own research or have worked for start-ups. We consider this a major strength in our ability to cooperate with industry and for our enabling role in innovation and industrialization.
IDI provides approximately 30% of all ICT university-level teaching in Norway. This is a strength as well as a weakness. Our national dominance in student numbers requires that we have a broad curriculum, which provides a potential for funding faculty members with specialities anywhere on the IT spectrum. IDI covers all areas of the ACM Curriculum.
Especially the engineering program has a strong emphasis on project-based work. Due to our reputation as the leading computer science program in Norway and because of IT’s current popularity we are in the fortunate position that we have one of the toughest entrance requirements in the country. Many of our undergraduates were the top 1-2 student at their respective high schools. We consequently have a large percentage of straight “A” undergraduate students, which is a desired pre-condition for achieving high quality both in teaching and research. Our students are undoubtedly one of our most important assets.
Another major strength of the department is our great reputation in industry for turning out good undergraduates. Many of our undergraduates do their thesis work in cooperation with industrial partners, and faculty cooperate with industry as time permits. We have put a strong emphasis on keeping our curriculum in pace with industrial needs. We consider the good relationship with industry one of our most valuable assets. Many faculty members are participating in joint R&D projects with hardware/telecom groups (e.g. Webtek), and applied projects with sociology, linguistics, technical design, medicine etc.
We have also managed to attract significantly more female students to NTNU’s Informatics and Telematics engineering studies through the “Women in Computing” program (“ Jenter og data
”) that was initiated in 1997. The number of female students increased from 8% in 1996 to 30% in 1997-2001. We had no female faculty members until 1996. Now we have 5 out of a total of 33, or 15%, which is above the national average of 13% in Science. Among fellowship holding Ph.D. students, 27% (13 of 46) are female. In the open studies of informatics we have a history of gender balance with about 40% female undergraduate students.
We recently co-located all parts of the department into a newly renovated building that previously housed the Physics Department. This has improved working conditions considerably and promotes cooperation among research groups with overlapping scientific interests. However, we do still have a severe lack of space for laboratories and rooms for effective cooperation both internally and especially with industry and new born companies.
At many universities around the world, teaching and research in IT is distributed among several different departments and faculties (“colleges”). We consider it a considerable
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strength that we have avoided such organizational fragmentation. Our department is responsible for all general IT courses at NTNU, which is a considerable strength. We believe our position will be further strengthened when we become part of the new ICT Faculty starting in January 2002.
Unfortunately public research grants have been very scarce for our field during the past 10 years. The policy of the Norwegian Research Council has been to put their money into IT applications, and into industry projects of rather short time-horizons which often border technology transfer, rather than to support basic research which by its very nature has a longer time-horizon. In fact, IT did not become part of NFR’s research strategy until 1997, when a small basic research program was initiated for Distributed Systems (DITS). For instance, IT was not even mentioned in the 1996 research strategy document of NFR. This has of course been a severe obstacle to the recruitment of both Ph.D. students and junior faculty. When the major funding body of the country sends strong signals of ignoring IT research, one must expect this signal to be observed by the younger professionals. The unwillingness of the political system to provide sufficient research funds through NFR for other than very shortterm research efforts is considered a major weakness of our position.
The lack of adequate internal budget models at the universities is also a severe problem for expanding fields like computer and information science. This is probably the main reason for the severe under-financing of the basic activities in computer and information science at all higher educational institutions in Norway. However, in spite of chronic under-financing, IDI has a publication rate (number of publications versus budget size) comparable to, say,
Chemistry and Physics at NTNU.
Most of our research funding has been tied to the funding of Ph.D. students. This is evident from our publication records, which shows that a large number of the publications are authored by our Ph.D. students. Most of our publication efforts have consequently been directed at international scientific conferences and workshops. This is in line with IT publication practices, but also reflects the need for Ph.D. students to have quick reviews internationally while they still have research funding.
Several of our research groups cooperate extensively internationally. This is evidenced by the fact that we will be hosting at least one international scientific conference a year for the next four years. Some of our research groups have participated heavily in EU projects, in particular some years ago. The reason for weaker participation over the last few years is because EU projects are generally under-financed and also because they recently have been focused towards IT applications rather than basic research.
