School of Computer Science

The School of Computer Science is located in Oviedo, capital city of the Principality of Asturias, an important financial, industrial and technological centre of the North of Spain.

Oviedo is a safe and beautiful city, being the administrative and political centre of the whole region. The city is communicated by plane with the main European and national capital cities: Madrid is just an hour away; Paris, London, Brussels and Barcelona are about hour and a half away while Zurich is only 2 hours from Oviedo.

Our school is part of the Catalanes Campus, and excellent place of over 5.000 square meters situated right into the city centre and communicated with the rest of Asturias by train, using the Cercanías Llamaquique train commuter station, which is just 8 minutes away on foot.

Our building is surrounded by several sport facilities belonging to the University of Oviedo, and is also very close to the university student residences and housing used by the majority of the foreign students that study in our university.

These sport facilities include:

• Snack bar.
• Swimming pool.
• Sauna.
• Gym.
• Soccer field.
• Athletics track.
• Sports centre (basketball, handball, …)
• Tennis court.
• Five-a-side football field.
• Parking.

Our centre provides an integral formation in Computer Science, including all the levels designed by the European Space of Higher Education (ESHE): graduate, master and doctorate.

As a result of our exclusive specialization in Computer Science, our learning strategies, lecturers, studies, classrooms and laboratories are exclusively centreed on it. We had not to make compromises in order to accommodate the requirements of other studies in our school.

Our facilities are specially designed to teach Computer Science:

• 16 laboratories with over 400 computers.
• 6 classrooms with 691 seats.
• 2 all-purpose rooms that can be used as:
  • Usability laboratories.
  • 3D filming studios.
  • Audiovisual recording and editing labs.
  • Brainstorming.
• Electronics laboratory.
• Wi-Fi Internet connection in all the areas of our building.
• Virtual machines that host an individual virtual server for every student of our master courses.
• Auditorium with 112 seats.

Our specialization on computer science allows us to have an excellent ratio of students per lecturer; our laboratory classes are limited to a maximum of 10 students per teacher.

This care for excellence, including state of the art computer science degrees, have allowed us to train excellent specialists in Computer Sciences, as well as a high level of academic success..

Computer Engineering is one of the most renowned degrees, having also very high employment rates. Our graduates are one of the most valued in the computer engineering field.

Several of our graduates hold very important positions in institutions and corporations all over the world, comprising different specialization fields of computer engineering. We give here some concrete examples:

• Google.
• Yahoo.
• Tuenti.
• W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).
• CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research).
• Deimos Space. (Aerospatial industry)
• Telefónica I+D.
• Canarias Astrophysical Institute.
• Nokia.
• Siemens.
• Intel.
• Dupont.

Through the internship program applied over the final year of our studies, the majority of our students manage to get a job even before finishing them.

Computer engineering is a discipline that is in constant and fast evolution, so breakthrough technologies that are widely popular today may became obsolete after a couple of years. In order to adapt our knowledge to this dynamic disciple, we must access to the state of the art data sources….and those are always published in English.

Because of that, we have chosen a bilingual approach to teach the subjects of our courses, offering to our students the chance to select their preferred language (English or Spanish) for their courses.

At present it is possible to study the subjects of our doctorate courses in English.

The recent growth experimented by Spanish companies require professionals with a global vision, able to assume the leadership needed to plan and execute European and international computer science related projects.

The use of the English language to teach the subjects of our courses is a very important aid to our students, but not the only one.

Our centre also provides our students the possibility to study part of their courses in foreign universities, by means of several collaboration and exchange agreements with European and American universities that we have been negotiating in the last few years.

In that sense, it is important to remark the possibility of study the European Doctorate (see FAQ).

In the enclosed tables and map you can see a list of foreign centres where our students can study part their courses.

In our centre you can study within an innovative environment, that has been a pioneer implementing educational models and technologies that were later adopted by other centres of the University of Oviedo: English classes, extreme programming, brainstorming, team work, project-based learning, distance learning, etc.

This dynamic approach has encouraged the development of several extra-academic activities that take place all along the academic year. Some of them are included next:

• Weekly conferences, Our institution was awarded by the participation in our conferences by lecturers so renowned as:
  • Vinton Cerf (Internet pioneer, Google vice president, Prince of Asturias award).
  • Bert Bos (World Wide Web Consortium, France).
  • Ivan Hermann (World Wide Web Consortium, EUA).
  • Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Head of Yahoo! Research, Chile).
  • Hiroshi Tamura (Head of Innovation of Hakuhodo, Japan).
  • Hugo Zaragoza (Head of Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain).
• Participation in International awards and contests In which we can remark the brilliant representation that our students had in the prestigious ImagineCup, qualifying to the 2009 finals in Paris.
• Student Associations, such as AIRE (robotics research), ARRAI (history and preservation of old computers), etc.
• eXtreme competitions, as our computer assembly competition, extreme programming, 10-minute videogame creation, etc.
• Courses and workshops, Videogame programming, Usability engineering, etc.