CIVIT is the Open Science Promoter of the Year: reusable and well-managed open data for visual technologies

CIVIT, Centre for Immersive Visual Technologies, is a research infrastructure unit at Tampere University. The centre focuses on the advanced visualisation of 3D content, 3D video and sound capture, immersive visual displays, and immersive user experiences. 

This year, Tampere University granted CIVIT the Open Science Promoter Award. CIVIT was awarded for promoting responsible openness of research data.  

The award criteria praise the research infrastructure for being at the forefront of producing and opening up visual resources. These materials have been published on CIVIT's own website and are described in the Finnish Fairdata service, which provides access to data from all fields of science. 

Other material, such as open code, has been made available on GitHub for software developers to share and collaborate on code. 

The theme of this year's award, which was presented for the third time, is promoting the responsible openness of research data. 

"The concept of Open Science strongly supports the dissemination of science, and building professional networks for future collaboration. Open Science is a good tool for this," says Director of CIVIT, Professor Atanas Gotchev. 

CIVIT follows good data management and allows research to be reproduced 

Professor Gotchev emphasises the reproducible research within the CIVIT infrastructure. The infrastructure wants to clarify how it can support people in their work and also convey the role and importance of open science. 

"The key is to allow people reproduce the state of the art using our facilities and datasets. We like to think of CIVIT not as a place, but as a combination of three main components. We need to have the most advanced equipment, the proper data and expert people to help, because the infrastructure is meant to be widely used". 

Overall, the CIVIT infrastructure provide research facilities, equipment and expertise in the emerging field of immersive visual technologies. With immersive visual technologies, the ultimate aim is to convincingly reproduce reality and to relay information in a natural way. CIVIT was established to help the research community. 

CIVIT's open resources implement the FAIR principles. According to them, the data should be findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable. 

”I think the principles are a guideline to act in a responsible manner with research data. As for platform to share data, it’s important that the data has a unique identifier and is described, so it’s as easy to use as possible”, says Staff Scientist Jussi Rantala.  

”If you decide to share data, first, you have to be sure that the data is high quality, this makes it reusable for others,” states Assistant Professor Robert Bregovic, responsible for project management at CIVIT.   

“We invite people to move data forward: update it, extend it, criticise it. They can do all of it when they have access to it," Gotchev concludes. 

The multimodal visual data creation and storage model developed by CIVIT has been widely used in other research, for example, by visiting Marie Curie researchers at Tampere University. Tampere University has been leading the doctoral education in the field of immersive imaging on European scale, coordinating four big Marie Sklodowska-Curie doctoral programs in the field. Doctoral students across Europe have been using CIVIT’s public software libraries and annotated datasets in their studies and theses. CIVIT also enables business collaboration by providing data for companies' testing and development needs.  

In 2022, Finland's first Volumetric Capture Studio was established at the CIVIT facilities in Hervanta. It is seen as a natural fit for research in image processing, machine vision and interactive technologies, but it can also be used in creative fields, arts and media. Professor Gotchev pointed to opportunities for human sciences, such as studying interaction, body language and emotions. 

CIVIT has indeed assisted in publishing a multimodal dataset that provides ethically compliant and diverse volumetric data from participants displaying posed facial expressions of human emotions and subtle body movements while speaking. Another example is a proof-of-concept dataset containing data from test scenes designed for mobile work machine applications.  

Check out the publicly open datasets and software on the CIVIT website.  

Open Science as quality control 

In their own scientific publications, CIVIT-supported researchers have provided links between the publications and the underlying data. The benefit of open science is that the results can be evaluated by others. Bregovic, Gotchev and Rantala share the view of open science as a quality control. 

”This helps advancing the science, because others don’t need to redo the work that was done here, and shared as open code for example. Anyone can take your data and verify the results out of it. And as for visibility, whenever you provide open data or code, it’s much higher probability to get cited,” researchers reflect. 
Professor Gotchev's first encounter with open science was some 25 years ago, when he was able to use the WaveLab code created by Jonathan Buvkheit and David Donoho at Stanford Universiry for wavelet analysis of signals and images. 

"It was an eye-opener when the code was openly available. Because the code was exact, you could clearly see all the building blocks, for example, a part that generates a certain figure," recalls Gotchev. 

“Open science is a relatively new term, but in practice it has been around for many years. The difference is that today the amount of data is much greater. Storage and distribution, for example, have become more complex,” says Bregovic. 

Data must respond to challenges 

When opening the data, researchers must describe how the data was obtained, what the physical and computational setup were. Then there is the question of proper licensing and deciding what others can and cannot do with the data or code. In fact, licensing and working with companies when a framework agreement is signed are the situations where Professor Gotchev and his colleagues would prefer the data issue to be more pronounced. Overall, however, CIVIT has received a lot of great support from Tampere University's partnership, legal, and library services. 

CIVIT also offers customised services for the creation and curation of datasets.  

The CIVIT team is grateful to all the students who have produced and managed data resources. For CIVIT, it is also important to preserve the legacy by hiring researchers, since curating data requires human resources.  

“We like to see data as a process from the beginning to the publication. It’s not just to be put somewhere,” Gotchev emphasises.  

"The most important thing is that the data respond to real challenges and therefore have social value. Data must be reusable for research and help others". 

CIVIT has an opportunity to promote open science and challenge thinking when the annual IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) gathers in Tampere in September 2026. The event will bring more than a thousand international experts from academia and industry to Tampere to discuss the latest advances in image and video processing and computer vision. 

Prize encourages open science practices 

Open science is an important part of Tampere University’s operations. With the Open Science prize, the University thanks community members for their successes, encourages them to invest in promoting the responsible openness of science, and highlights successful open science practices. 

The aim of open science is to promote the high quality and societal impact of science and research by enabling co-creation and making scientific results openly available to everyone.  

The award is granted based on suggestions submitted by members of Tampere University community. The value of the award is €5,000 for a group or €2,000 for an individual. The final decision on the awardee(s) is made by the the Open Science Steering Group. 

The prize is jointly funded by the University of Tampere Foundation and the Industrial Research Fund at Tampere University of Technology.