Informatics Europe Bulletin - March 2019

Informatics Europe

Informatics Europe Bulletin - March 2019

Dear Members,

We are happy to send you the latest Informatics Europe bulletin, our bi-monthly newsletter for members.

In this issue:

Informatics for All Workshop in Brussels

On Wednesday 20th February 2019, the Informatics for All coalition hosted a workshop in Brussels for 50 representatives from leading European universities; a few major industry representatives were also present.
The background for the workshop is the document Informatics for All: The Strategy - launched and discussed at a panel in Brussels in March 2018 attended by leading computer scientists and European Commission leaders.
The workshop was an excellent event with highly engaged discussion of key challenges regarding Informatics for All. Five major challenges were identified and discussed:

  • Identifying a relevant curriculum (framework) for all;
  • Well educated teachers (and teacher teachers);
  • Development of associated subject didactics (teaching methodology);
  • Convincing stakeholders of the importance of Informatics as a fundamental discipline in the 21st century;
  • Resources.
A report and a "Brussels declaration" from the workshop will be published soon.

To know more about the Informatics for All initiative or getting involved contact Michael E. Caspersen (mec@it-vest.dk).

Call for the 2019 Best Practices in Education Award

The Best Practices in Education Award recognizes outstanding European educational initiatives that improve the quality of Informatics teaching and the attractiveness of the discipline. The 2019 Award is devoted to outstanding European Informatics educational initiatives that promote the inclusion and development of different student groups such as the elderly, immigrants or people with functional diversity. The Award is sponsored by Microsoft and carries a prize of EUR 5,000. Proposals should be submitted electronically, before 1 June 2019.

For more details visit the Best Practices in Education Award page.

Call for the 2019 Minerva Informatics Equality Award

The 2019 Minerva Informatics Equality Award is devoted to gender equality initiatives and policies to develop the careers of female faculty in Departments or Faculties of European Universities or Research Institutes and Labs. The Award seeks to celebrate successful initiatives that have had a measurable impact on the careers of women within the institution. Such initiatives can serve as exemplars of best practices within the community, with the potential to be widely adopted by other institutions. Submissions will need to demonstrate the impact that has been achieved. The Award is sponsored by Google and carries a prize of EUR 5,000. Proposals should be submitted electronically, before 1 June 2019.

For more details visit the Minerva Informatics Equality Award page.

Key Data Report 2019 Edition - Is Your Country In?

Informatics Europe is engaged in continuous efforts to collect key data on Informatics education in Europe and make it available in a useful and informative way to its members and the community. One example of these efforts is the report series "Informatics Education in Europe. Key Data” which we have been publishing since 2013. We have already started to collect the data for the 7th edition of the report, including data from 2013-2018, and encourage members who have access to reliable data sources on higher education in their respective countries to contribute.
How can you help:

  • finding and guiding the interpretation of the data from your country or
  • putting us in contact with people who understand your system and have access to the statistics.
For more details and sharing the data, please contact: svetlana.tikhonenko@informatics-europe.org.

Your country should not be left out of this edition of the Key Data Report!

Supporting CLAIRE - A European Vision for AI

Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe - A European Vision for AI (CLAIRE) is an initiative of the European AI community that seeks to strengthen European excellence in AI research and innovation. To achieve this, CLAIRE proposes the establishment of a pan-European Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe that achieves “brand recognition” similar to CERN.

The CLAIRE initiative aims to establish a pan-European network of Centres of Excellence in AI, strategically located throughout Europe, and a new, central facility with state-of-the-art, “Google-scale”, CERN-like infrastructure – the CLAIRE Hub – that will promote new and existing talent and provide a focal point for exchange and interaction of researchers at all stages of their careers, across all areas of AI. The CLAIRE Hub will not be an elitist AI institute with permanent scientific staff, but an environment where Europe’s brightest minds in AI meet and work for limited periods of time. This will increase the flow of knowledge among European researchers and back to their home institutions.