7. Strategy and Plans for the Future
Strategic goals for research are:
Increase intake of Ph.D. students to at least 20 per year within 2005, and strengthen their curriculum on research methods.
Actively use Post.Doc.s and full-time research associates to build up and consolidate certain research areas.
Double the number of journal publications in four years, e.g. though the use of internal incentives.
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Promote informatics as an experimental and empirical discipline, with a doubling of resources for laboratories, both for equipment and staff.
Increase the number of larger projects and laboratories, involving several groups.
Increase participation in multi-disciplinary projects and encourage “bridge-builders”.
Increase international research co-operation.
Strategic goals for teaching are:
Maintain the current high quality of students enrolled in our engineering studies.
Let societal and market relevance guide our teaching and partly our research profile.
Strategic goals for industrial cooperation are:
Keep co-operation with domestic industry at least at current levels.
Tactical goals for internal infrastructure and extra resources are:
Establish a permanent recruiting committee for scientific personnel.
Join and help form the new ICT faculty (“college”) at NTNU. This is Norway’s first complete ICT faculty.
Double the basic IDI budget from NTNU, to 110 MNOK per year.
Increase external research financing five times to 30 MNOK per year.
Increase faculty salaries by at least 100,000 NOK per year.
It will be essential to maintain the current high quality of our first-year engineering students.
This year (2001) 40% of Norwegian high school graduates with a science background (2100 students) applied for some kind of ICT engineering study at NTNU. Over 700 such students were accepted, all with a straight “A” grades from high school and with 230 ending up at IDI.
In addition, 25 new students were admitted to the cand.scient. study in informatics. We foresee a more active recruitment process, building on the activities and experiences with the
“Women in Computing” program (“Jenter og data”).
Relevance is another essential matter. We can only maintain our high admission standards, if the students’ knowledge profile upon graduation is consistent with societal and market needs.
And, we can only provide high-quality teaching, if such teaching is supported by relevant research. So a constant re-examination of research relevance in a rapidly moving technological area is necessary for survival. This renewal process must be supported by joint research projects with external parties, and by hiring part-time teaching faculty and course examiners from industry, consultancy companies, and public administration.
Close co-operation with domestic industry is seen as very important, both from the reasons given above and because of our educational and research support is required to develop and sustain new ICT-based companies. New ICT-based companies compete globally, and competent staff is a key (“human capital”) success factor.
The number of Ph.D. students in ICT is only half of what it should be, and 1/3-1/4 of the level in other science disciplines. To reach a goal of 12% of our M.Sc. students undertaking Ph.D. studies, we need to increase the number of new Ph.D. students admitted each year to 30.
Funds unused for hiring permanent staff will be used for this purpose as long as we experience the current difficulties of finding qualified faculty. We will also start requiring a committee of three advisors for each Ph.D. student and strengthen the students theoretical background on research methodology.
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Ph.D. students provide most of the research volume in the department. They leave after graduation, in most cases before the research has matured to a level where high quality publications can be written. To improve upon this situation and to build up and consolidate certain research areas, we will put more emphasis on hiring Post.Doc.s and strengthen the IDI infrastructure for research.
Our participation in international projects has decreased over the past 5 years, mostly due to understaffing and EU’s reduction of basic ICT programs. We shall try to counteract this by exchanging Post.Doc.s internationally, by actively participating in the ERCIM network, and by supporting more actively those of our staff who participate in international committees and/or help organize conferences. All of our Ph.D. students may spend half a year abroad during their program with us, and we shall continue this policy.
The key strength of our department lies in our generic IT knowledge, i.e., IT methods and systems that have many application areas. IT becomes of greatest value when it is combined with knowledge from other areas and is used to improve practices in these other areas. We therefore will continue with basic (generic), as well as applied research. IDI’s strategic plan from 2000 identifies three research areas, in line with NTNU’s Webtek program:
Basic technology – with focus on web-based, mobile and agent-based information systems (mainly DB, IS, KS, SU groups).
Method development – with focus on quality assurance, process support and empirical studies, component-based development of large program and information systems (IS,
SU, SA).
Information Management – with focus on techniques for efficient storing, retrieval and searching in large information and multimedia sources (IF, DB).
10 new faculty positions in these areas were announced last year, and 3 have been filled.
