Informatics Europe Bulletin - May 2021    

Dear Members,

Welcome to the May edition of our monthly Bulletin. We hope you enjoy it!

In this issue:

Ethics4EU Workshop - Digital Ethics: Can we do better?

On the 20th of May, Informatics Europe and the Ethics4EU team met online for the most recent Milestone Meeting to join forces and to discuss the current working status of the project. One announcement of the event is the Ethics4EU Workshop - Digital Ethics: Can we do better?, which will be hosted by Institut Mines-Télécom/Télécom SudParis and take place on Tuesday 15 June 2021. The programme is yet to be confirmed, but will include presentations from researchers, teachers, journalists, politicians and industry professionals to discuss the topic “Can we do better in Digital Ethics?”. The workshop will also include a poster presentation by students from different European universities.

You can already sign up for the workshop here.

ECSS 2021 - Career Development Workshop for Young Researchers

As part of the 2021 European Computer Science Summit (ECCS) held in Madrid/online, the Workshop on Career Development for Young Researchers will take place on Monday 25 October 2021. The goal of the workshop, organised by Elisabetta Di Nitto (Politecnico di Milano) and Standa Živný (University of Oxford), is to support young researchers (PhD students and Postdocs) in the development of their soft skills related to presentation abilities, networking, developing a research plan, and connections to industry.

Participants of the workshop will attend invited talks and have the opportunity to actively participate in discussions. Moreover, they can submit their CV (up to 2 pages) and a research statement (up to 5 pages), on which they will receive feedback and suggestions for improvement.

To find out more about this great opportunity, please have a look at our workshop website.

Data Collection on Informatics Curricula for Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Informatics Europe and several National Informatics Associations are joining forces to work together on the Data Collection on Interdisciplinary Informatics Curricula. By collecting basic data about the Informatics contents in interdisciplinary curricula, the goal is to prepare an overview report on the situation and possible curricular recommendation by the end of the year. Therefore, a special meeting took place via Zoom on 16 April 2021.

We kindly ask our community to participate in the data collection and to fill out the
online questionnaire until Tuesday 25 May 2021.

Reminder: Call for 2021 Informatics Europe Awards

Until Tuesday 1 June 2021, Informatics Europe is accepting submissions for the 2021 Best Practices in Education Award, devoted to educational initiatives in the domain of cybersecurity, and the 2021 Minerva Informatics Equality Award, devoted to gender equality initiatives encouraging female students to enrol in Computer Science/Informatics programmes and retaining them.

For more details visit the Best Practices in Education Award page or the Minerva Informatics Equality Award page.

Association News

Board Meetings

• Friday, 28 May and Monday, 31 May, 09:30-12:30, online
• Friday, 25 June, 16:00-17:00, online
• Thursday, July 8 and Friday, July 9, 13:00-17:00, online (Executive Committee only) 

Don’t forget: As a member representative, you can submit agenda topics and participate as an observer in Board meetings. Let us know in case you are interested in this offer!

New Informatics Europe Members

We are very pleased to welcome the following new members:

• CNRS - Bordeaux University - INP, LaBRI
• Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Informatica
• University of Calabria, DIMES

Change of Office Staff

Since the beginning of May, Svetlana Tikhonenko is on maternity leave. We wish her all the best for the new chapter in her life and are looking forward to welcoming her back at the beginning of November.

Members News

LIP6, Sorbonne Université, France - ERC project demonstrates a quantum computational advantage with photonic technology

The goal of the ERC project QUSCO "Quantum superiority with coherent states", led by Eleni Diamanti, CNRS research director at LIP6, is to demonstrate an advantage in computation time for specific tasks thanks to the use of quantum resources. Practical demonstrations of such an advantage are particularly challenging and have attracted much attention in the last years from both academic and industrial teams, including Google or IBM.

In recent work published in Nature Communications, the LIP6 team together with collaborators at the IRIF lab of Université de Paris have shown such a quantum computational advantage exploiting high-performance quantum photonic technology. The task was the verification of the solutions of problems belonging to the NP complexity class in an interactive proof setting, where the prover who holds the solution to the problem wishes to unveil a limited amount of information to the verifier. This setting may be useful in server-client cloud computing or a future quantum internet, similarly to zero-knowledge proofs used for identification, authentication or blockchain.

Université de Rennes 1, France - Europe Needs Strong Software Research

Software research is crucial for a strong and independent Europe. A small group of Informatics Europe members from France, Finland, and the Netherlands have written a one-page document as a call to action for increased funding of software research in Europe.

You are thus cordially invited to sign the petition and distribute it to whoever might endorse this message (colleagues, heads of departments, policymakers, etc.). Feel free to share on social media using the hashtags #EuropeNeedsSoftwareResearch #FundSofwareResearchEU.

University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy - New Master's Degree Course in "Digital Heritage. Museums, Archives, Libraries"

From the next academic year, a new Master's Degree Course in "Digital Heritage. Museums. Archives. Libraries" will start at the University of Bari Aldo Moro. It is the first one in Italy on Digital Heritage. The goal is to combine a consolidated scientific tradition in the archival and library fields, present in the Department of Humanities, with computer and computational sciences present in the Department of Computer Science. The Master covers several fields: historical, archival-librarianship, computer science, linguistic-literary, legal, historical-artistic and physical-mathematical.

Innopolis University, Russia - 2021 RAEX University Ranking

Innopolis University was ranked the 8th best university in Russia based on the quality of education in the area of engineering according to the 2021 RAEX University Ranking. This is a significant achievement for the young IT university that is teaching on all levels of education: Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD. The students are taught by the 263 faculty members and research staff that represent 24 countries and have working experience in Samsung Research, Intel, and the United Nations among others.

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This space is available to include relevant news from our member institutions. If you would like to share your news, please contact Franziska Hauffe.

New Jobs @ Informatics Europe Job Platform

There are 13 new job openings on the Informatics Europe Job Platform!

Extend your search to attract the best and advertise open positions on the Informatics Europe job platform free of charge!