2016 Minerva Informatics Equality Award

Informatics Europe proudly announces the first Minerva Informatics Equality Award devoted to initiatives which seek to encourage and support the careers of women in Informatics research and education. The first of this annual award will be made in October 2016 and will be sponsored by Google.

The Informatics Europe Minerva Informatics Equality Award recognizes best practices in Departments or Faculties of European universities or research labs that have been demonstrated to have a positive impact for women. On a three-year cycle the award will focus each year on a different stage of the career pipeline:

• Developing the careers of female faculty, including retention and promotion;
• Supporting the transition for PhD and postdoctoral researchers into faculty positions;
• Encouraging female students to enroll in Computer Science/Informatics programmes and retaining them.

The 2016 Award is devoted to gender equality initiatives and policies to develop the careers of female faculty.

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. Nominations will need to demonstrate the impact that has been achieved.

For 2016 examples of impact could include an improved success rate in recruiting, retaining and promoting female staff, increased satisfaction scores from objective surveys of staff experience, achievement of “beacon” status (i.e. being used as an exemplar within national or regional initiatives).

The Award carries a prize of EUR 5,000

The Award will be given to a Department or Faculty to be used for further work on promoting gender equality. To be eligible, nominated institutions must be located in one of the member or candidate member countries of the Council of Europe, or Israel. Institutions associated with members of the Informatics Europe Board and of the Award panel are not eligible.

The Award panel will review and evaluate each proposal. It reserves the right to split the prize between at most two different proposals. Moreover, noteworthy runners up may also be included as exemplars of best practice in future Informatics Europe publications.

The proposal should include:

• Contact information for the Head of the nominated Department or Faculty and the nominator (who can be the same);
• A brief summary or abstract (100 words or less) which can be made public.
• Description of the initiative (max 2 pages);
• Evidence of its impact (max 2 pages);
• An optional reference list (which may include URLs of supporting material);
• Optionally, one or two letters of support. The letters of support may come, for example, from female staff members who have benefited from the scheme.

 Deadlines:

• Public summary: May 1, 2016
• Full nominations: June 1, 2016
• Notification of winner(s): August 1, 2016

The Award will be presented at the 12th European Computer Science Summit (ECSS), in Budapest, October 24-26, 2016, where a representative of the winning institution will be invited to give a talk on their achievements.

Award Panel:

• Micheline Beaulieu, Emeritus Professor of Information Science, University of Sheffield, UK (Chair)
• Erika Abraham, Professor of Hybrid Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• Luca Aceto, Professor of Computer Science, Reykjavik University, Iceland
• Christine Choppy, Professor of Logic, Calculi and Reasoning, University of Paris Nord, France
• John Clark, Professor of Critical Systems, University of York, UK
• Dunja Mladenic, Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
• Pierangela Samarati, Professor of Information Technologies, University of Milan, Italy

Further inquiries:

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