The same strategic plan outlines three applied and multidisciplinary areas:
Bioinformatics (KS, DM, others), specially coupled to Genome research.
IT and teaching (AI, SA, SU), specially coupled to own teaching.
IT and health (AI, SA, DB), specially for electronic journaling systems.
Some of these fields and plans may seem broad, but IDI’s basic need is a general, large and persistent increase in university and research funds – not funding for selected activities and projects. We must first cover the holes and give everybody “livable” work conditions.
Afterwards, but also in parallel, we can start more focused research initiatives, according to stated and submitted plans.
We foresee need for extra equipment – including supporting staff – for mobile and nomadic computing (e.g. used for teaching), bioinformatics, powerful database/information servers with search engines, and “heavy” commercial development tools and platforms. The financial source of such must largely be from NFR, in the context of larger projects.
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8. Major Investments in Recent Years
8.1 Student equipment
Due to the departement’s growth in number of student, equipment funding – some times earmarked from NTNU -- has been used more or less solely to faciliate high volume teaching.
The department maintains more than 1000 workstations (PCs, Macs, Suns etc.), and associated file servers and infrastructure.
8.2 Research equipment
Many groups have special laboratories, e.g. for HCI with an observational lab, graphics (see below on RAVE), bioinformatics (the Microarray), ERP (with a SAP tool), a mobile lab.
(under build-up in the MOWAHS project), and high-performance database machines (DB group).
Of special mentioning is the new RAVE visualization laboratory at NTNU. This has been established with IDI as a driving force and in co-operation with NTNU colleagues in
Petroleum Engineering and Applied Geophysics, Building Technology, Architecture, Art and
Media, Medicine, and with Norsk Hydro as sponsor and industrial partner. The goal is to establish powerful facilities at NTNU for computer graphics, visualization, and fully immersive virtual reality. The core of the RAVE laboratory is a Silicon Graphics Onyx specialized graphics computer. RAVE has a joint NFR, NTNU and industrial budget of 8.2
MNOK in 2001-2002. RAVE is available for researchers and students from IDI and the entire university and for connecting distributed laboratory equipment. The first part of
RAVE was established during the spring of 2001 and is progressively being expended. A local IDI laboratory is being established, facilitating a wide choice of advanced equipment for visualization, interaction and immersion in virtual environments.
9. Other Information of Importance for the Evaluation
We have several times described the resource crisis for IDI and for the entire ICT/Informatics field in Norway. Below we will first give a historical survey of the resource situation, and then bring forth some more specific comments about IDI.
9.1 The ICT resource and personnel crisis on a national level
All Norwegian ICT departments have had a very tough personnel and budget situation the last
20-30 years. For instance, IDI carried in 2000 11% of NTNU’s teaching load, spent 5% of its budget, and employed 3% of its educators. The situation is chronic, and is getting worse with the increasing number of students we are asked to serve. Research is primarily hit, but the situation is self-amplifying. I.e. young researchers are not likely to accept a faculty position with sub-standard working conditions and sub-industrial salaries.
A survey by the Norwegian University Council in Informatics in March 1999 showed that
20% of the faculty positions at Norwegian ICT departments (including both universities and regional colleges), were vacant. These institutions have only half of the number of faculty positions they should have had to start with, compared to other disciplines. All in all, there is
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a national shortage of close to 200 Informatics/Telematics educators at Norwegian universities and colleges – or the same as the total number of doctoral candidates since 1990
(182 Ph.D.s) in these subjects!
In June 1966, the Norwegian Ministry of Education approved an expansion plan to double the number of Informatics M.Sc.-level graduates from 300 to 700 per year. As a response, NTNU increased the annual first-year enrolment from 100 to 300 for the Informatics/Telematics
M.Sc. Engineering Program. NTNU has 3 applicants per each new student slot in ICT, and is able to attract many of the “straight -A” science students from high schools.
9.2 Some funding history, mainly about the Norwegian Research Council
As mentioned, Norwegian ICT departments have been and are still grossly under-funded by their universities and colleges. Further, the National Research Council (NFR) has not allocated appropriate levels of research funds either. There are pretty much the same professors from traditional sciences and technologies holding controlling positions at both places, so these social institutions are not easy to turn around.
