Summary...

Simply put: I learned a lot in this course. Not only my, but according to my observation most of students learned something new. Although it is different from person to person, but almost everyone leaned something which they did not knew before. I can divide it to five sections:

1. Looking at problems scientifically
   In this course, we understood to use science, with its proper tools. As M.Sc. students, we should find for the problems in daily life, look for its relevance (if it is possible) to CS/IT, and try to search for its root. Searching for its root means thinking about the nature of the problem and trying to find out why it is caused.
2. Role of research
   ‌Back in my B.Sc. studies, there was no talking about researches and researchers. The main difference between in bachelor and master in my opinion, is that as a M.Sc. student, we should be able to to researches and by being able to do researches, I mean feeling the urge to need to solve a problem by doing scientific researches. In this course, one of the first thing I learned, was that the world needs the researches. Almost everything which exists in today's technological life, is derived by researches.
3. Role of Computer Science to solve problems
   Beside the last point, we also learned to search for the problems related to our field. The good thing about this course is that there was so many talks and discussion (started by Errki, course's students, Ph.D. students and lecturers from other universities), about innovative research topics in our field. Right now, there are so many researches in different fields, like Educational Technology, Image analysis, Speak Recognition and so on, which are happening in our university, with introducing us to lots of new areas.
4. Research methods
   during the course (to be exact in the 4th week), expert group, each containing 3-5 students, did presentations. Each group presented some information about one research method. Roughly no one knew all the research methods presented during the course and the interesting fact is that, all the information will be useful, during our researches in master or doctorate level.
5. Characteristics of a good research
   We did learn characteristic of a good research; What should be done, and what should not. Also what a good presentation or an scientific paper should have. Almost everything which was needed for, from the whole structure to the small details, got covered by Erkki.

My Professional Identity

It is a good thing, that I am able to see myself as an IT\CS Scientist, who is aware of the generality of what is going on in the area, technologies, issues, challenges and so on. My main goal is as simple as:  

Making life easier, using Information Technology and Computer Science!

Before starting my M.Sc. at the UEF, I did pretty much technical projects in the area of Computer Science. Since Software Engineering has always been one of my interests, I have done some works in this area. Web developing, game designing, parallel computing, implementing network concepts, creating a social media and doing some researches in the area of operating systems and working in both MS Windows and Linux operating systems and analyzing both advantages, challenges and technical details, are the areas I put foot on and it made pretty much well aware inside world software engineering and information technology.

Since starting my M.Sc., and especially since beginning of  this course, I started thing on more abstract and societal aspects of the story. Reading many articles, doing reviews and criticism on some of them and getting familiar with the whole constructive body of research and getting to know lots of research methods, gave me more control on the outside, and the relationship between CS/IT and daily (scientific) life.

So, back into my professional identity again, I see myself more of a person, who is aware of CS backbone. I can find problems, find out their nature, suggest solutions and even make that solutions actually happen. You can call it with lots of name: IT specialist, IT consultant, IT manager or even project manager or software engineer. I don't have any dream career, but I have in mind, in a realistic world of course, is as a IT consultant for CS/IT related problems, in a wide variety of topics, or a project manager, to lead teams to make those solutions happen.

Exercise #2

Here, I am going to talk about the second question I liked in the exercise sessions. During one of the lectures, Erkki talked about something import happened recently in the Finland's Health Information System (HIS). There story is, Finns was able to develop a integrated HIS, that costs them 1.8 billion  euros. On the other hand, Estonians was able to the the same, with only 17 million euros. The exercise question had asked us, what you think the reasons would be.

Everyone has different answers, but almost everyone agreed on the fact that the main reason could be the difference in the nature of these twoHIS. As Maids Tiik, Estonian IT expert has stated in an interview, regarding this huge difference, the main idea behind Estonian HIS is ‘lightness’ and of course, they have developed the HIS from scratch, so we can conclude that from the beginning, they had the intention to develop a light, fast and space-optimized software. So, there is not any heavy process-consuming tasks that for sure require more or faster processors, much memory space to run and many technicians to constantly repair the bugs and problems due to overload of software.

