Key Themes
The Software Engineering Laboratory was established in 1999 and has since been exploring the subject from a number of different angles. Currently, the main themes of the laboratory can be described as follows:
Human-Centric Software
Design
Software must be designed for the end user. We research both the lower level user interface conventions and the higher level interaction design methods. We use gamification and mixed reality technologies to develop more interactive and immersive UX practices.
Contact persons:
Jaakko Järvi,
Jouni Smed
Digitalization with Software Systems
Digital systems are always connected to the real world. We analyse the impact of digital solutions in various domains: maritime, food, healthcare, etc. Whether the solution is a mixed reality application, a website or an embedded device, we are able to prototype it and gather empirical evidence of its impact.
Contact persons:
Teijo Lehtonen,
Carolina Islas Sedano,
Tuomas Mäkilä
Fair Software
Engineering
We see sustainability as a fair way of developing software that takes people and the environment into account. Although we take a holistic approach to the topic, we have specialised in software privacy and security issues and in measuring the sustainability impact of software.
Contact persons:
Ville Leppänen,
Tuomas Mäkilä,
Sampsa Rauti
AI Supported Programming Learning
AI is changing the landscape of programming and software development. We are analysing its impact on programming practices and consequently on software engineering education. Our specific focus is to use AI as a tool for better learning outcomes for our students and as an enabler for higher quality programming and software engineering education.
Contact person:
Erkki Kaila
On-going Projects
The Software Engineering Laboratory runs variety of research and development projects with both competitive external funding and university basic funding. Our current project portfolio consists of the following projects:
| Name | Period | Funders | Description |
| Finnish Software Engineering Doctoral Research Network | 2024 – 2027 | Ministry of Education and Culture | The Finnish Software Engineering Doctoral Research Network offers 49 paid doctoral researcher positions in software engineering across nine Finnish universities, starting in August 2024. This initiative, part of a major national investment in doctoral training, aims to foster collaboration among Finland’s top software engineering researchers and includes partnerships with industry for practical experience. Candidates with a master’s degree in software engineering, computer science, or related fields are encouraged to apply, promising a competitive salary for three years and opportunities for industry collaboration. |
| Virtual Sea Trial | 2024 – 2026 | Business Finland Co-innovation | The Virtual Sea Trial project will develop a unified and distributed virtual testing environment for ship systems. In the test environment, the shipbuilding ecosystem can test, validate, design, develop, and monitor things related to sea trials in cooperation and transparently. The virtual testing environment significantly reduces the cost risks associated with sea trials and the time needed to test ships at sea, which leads to direct emission reductions, enables the co-creation of innovations, and saves costs for the entire shipbuilding ecosystem. |
| Visiiri – National ecosystem for Green ICT transition | 2024 – 2026 | ERDF | The Visiiri project aims to establish a national Green ICT ecosystem to reduce the environmental footprint of the ICT sector, focusing on energy efficiency of information systems. Collaboratively developed by six key actors, including universities and ICT organizations, the project produces resources to guide companies towards climate-friendly practices, ultimately impacting 2,000 ICT actors and training 400 employees in sustainable methods. |
| Dining Flow | 2023 – 2025 | Business Finland Veturi | The objective of the Dining Flow project is to enhance diners’ and service providers’ experiences and to increase sustainability in Self Service Restaurants (SSR). |
| Flavoria Flex | 2023 – 2025 | Business Finland R2B | The Flavoria Flex project aims to create a system for collecting data on consumer food choices in professional kitchens, addressing the need for transparency in food content and its health effects. This technology will assist food service companies in tailoring their offerings based on detailed consumer behavior insights, with plans for commercialization through food services, a mobile app, and AI-based nutrition advice. |
| GEMMA | 2022 – 2025 | Erasmus+ | GEMMA will develop a training course for researchers (from PhD students to professors) in higher education institutes aimed at furnishing this academic staff of the digital, entrepreneurial and life skills. |
| Sustainable ICT Procurement and Digitalisation Studies | 2022 – 2025 | SECLE | The Sustainable ICT Procurement and Digitalisation Studies aims to address the growing importance of green ICT procurement and the associated skills needs. This program is open to all interested parties and is particularly valuable for those working in ICT procurement and digitalisation in both the private and public sectors. The courses are delivered online, allowing for flexible learning alongside work, and cover digitalisation, sustainable development and innovative ICT procurement, with a focus on the healthcare sector. |
| Sustainable Web Development Studies | 2022 – 2025 | SECLE | The Sustainable Web Development Studies offered by the University of Turku’s Department of Computing focus on equipping professionals and individuals with skills for developing digital services and software with a sustainability focus. This free program, intended for those with basic programming skills, emphasizes technical production, user experience, and green ICT practices through a flexible online format and includes practical exercises and group work. |
| Open Programming and Database Courses at the Open Higher Education | 2022 – 2025 | Ministry of Education and Culture | The project aims to provide high-quality open ICT education to refugees in Finland. While it was initially opened with Ukrainian refugees as the primary focus group, the studies are available to anyone interested. |
| SusFlow – Sustainability through Information Flow (MR Group) | 2023 – 2025 | Business Finland | The SusFlow project applies a multidisciplinary approach for shared solutions within a network of enterprises representing a multitude of competence areas with an LCA-driven focus. The project promotes sustainability assessments based on real data, a seamless flow of information, and a possibility to discover innovations to benefit the incorporation of sustainability as a practice within the shipyard ecosystem. |