In 1970-85: It was almost impossible for IDI to get research funding from NAVF (the basic sciences research council), as we were looked upon as being too “technical”. So that money went mostly to Oslo and Bergen. On the other hand NTNF (the technical-industrial research council), considered us being an integrated part of the local SINTEF research foundation (we were not), implying that we should get our funding “through” the latter. So it was a catch-22.
In 1987-1990: Norway got its first and only IT program, with emphasis on the build-up of educational capacity and on applied industrial projects, but with some new money for university research -- even from NTNF. Our department benefited from this.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s:
EU’s ESPRIT program represented a source to finance research projects in IT, mostly applied ones. However, the recent EU framework programs have not been very attractive for (basic) ICT research.
Since 1991-92: Most of the funds in “our” area in NTNF went to user-driven industrial projects, and we were out of luck again. At the same time, the funds in NAVF for new research in informatics were only 5-6 MNOK per year. And in 1993-1996, a time of the merger of NAVF and NTNF into NFR, new research funds for ICT were at a minimum. The
NFR strategic R&D plan from 1996 hardly even mentioned ICT.
Since 1997: Several national ICT programs were initiated by NFR’s NT area (Science and
Technology). In 2000
, about 22 MNOK were available for new research projects under NFR’s three ICT programs DITS, GT, and IKT2010 (not covering Numerical Mathematics,
Electronics and Control Theory). In addition, 8 MNOK were given to “open” ICT projects
(out of a total of 111 MNOK under the NT Program). Thus, a total of 30 MNOK were available from NFR for basic ICT research in 2000. Other funds that year went to
Microelectronics (15 MNOK), Supercomputing (22 MNOK), Numerical mathematics (11
MNOK), and the upstarting Simula Research Laboratory (ca. 5 MNOK). Applied ICT projects from other NFR areas are additional.
The scarcity of research funds from NAVF/NTNF/NFR during the past 20 years have prevented many of our colleagues from even considering applying for external research funds.
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In more applied areas (e.g. Industry-Energy and Culture-Society) it has been easier to get
NFR funds for ICT research, but these areas do not cover the basic research needs of
Norwegian ICT departments.
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9.3 Appendix, section 9: Educational capacity in ICT, Norway, 1990-2010
Table 1. MSc candidates (cand.scient., siv.ing.) in ICT 1990-2000 and total.
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 Sum
Cand.scient.-kandidater
Informatikk,UiO
Informatikk,UiB
Informatikk,NTNU
Informatikk,UiTø
Sum Informatikk
Siv.ing.-kandidater
Datateknikk, NTNU
Telematikk, NTNU
Teknisk kybernetikk,NTNU
Elektronikk,NTNU
Informatikk,UiO
Informatikk,UiTø
Datateknikk,HiStavanger
Datateknikk, HiNarvik
Telematikk,HiAgder
Sum Siv.ing IKT-fag
48
18
65
84
0
0
13
59
5
1
8
73
228
74
26
43
72
9
10
11
82
13
5
8
108
245
58
31
88
124
4
12
21
77
19
7
7
110
338
78
34
74
115
3
11
34
80
18
7
6
111
349
84
30
68
138
0
11
29
76
19
11
8
114
360
1
8
36
21
86
28
81
102
89
15
13
2
119
363
5
10
44
22
66
19
60
111
72
20
17
3
112
337
4
5
25
20
70
30
49
100
81
14
10
8
113
303
2
11
26
14
98
15
66
124
69
18
15
5
107
356
4
16
316
7
10
46
77
21
43
92
76
13
10
1
100
66
22
827
176
26
4
122
60
118 1185
113 852
29
37
281
674
85 1147
2
14
23
37
102
308
29
81
45
332 3527
Cand.polit-kandidater
Info.vitenskap, UiB 16 16 10 8 9 14 5 9 11 34 23 155
IKT hovedfag-/siv.ing
317 369 458 468 483 496 454 425 474 450
Figure 1. Number of graduated MSc candidates in 1990-2000 in Norway.
473 4867
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000
Siv.ing.-kandidater
Cand.polit. info.vitenskap
Cand.scient.-kandidater
As shown, about one fourth of the MSc candidates have a siv.ing. degree, the rest a cand.scient. degree. Close to 5000 MSc candidates have been produced in 1990-2000.
