A Historical Note

The Institute of Information Processing started originally with undergraduate education in the discipline of numerical analysis. Research in numerical analysis started in 1972 with the establishment of a professor chair.

The operation of the department of Informatics under the initial name of Administrative Data Processing - ADP (Swedish acronym ADB), side by side with the department of Numerical Analysis, started also in 1969 with undergraduate education. Graduate studies started in 1977, and continued until 1984 under the supervision of the late professor Staffan Persson from the Stockholm School of Economics. At the end of 1984 Kristo Ivanov was appointed as first professor. The first PhD degree was conferred in 1988. In 1994 a new adjunct professor chair was established in the area of Computerization and Organization of Work (Heinz Leymann, retired in 1997). An additional chair in informatics was later established, shared with Mid-Sweden University, and to which Gunilla Bradley was appointed in 1997.

The end of the eighties was a period of rapid growth for the whole institute of information processing. The Swedish parliament voted a bill for a build up of information-technological research at the university. Both the faculties of mathematical & natural sciences and of social sciences kept working on special research programs in the area.

The growth of the institute also led to the construction of a new campus building for a "mathematical & information-technological center". This growth motivated eventually in July 1994 a division of the institute into two separate and completely independent departments - Administrative Data Processing changing its name to Informatics (in Swedish: Informatik), and Technical Data Processing changing its name to Computing Science (in Swedish: Datavetenskap).

Computer equipment includes a network of personal computers, mainly Macintosh and SUN workstations.

The county of Umeå (about 100.000 inhabitants) has grown rapidly in the last years, and it offers rich cultural life, outdoor activities, and good communications facilities including hourly flights to Stockholm (50 minutes). The University (http://www.umu.se/) is composed of five major faculties: Arts, Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Medicine, Odontology, and Social Sciences. Our university also incorporates Colleges of Teacher Education, Fine Arts, Design, Umeå School of Environmental Studies, Institute of Technology, and the School of Business and Economics. The university (http://www.umu.se/) has by now about 3900 employees including 180 full professors in 100 departments, and about 23.000 students, including more than 1.300 graduate students, with a total budget allocation of about 2.000 million crowns.