What Is SoSE?

SoSE provides funding for 10 PhD students in the focus areas of the doctoral programme during 2012-2015. Student positions are applied roughly once a year.

SoSE is a doctoral programme supporting PhD students in Finnish universities in its focus areas. SoSE is funded by the Ministry of Education in Finland and by the Academy of Finland. SoSE is coordinated by University of Oulu.

SoSE is organized into two subschools according to its focus areas. SE-SoSE subschool (2/3 of funded positions) acts on software engineering focus area within seven universities. IS-Oulu subschool (1/3 of funded positions) is devoted to information systems research at the University of Oulu.

The positions are generally intended for students in the founder universities, but some part of the SE-SoSE positions can be applied also by students in any university in Finland. This part is decided separately in each announcement of open positions.

SoSE also organizes workshops on various topics belonging to the focus areas; supports the creation of advanced courses on the focus areas; and provides funding for the participation of its students in high quality international conferences.

Focus

SoSE combines research areas that are essential for industrial software production from multiple perspectives and with different research methods. The focus areas of the graduate school are software engineering (SE) and information systems (IS).

Software engineering area focuses on the research problems related to the software engineering process, software design and architecting, software implementation, software project management, and software testing, quality assurance and maintenance. The research covers the study and development of methods and tools used for the various phases of software development and empirical software research. Software engineering emphasizes practical applicability of the results to be evaluated in industrial contexts.

Information systems research studies various software based systems and their development processes in a broader context, emphasizing the benefits gained from information technologies, and the quality and efficiency of the development processes.