Annual Report 2021

Annual Report 2021: Doctoral Education

The Helsinki Doctoral Education Network in Information and Communications Technology (HICT) is a collaborative doctoral education network hosted jointly by Aalto University and University of Helsinki, and managed and financed by the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. The key objective of the HICT network is to serve as a collaboration and networking platform for doctoral students and supervisors combining all the relevant subfields of computer science and information technology at the partner universities and departments. The network has grown during the past years and currently HICT involves over 80 professors and almost 300 doctoral students, and the participating units produce altogether more than 40 new doctors each year.

HICT has two annual open calls for new doctoral students. In 2021, the international calls received once again a lot of interest. Application numbers have been growing: the HICT Spring call 2021 attracted 340 applications and the HICT Autumn call 2021 received 246 applications.

One of the main goals in HICT is to provide courses and training that support the development and careers of our doctoral students. Another important aspect in these activities is to meet other graduate students in ICT at the partner universities. Unfortunately, the coronavirus situation has hampered the organization of events in 2021, meaning that HICT activities have been on a break. A group of active HICT students started planning a student event in fall 2019, but unfortunately, they also had to cancel the HICT S4 student event and postpone it to June 2021. During the past years, HICT has organized several informal student events, but also workshops about science communication and presentation skills. We hope to be able to host 4-5 different events for doctoral students every year. The working language in all HICT activities is English.