University

Aalborg Universitet stands out among older and more traditional Danish universities with its orientation on interdisciplinary problem-based work. Since its establishment in 1974, AAU has built a worldwide reputation for its problem-based learning model of problem-based project work - also known as The Aalborg Model - and by extensive collaboration with the surrounding society. Within the fields of technical and natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and health sciences, AAU currently educates more than 14,000 students, ranging from students at preparatory courses through doctoral-level candidates. These programmes aim to fulfill the requirements of both the private and the public sectors of the labour market. While AAU also provides elite programmes within a few selected areas (including data-intensive systems), it is taking steps to expand its reputation as an internationally recognised leading university within problem based learning. AAU's programmes already attract approximately 10% international students, coming from different countries around the world. The international perspective is also reflected through the university's active employment of international academic staff, the establishment of student exchange programmes and international research collaboration. AAU is characterised by combining a keen engagement in local, regional, and national issues with an active commitment to international collaboration. In 2011, AAU acquired 672 new external grants and administered external projects with a total turnover exceeding 56 million euro. It has expanded its strong research areas ranging from basic research and applied research within all the academic fields represented at the university to world class research areas within selected fields. AAU has a strong focus on Information and Communications Technology (ICT), centered at the Faculty of Engineering and Science, where approximately one third of all AAU students are enrolled. The strong focus makes AAU Denmark's leading ICT university, attracting close to 39% of all new ICT students in Denmark. By further expanding its multidisciplinary research activities, increasing its collaboration across different research and knowledge areas, and strengthening its position as a network university, AAU has become one of the leading innovative universities in Europe. Today, AAU has/had approximately 150 EU projects in FP6 and FP7 alone.

Department

The history of Computer Science at AAU goes back to 1976. In 1999 Computer Science became an independent department within the Faculty of Engineering and Science. The Department of Computer Science offers, apart from four programmes for Danish-speaking students, three international master's programmes including one on Data Engineering. It also offers two elite education programmes within computer science: Data-Intensive Systems (headed by Prof. Pedersen) and Embedded Software Systems. The excellence of these programmes is recognised in the international benchmarking of Danish computer science in 2006: "AAU has developed programmes with a strong professional orientation [... that ...] make an important contribution to Danish computer science." Currently, the department has 38 professors and 52 academic staff members, including more than 40 Doctoral candidates, and educates 600 students with 10% international. Along the line of the university, the department performs world-class international research within four main areas: database and programming technologies, distributed and embedded systems, machine intelligence, and information systems. The department has 12 ongoing or recent FP6 and FP7 projects.

Group

The Database and Programming Technologies unit (DPT) is one of the four research units of the department. In 2006, DPT expanded its activities by establishing the Center for Data-Intensive Systems (Daisy) as a powerful platform for research and industry collaboration. Currently, DPT/Daisy, headed by Prof. Pedersen, consists of nine professors, four post-doc researchers and 14 doctoral candidates. The overall topics of the group include business intelligence and data warehousing, spatio-temporal data management, location-based mobile services, and programming languages and tools. Among the over 40 national and international collaboration partners, the close industry partnership with leading OLAP vendor TARGIT and the collaboration with TUD in the MIRABEL Project (FP7) emphasise the group's research focus on business intelligence. Within the BI area, the group is working on data warehousing of spatiotemporal, multi-granular, and web data, near-real-time data warehousing and data streams, scalable and distributed DWs, open source business intelligence tools, and mining of data cubes and spatio-temporal data. In a recent research evaluation, covering the period 2006-2010, the independent international evaluation committee concluded that DPT/Daisy is "[...] among the top-5 database groups in Europe, on level with institutions like ETH, and with an analogous significant reputation at world level."

Learn more about the IT4BI-DC team at Aalborg.