Informatics Europe encourages its members to publicly support CLAIRE either in the role of experts or on behalf of their institutions or research groups. A list of supporting organizations and experts can be found at: https://claire-ai.org/all-supporters

Association News

GDPR Compliance

To ensure that our organization complies with the regulations of the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 ("GDPR") Informatics Europe has recently published its public Privacy Policy and has created internal data protection policies and procedures. Our organization has always been committed to protect the security and privacy of the data of   representatives from our member institutions. However, untill now, we had never formally created the documentation required to officially and publicly comply with the issued EU regulations.

If you or your department administration have any questions, comments or requests regarding our Privacy Policy please write to: administration@informatics-europe.org

New Members

We are very pleased to welcome the following new members:

They join a constantly growing community of close to 140 members from 31 European countries. Check out the current members list.

Board Meetings

The Informatics Europe Board met for a full day face to face meeting in Zurich on January 25 and by teleconference on 22 February for discussions on a number of topics, including: organization of ECSS 2019, progress and outcomes high-level activities, progress reports from the Working Groups and membership drive, finances.
 
Next Board Meetings:

  • Wednesday, March 27, 9:30-16:30, Zurich (Executive Committee Only)
  • Friday, March 29, 16:00-17:00, Skype
  • Friday, April 26, 16:00-17:00, Skype
  • Thursday, May 23, 9:30-16:30, Zurich (Executive Committee Only)
  • Friday, May 24, 9:30-16:30, Zurich.
Don’t forget: as a member representative, you can submit agenda topics and participate as an observer in Board meetings. Let us know!

Members News

 

ACM Europe Summer School 2019 - Barcelona, Spain


The 2019 ACM Europe Summer School on “HPC Computer Architectures for AI and Dedicated Applications” will take place in Barcelona 17 - 24 July 2019, and is hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC-BarcelonaTECH). The summer school addresses young computer science researchers and engineers, and it is open to outstanding MSc students and senior undergraduate students. Accepted participants will spend a full week in Barcelona, attending formal lectures during the mornings and practical exercises in the afternoons. Registration is open.


European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information 2019 - Riga, Latvia


The 31st edition of ESSLLI (European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information) will take place in Riga, 5 - 16 August 2019, at the University of Latvia. The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information is an event organized every year in a different European country under the auspices of the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI). More details at: http://esslli2019.folli.info
 

LASER Summer School 2019 - Elba, Italy

 
As in previous years, organizers of the summer school are happy to offer a 10% discount on the registration fee to participants from member institutions of Informatics Europe at the 2019 LASER summer school (now its 15th edition). The school will take place in Elba, Italy, 1 - 9 June 2019. The theme is Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Software Engineering. The speakers are:
  • Shai Ben-David, University of Waterloo;
  • Lionel C. Briand, University of Luxembourg;
  • Pascal Fua, EPFL;
  • Eric Meijer, Facebook;
  • Tim Menzies, NC State University;
  • Bertrand Meyer, Politecnico di Milano and Innopolis.
Deadline for registration at early prices is March 31. Just mention “Informatics Europe member” in the field for additional comments on the form. More details at: https://www.laser-foundation.org/school
 

Université catholique de Louvain - ICTEAM Institute

 
INGInious, UCLouvain’s online grading tool, is helping the computer science department scale up to the growing number of students, while still guaranteeing a personalized feedback. Over the last year almost 600,000 exercises were submitted by students, more than 2,000 students have been using the system actively (over 3,000 if considering instantiations of INGInious outside the university) and almost 30 of University courses (including non-programming courses like mathematics, electronics and networks) are now using the tool to complement the practical exercises. The INGInious tool was developed at UCLouvain but is available as open source, distributed under an AGPL license. More details at: https://inginious.org  
 
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This space is available to include relevant news from our member institutions. If you would like to share your news (courses, awards, nominations…), please contact: svetlana.tikhonenko@informatics-europe.org. Deadline for the May issue is May 5, 2019.

New Jobs @ Informatics Europe Job Platform

Current openings on the Informatics Europe Job Platform. Your department/institute can advertise open positions on the Informatics Europe job platform too.

Extend your search to attract the best! The job service is free of charge for our members.

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