National Informatics Associations WS

Informatics Europe annually organises a workshop in collaboration with the National Informatics Associations (NIAs) in Europe. This year it was held on Wednesday, 30 October,  with the title "AI in Informatics Education and Professional Practice" and chaired by Pekka Orponen, Aalto University (Finland), Manuel Carro, Technical University of Madrid/IMDEA Software Institute (Spain) and Heri Ramampiaro, NTNU (Norway).

The two morning sessions at this year’s workshop continued the discussion initiated at last year’s meeting on the impact the dramatic GenAI developments are having on Informatics education, extending this now also to the changing competence needs in the industry. The discussion was primed by a number of short viewpoint presentations from the National Informatics Associations and industry representatives.

A third session presented for community discussion the updated IE/NIA report on Recommendations for Informatics Research Evaluation, as prepared by a joint IE/NIA task force established in response to the deliberations at last year’s workshop. (The earlier 2018 report is available to IE members on the Informatics Europe website.)

The workshop was open to all ECSS participants.

Workshop Rundown
Speaker bios and abstracts are available on the ECSS speakers page by clicking their photos.

09:00 - 10:30 Session 1: AI in Informatics Education and Professional Practice

• Josep Fernandez, CODDII - Conferencia de Directores y Decanos de Ingeniería Informática / Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), on "Shaping the Revolution: The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence Education in Spanish Universities"
• Jussi Jokinen, Finnish Society for Computer Science / University of Jyväskylä (Finland), on "Navigating AI in Higher Education: Lessons from Finland"
• Rosa Meo, GRIN - GRuppo di INformatica / University of Torino (Italy), on "Some experiences of the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Education"

10:30 - 11:00 Coffee break

11:00 - 12:30 Session 2: AI in Informatics Education and Professional Practice (cont’d)

• Alexiei Dingli, University of Malta (Malta), on "THE SILENT TAKEOVER - AI’s Dramatic Role in Redefining Academic Norms"
• Stefano Paraboschi, GII - Gruppo di Ingegneria Informatica / Università degli Studi di Bergamo (Italy), on "AI in Informatics Education and Professional Practice - Status in Italy"
• Heri Ramampiaro, NTNU (Norway), on "AI in research and education in the LLM era: The Norwegian perspectives"

12:30 - 14:00 Lunch

14:00 - 15:30 Session 3: Recommendations for Informatics Research Evaluation

• Discussion on Informatics Research Evaluation, Revised Report (Draft)

15:30 - 16:00 Summary and next steps