Week #5

In this week's lecture, Erkki talked about two important matter, which every researcher is going to need, sooner or later: Quality of Research and Presentation Skills.
In every research, some parameters should be considered, so it can be considered as a scientific research.

1. Accountability: A perspective to quality and relevance of the research.
2. Credibility: Trustworthiness of the research and expertise of the research, plus subjective and objective aspects of the research itself.
3. Reliability: (The results of) the research should be reliable and make sense.
4. Validity: The extent which measured values are influenced by the factors, and generalizability of the results.

A scientific and logical research, should be verified, from these points of view, and lack of each one of these, will result in an unprofessional, unaccountable, ... work.

The other lecture was about some details about different aspect of a presentation, or what Errki referred to as Communication.

1. Structure: The structure of the research should serve one and only goal: Transferring the message of the whole research. Arguments, story and logical reasons could be used, to reach the goal better and also easier for the reader.
2. Language: Different kinds of techniques in text processors, like bold, italic, references, and reasonable usage of abbreviation and spell checking (and more importantly proof reading), can be usd by the researcher. Plus, it is important that every paper, chapter, section, paragraph and even every sentence should give one message.
3. Figures and tables: There are some important things about the way figures and tables should be used in a presentation or paper, Using captions, resolution, mentioning them in the text, referencing and using them if they're needed, are important facts which Erkki mentioned during the lecture.

Week #4

In this week, all students who had worked in 3-5 person groups, did presentations about different research methods. There were more than 10 presentations, both is Joensuu and Kuopio, and really interesting sessions to attend. Generally, every presentation talked about different aspects of both qualitative and quantitative research methods, like definition, background, history, pros, cons, philosophical stands, and examples of its application. My team's subject was about 'Focus Group', which you can find the presentation here.

I learned so many interesting things from each group's presentation, which everyone can definitely use in their researches, now or in the future.

Exercises #1

In this sections, I want to talk about two exercises which I liked more than other.

In 3rd week's homework, there was question, asking about our 'research field',  asking how it's gonna be. There reason I am putting this question here, is because this question made me think! I had to come up with: In what fields I am going to work, What are my milestones, When  I am planning to achieve these milestones.

I answered this question with two figures: One was showing different fields in computer science which I work on, and the other one was my milestones:

Week 3#

Positioning

In this week, the main subject of lectures, in my opinion, was about entering the actual research methods area, such bibliography. During the research, we should reach the knowledge of finding others and letting others t o find us.. Something like a 'compass', in the area of the research. Plus, we should determine some milestones in our research plan, because we should know what do we want, before we move toward it. We can always set some figures in our area, to learn from them; something that Erkki called it 'The Hall of Fame'.
It was a really good idea that Erkki decided to discuss us a real world example. He invited one of the students, to talk about his research (to be exact his work) area, the milestone he has achieved and the ones he has ahead and other details. I was good, cause it made me think about myself; my milestones, my area of work, timeline and my final goal.

Bibliography?

Moreover, Erkki discussed some other subjects, like: How to make a review of an article and one of the methods of research, Bibliography. The next lecture was about using LaTex, in area of bibliography, presented by one of PhD students. Bibliography is mainly about having a database of  articles. After the class I asked Erkki that will having a database of notes about article, be considered as bibliography (because that's what I do most of time, when I read articles) and his answer was positive. So currently, I'm working on a simple software, which the main idea is giving the ability of making notes, storing them in database and retrieving them when needed.

Research methods... Finally!

Another interesting part was making groups of 3-4 persons, to make presentations about research methods. Every team picked one research method to tell the class about its definition, history, techniques and introducing an CS paper or thesis, which have made use of this method. I think it's a good chance to learn about a research method completely and of course, learn from other teams' presentations.