Academia-Industry Sessions

As part of the ECSS 2023 program, Informatics Europe organised sessions with Industry on Tuesday afternoon, 24 October, and Wednesday morning, 25 October, open to all participants, and chaired by Lenuta Alboaie, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași and Jim Ashe, University of Edinburgh. A Tuesday afternoon session was dedicated to informatics life-long learning challenges, while a Wednesday session to entrepreneurship and commercialisation of research.

In a world undergoing accelerated technological evolution, it is evermore important that students have the ability to adapt to new technology landscapes. While academia is concerned with continuous learning, in industry this does not always hold true. Tuesday aftern0on session "Plugging the Informatics Skills Gap" addressed the importance of upskilling and reskilling in the Computer Science ecosystem and offered the opportunity to explore together ways to improve the skills gap issue.

Computer Science and related informatics courses in academia focus on providing students with the technical background and best practices to write elegant and efficient algorithms. While it is essential to equip students with these technical abilities, we must also raise students’ awareness of how they may use their intellectual property to form innovative companies and equip them with the tools and knowledge they need to bring their technologies to market. In the Wednesday morning session "The Journey from Higher Education to Entrepreneurship", the University of Edinburgh and other universities shared their experiences. We also heard from some successful entrepreneurs about their learnings.

*Please note that the photos below are better viewed when applying zoom out.