Diversity in Informatics Research and Education

Diversity in itself is an integral part of Informatics as a scientific discipline, few areas of knowledge are more impacted by the interplay with other disciplines. This diversity becomes evident when we consider so many well-established multidisciplinary Informatics areas such as Bioinformatics, Health Informatics, Business Informatics, Digital Humanities, Computational Biology, Computational Life Science, Geoinformatics, …). In spite of this natural diversity, the increasing emphasis on more interdisciplinarity raises nontrivial questions for Informatics research and education. Questions such as “Does Informatics as a field benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration?”, “In which interdisciplinary areas does Informatics have the biggest (potential for) impact?”, “Interdisciplinarity and core Informatics: friends or competitors?”, “How should interdisciplinary research and teaching (including doctoral education) be organised?” are being posed by many leaders in Informatics research and education and were considered along the three days of the ECSS.

Considering human diversity, Informatics takes also a distinctive place among other disciplines. The persistent and stark gender unbalance is pervasive in the academic environment and the research community as well as in the workforce, and present in almost all countries in the world. This poses a unique threat for the future sustainability of the field as well as for the economic development of societies that are more and more reliant in IT knowledge for their proper function and prospering.

On the morning of Tuesday, October 27, ECSS portraited two aspects of Informatics Research and Education Diversity, namely, Interdisciplinarity and Gender Balance. The Session was chaired by Letizia Jaccheri, Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Jaak Vilo, University of Tartu and featured two prominent keynote speakers:

Ewan Birney, Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory was presenting the successful example of the European Bioinformatics Institute in bringing together Computing and Biology and establishing a flourishing environment for the Computational Biology area to become a major driver in both fundamental life sciences research and increasingly applied research and healthcare in Europe.

Vivian Anette Lagesen, Professor in Science and Technology Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology was addressing the persistent underrepresentation of women in higher education in Informatics from the perspective of a social scientist. Aspects like the political, economic and scientific ramifications were considered as well as a critical appraisal of why in spite of this widespread concern and also much resources spent on getting more women in Informatics, the results have been rather poor and how policies can be better designed for better inclusion for (gender) diversity in Informatics?