Page 29 of 33
Table 2. PhD candidates (dr.scient., dr.ing., dr.polit. etc.) in ICT 1990-2000 and total.
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 Sum
Dr.scient
Informatikk,UiO
Informatikk,UiB
Informatikk,NTNU
Informatikk,UiTø
Informatikk,sum
0
0
2
2
4
0
1
6
2
9
0
1
4
5
10
1
1
4
5
11
0
0
3
2
5
0
1
9
3
13
0
0
4
4
8
15
1
0
2
18
11
4
2
0
17
0
1
7
0
8
2
0
3
9
14
68
37
5
7
117
Dr.ing
Datateknikk,NTNU
Telematikk,NTNU
Tekn.Kyb.,NTNU
Elektronikk,NTNU
IKT-fag,NTNU
Dr.polit
Info.vitenskap, UiB
2
9
18
5
2
0
7
10
21
3
1
0
9
8
20
3
0
0
11
0
10
5
26
0
8
9
19
1
1
0
9
6
22
5
2
0
11
15
34
6
2
1
5
11
27
9
2
0
8
6
22
3
5
1
5
3
11
2
1
1
5
15
26
4
2
1 4
52
18
81
97
248
Dr.grader IKT totalt 22 30 30 37 24 35 43 45 40 20 41 369
During 1990-2000 369 Ph.D.s in ICT were produced in Norway. This is 9% of the MSc candidates in the field, what we call the dr.density
. However, there are large variations, e.g.
Univ. of Bergen (UiB) has a dr.density of 25%. For Datateknikk/Telematikk at NTNU, the dr.density is 6%, and for other ICT disciplines at NTNU the dr.density is 9.8%. For general
Science and Mathematics (excluding Informatics) the dr.density is 24%, and in non-ICT technology topics the dr.density is 10.5% (using data from “Realfagsmøtet”).
A similar imbalance exists for NFR’s industrial projects: the ICT sector represents 1/3 of
Norwegian R&D, while NFR is only providing 11% of its funds in the ICT sector and half of that towards classic IT/telecom which only represents 10% of the total ICT sector.
STUDENT/FACULTY QUOTIENTS IN SOME AREAS, YEAR 2000:
Full-time students Size of faculty Students:faculty
IDI, NTNU 1125 33 34:1 !!
Civil Eng. Faculty, NTNU 400 56 7:1
Informatics, UiO 620 43 14:1
Physics, UiO 140 60 2.3:1
IDI: budget, faculty and students 1996-2001:
1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001
Budget in MNOK 27 35 45 43 47 60
Faculty, person-equiv. 27 30 31 31 33 38
Full-time students 660 750 950 1000 1125 ?
Students:faculty 22:1 21:1 21:1 23:1 34:1 ?
Students:faculty, all NTNU 10:1
Ex. In 2000, IDI produced over four MSc candidates per faculty member,
UiO two and UiB one.
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Appendix 0: Fact Sheet
Department of Computer and Information Science
Faculty of Physics, Informatics and Mathematics
Norwegian University of Science and Technology - NTNU
Organization Chart
NTNU
The Norwegian University of
Science and Technology
Other faculties...
Department of
Physics
FIM
Faculty of Physics,
Informatics and Mathematics
IDI
Department of Computer and Information Science
Head of Department
Vice Head of Department
Administrative
Staff
Technincal
Staff
Other faculties...