| ENIGMA | 2023 – 2026 | European H2020 project | ENIGMA shall achieve excellence in the protection of Cultural Goods and artifacts from man-made threats by contributing to identification, traceability, and provenance research of Cultural Goods as well as by safeguarding and monitoring of endangered heritage sites. |
| Intimacy in Data-driven Culture IDA | 2020 – 2025 | Academy of Finland | The IDA project analyzes the impact of data-driven culture on social roles and relations, as well as the vulnerabilities that it gives rise to. |
| GeoICT4e | 2020 – 2024 | Ministry for Foreign Affair | The GeoICT4e project, coordinated by the University of Turku and involving Finnish and Tanzanian universities, focuses on enhancing geospatial and ICT education in Tanzania. Through a novel multi-competence learning approach, it aims to improve teaching capacities and student competences, fostering innovative solutions for societal needs. The project emphasizes co-creative education with the innovation ecosystem to transform geospatial and ICT education for better employment outcomes. |
| HotDrink | 2012 – 2025 | Basic funding | The project investigates a GUI programming approach, where a GUIs operation is determined by a constraint system. GUIs can be expressed very concisely since most of their behavior is managed by algorithms in the GUI library. Key people: Jaakko Järvi. |
| Fitech ICT | 2019 – 2025 | Ministry of Education | The Finnish Institute of Technology (FITech) was founded in 2017 by seven Finnish universities of technology, Technology Industries of Finland (Teknologiateollisuus) and the Academic Engineers and Architects in Finland TEK. In December 2019, University of Jyväskylä joined the network university. |
Projects of the Mixed Reality Group can be found at the following link: https://tt.utu.fi/ar/research
Past Projects
The major past projects of the Software Engineering Laboratory are as follows:
| Name | Period | Funders | Description |
| Digisaapas | 2020 – 2022 | EAFRD | The Improving digital accessibility in recreation services (Digi-SAAPAS) project utilizes previous recreation and nature tourism information. The main goal of the project is the effective implementation of the data collected by municipalities, companies and end users of the information. The goal of the project is to solve the entire flow of information related to recreation, from the input of initial data to the consumer experience. |
| MitViDi | 2022 – 2023 | ERDF | The aim of the MitViDi project is to develop an easy to use sustainability grading system, based on existing frameworks to support the public ICT procurements and to build and systematically develop a local Green ICT RDI triple-helix network in Southwest of Finland and in Southeast of Finland, and further build networks on national and international level. |
| Full Stack Training | 2018 – 2023 | Ministry of Education | A Full Stack developer is a person who knows the whole range of the modern web world: back-end systems, designing browser applications and user interfaces while understanding the business logic behind the implementation. |
| ICT-Sote | 2019 – 2022 | Ministry of Education | The free continuous learning training is aimed at all professionals working in or interested in public sector projects and the SOTE sector – the courses will provide examples and relevance to working life from the social and health sector and public sector procurement, among others. |
| SusCon (MR Group) | 2020- 2022 | Business Finland | Sustainable Shipbuilding Concepts project focuses on creating sustainability based value in shipbuilding through designing more sustainable concepts for cruise ships and related systems. |
| Hospital Ship Reimagined | 2019 – 2020 | Business Finland Co-creation | The Hospital Ship Reimagined project developed future mobile hospital and healthcare solutions by combining Finnish shipbuilding, ICT and health technologies. Developed concepts can be also used for emergency operations that may be caused by natural disasters from hurricanes to earthquakes, or by war and other humanitarian crisis circumstances. |
| Allied ICT Finland | 2018 – 2020 | Business Finland Network | Allied ICT Finland is a collaboration network of Finnish ICT research institutes and their cities, national ecosystems both applying and enabling ICT, hundreds of researchers and a large number of companies. |
| Information and Cyber Security in Communication and Software Engineering | 2017 – 2018 | Tekes, F-Secure and UTU | Part of NSF co-center in Oulu; works on Advanced Open Source Virtual Machine Introspection Platform |
| ICT Illusions (Tietotekniset harhautukset) | 2017 | MATINE (Ministry of Defense). | The idea behind the project was to create fake services that would mislead an attacker with false information, while enabling the collection of information about the attacker and their goals. |
| BalticSatApps | 2017 – 2020 | Interreg | The project aim was to advance the development of new solutions and commercial activity that utilize Copernicus Earth Observation data. The project strived to speed up the market uptake of EO satellite data in the Baltic Sea Region by utilising societal challenges and needs along with the developer community as innovation drivers https://balticsatapps.eu/ |
| Pre-KOD ‘Kyberturvaa ohjelmistollisella diversifikaatiolla’ | 2016 | – | Project goal was to provide protection to applications and software systems in a new way: we attempt to diversify the implementations of all software layers and their interfaces on the binary level. The system call interface of the operating system that can be used to access resources is diversified uniquely for each system and all the entry points to this interface are diversified accordingly. |
| GESEC (Geospatial business ecosystem in Tanzania) | 2016 – 2018 | ||
| Pre-Gesec (Geospatial ecosystem for location-sensitive decision-making business in Tanzania: a preparatory project) | 2016 | ||
| CyberTrust: DIMECC’s SHOK program | 2015 – 2017 | 25 MEur project 20 industrial partners; 9 academic partners; Univ. of Turku site leader, and WP4 academic leader. | |
| MATINE-Diversify: ‘Overall software security with low-level code transformation techniques’ | 2014 | MATINE (Ministry of Defence) | |
| REPLICA | 2011 – 2013 | VTT funded research project | The removing performance and programmability limitations of chip multiprocessor architecture (REPLICA) project aimed developing the CESM architecture and methodology that would enable radically easier programming and higher performance with a help of the PRAM model of computation. |
Projects of the Mixed Reality Group can be found at the following link: https://tt.utu.fi/ar/research