History

University of Oulu is a science community of 3,100 employees and over 15,800 students. The university has a large scientific base of nine educational areas, which are organised in six faculties. The focus areas that encompass the entire university are Biotechnology, Information technology, Northern and Environmental Issues.

A suitable work environment and excellent research equipment enable research that requires state-of-the-art technology. The outstanding achievements of information technology have created a center of IT technology in the Oulu region. This "Oulu phenomenon" is a constant marvel for visitors from all over the world.

All this has been achieved with the aid of a motivated staff and talented students.

Involvement with Symbian 

Department of Information processing science started teaching Symbian related courses already at the end of 1990's, supported initially by Nokia. The first course, EPOC programming, has been offered continuously, nowadays named Symbian programming. Later, department has actively participated in the development and implementation of the course Mobile systems programming. This
networked course between several Finnish universities has originated from and coordinated by the Tampere university of technology.

Symbian OS has also been presented as part of other courses such as testing and mobile services development. Deparment is also part of the MobEdu network of academics, focusing on development of Symbian related teaching material. Also several research groups (e.g. INTERACT) and projects (e.g. IPCity, Capnet, Rooster, Minne, Monica, Nomadic media) relate to mobility and have used also Symbian based devices in the development and testing of mobile technologies and services.

Course overview 

Symbian programming
The course focuses on the Symbian OS as an example of an operating system for mobile devices and handles the basic topics of processes, threads, file system, OS components, clients and servers, active objects, etc. Course includes lectures, exercises and an exercise work.

Mobile systems programming
The course focuses on development of mobile services and applications, as well as challenges in mobile systems in general. In practice, the students will work on both J2ME and Symbian C++ to gain practical experience in mobile programming.

Mobile Internet service architecture
The course is an introduction to mobile services. It provides the students with a usable architecture and a complete view of technologies available for use. It includes a lecture on Symbian OS.

University members engaged with Symbian 

• Peter Antoniac, PhD, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Information Processing Science
• Antti Juustila, Phil Lic, Researcher, Dept. of Information Processing Science
• Toni Räisänen, Assistant teacher, Dept. of Information Processing Science
• Kimmo Romppanen, Teaching Assistant, Dept. of Information Processing Science