Department of
Mathematics
Division of Complex
Computer Systems
Computer Architecture and
Construction Group (DM)
Algorithm Construction and
Visualization Group (AV)
Division of Data and
Information Management
Database Systems
Group (DB)
Information Management
Group (IF)
Division of Software and Information Systems
Software Engineering
Group (SU)
Information Systems
Group (IS)
HCI and Systems
Development Group (SA)
Division of
Intelligent Systems
Knowledge Systems
Group (KS)
Artificial Intelligence and Learning Group (AIL)
Graphics and Image
Processing Group (BB)
Page 31 of 33
Positions
Positions
Professor
Associate professor
Professor emeritus
Professor II
Associate professor II
Post-doctoral research fellow
Doctoral fellow
Technical/adm. position
Total
1. AV
Research group/unit
Univ Extern Univ Extern Univ Extern Univ Extern
1
1+1
1
1
2
7
2. DM
Research group/unit
1
1
1
2
5
1
1
3. DB
Research group/unit
4
2
1
3
10
1
2
3
4. BB
Research group/unit
1
1
1
2
5
Positions
Professor
Associate professor
Professor emeritus
Professor II
Associate professor II
Post-doctoral research fellow
Doctoral fellow
Technical/adm. position
Total
5. IS
Research group/unit
Univ Extern Univ Extern Univ Extern Univ Extern
1
1
3
2
7
2
2
6. KS
Research group/unit
2
1
1
6
10
2
2
7. SU
Research group/unit
1
2
2
5
1
2
3
6
8. SA
Research group/unit
2
1+1
2
6
1
1
9. AIL
Research group/unit
10. IF
Research group/unit
Support staff
Total
Positions
Professor
Associate professor
Professor emeritus
Professor II
Associate professor II
Post-doctoral research fellow
Univ Extern Univ Extern Univ Extern Univ Extern
2
2+2
1 1
1
Doctoral fellow
Technical/adm. position
6 1 1
11+8
Total 13 2 2 19
”Univ” = financed by the university, ”Extern” = external research grants.
“+” is for assistant professors.
16
11+5
1
2
7
28
11+8
89
1
1
3
13
18
1
1
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Tenured professors and associate professors 3
Name
Blake, Richard E.
Bratbergsengen, Kjell
Bratsberg, Svein Erik
Conradi, Reidar
Downing, Keith
Halaas, Arne
Hvasshovd, Svein-Olaf
Komorowski, Jan
Matskin, Mihhail
Monteiro, Eric
Natvig, Lasse
Born Group/ unit
Name
1947 4. BB Amble, Tore
1944 3. DB Divitini, Monica
1965 3. DB Elster, Anne Cathrine
1946 7. SU Haddow, Pauline
1961 9. AIL Hokland, Jørn
1943 1. AV Jaccheri, Maria Letizia
1954 3. DB Midtstraum, Roger
1952 6. KS Nytrø, Øystein
1956 6. KS Nørvåg, Kjetil
1961 8. SA Sindre, Guttorm
1958 2. DM Svanæs, Dag
Born Group/ unit
1945 6. KS
1964 7. SU
1962 1. AV
1964 2. DM
1966 4. BB
1965 7. SU
1962 3. DB
1960 9. AIL
1969 3. DB
1964 5. IS
1959 8. SA
Nygård, Mads
Skramstad, Torbjørn
Stålhane, Tor
Sølvberg, Arne
Sølvberg, Ingeborg
1953
1944
1944
1940
1943
3. DB Hallgren, Torbjørn
8. SA Holme, Arvid
7. SU Rydland, Terje
5. IS Staupe, Arvid
10. IF Thomassen, Asbjørn
1942
1941
1953
1942
1953
1. AV
9. AIL
9. AIL
9. AIL
Aamodt, Agnar 1950 9. AIL
Total: 33 full-time faculty members and 10 adjunct faculty members. In addition, we have 4 lecturers/non-tenure-track assistant professors (“university teachers”): Steinar Line (DM),
Hallvard Trætteberg (IS), Terje Brasethvik (IS), and Amund Tveit (KS).
8. SA
Graduates
Dr. scient./dr.ing. graduated
1998
2+3
1999
0+2
2000
2+4
Total
13
Cand.scient./siv.ing. graduated
Total Ph.D. graduates in 1996-2000: 28
15+98 9+77 26+113
R&D expenditures on current costs by main source of funding (1000 NOK)
338
Type of expenditures
University funding 4 , salaries
University funding, running costs
University funding, total
Funding from the Research Council
Other funding (public or private)
1998 1999 2000
24.596 33.731 36.748
12.488 8.942 12.670
37.084 42.673 49.418
7.640 4.436 4.497
929 5.102 948
Total expenditures
Grants and funding as % of total expenditures
……………………………………………………….
Date and signature
3 Only associate professors who do research.
4 University funding: This refers to the institutions input of own resources such as cash, personnel, infrastructure/goods/equipment.
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