Annual Report 2022: HIIT Organisational Structure
The Board of HIIT, nominated by the host universities for a 4-year period at a time, decides on HIIT’s overall research strategy and focus areas. The Scientific Advisory Board provides scientific guidance and criticism for the Board a few times per decade. The Director, Vice Directors and the Focus Area Leaders constitute the Steering Group responsible for inter-focus area coordination and planning. The main instruments of HIIT are ambitious ocus areas that bring together several research groups with different expertise. Our focus areas focus on the strategic recruitment activities (see Section on HIIT Fellows). In addition to these, HIIT is coordinating a lot of activities that support the Helsinki ICT community as a whole through the instruments Community Support and Doctoral Education.
The organisation chart of HIIT in 2022.
At Aalto University, HIIT is administratively supported by the Department of Computer Science and the associated service personnel. Similarly, at the University of Helsinki the administration is handled together with the Department of Computer Science. However, the activities of HIIT span much wider beyond these departments, and HIIT actively supports the Helsinki ICT community as a whole (see the Community Support programme). In research, the activities of HIIT focus on supporting cross-cutting, grand-challenge type focus areas that involve people from not only the CS departments of the two host universities, but also researchers from the SPA and COMNET departments of the Aalto School of Electrical Engineering and at the University of Helsinki people from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, the Helsinki Institute of Life Science and the Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities. In administration, the key people supporting HIIT activities were Alan Medlar (coordinator of HIIT), Christina Sirviö (coordinator of HIIT and Doctoral Education), and Kaisa Pekkala (coordinator of FCAI).