HICT Pitch & Pizza competition event brought computer science students and researchers together

HICT Pitch & Pizza competition event was held in Computer Science building’s Learning Hub on Wednesday 7^thNovember. The event was organized by the Helsinki Doctoral Education Network in Information and Communications Technology (HICT) in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science.

The core idea of the event was to practice science communication and pitching skills in a fun and informal way. Secondly, the event offered an opportunity to meet colleagues working in ICT-related research topics at Aalto and University of Helsinki. Overall 10 doctoral students or post doc researchers gave interesting and timely pitch talks and the audience had an opportunity to vote for their favourites.

HICT awarded three SLUSH tickets for the best pitch talks – two of them went to doctoral students (Amin Babadi and Sebastian Szyller), and one ticket was awarded for the best post doc pitch (Behrouz Jedari). The event turned out to be a success, and it will likely be held next autumn as well. “Science communication skills are nowadays essential part of researcher’s work, and thus it is important to have opportunities to practice pitching in a relaxed and informal environment”, says HICT Coordinator Aija Kukkala.

The Helsinki Doctoral Education Network in Information and Communications Technology (HICT) is a collaborative doctoral education network hosted jointly by Aalto University and the University of Helsinki, the two leading universities within this area in Finland. The network serves as a collaboration platform for doctoral education combining all the relevant subfields of computer science and information technology at Aalto University and the University of Helsinki.