Informatics Europe Bulletin  - February 2023

Dear Colleague,

A very warm welcome to many new subscribers who joined us after our recent communications campaign! Bulletin is now fully open to both members and non-members of Informatics Europe. We hope you can benefit from our monthly updates, and look forward to welcoming you as a member and strengthening our collaborations via future activities.

In this issue:

Higher Education Data Portal: new data available

As announced in January, our Informatics Higher Education Data Portal, one of IE’s most used and valued services, has recently been updated with the data of 2020/21 academic year. It now covers statistics of 11 academic years for 23 countries on students enrolled and degrees awarded at Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD level, including gender distribution. Other data is also available in the Portal for selected countries, such as a comparative analysis of some key academic positions and corresponding employment details, including estimations of academic salaries.

With plenty of opportunities for data visualization and in-depth analyses, the first five-year dataset is publicly available. After a quick registration on IE website with the institutional email address, IE members can benefit from the exclusive access to the full dataset (including the possibility to download it) as well as the much-needed data about academic salaries.

If you wish to drive or contribute to the creation of analytical outputs and reports, and propose improvements to the IE data portal functionalities, please join our permanent Data Analysis and Reporting working group. We also welcome any individual feedback and contribution, regardless of your country statistics being featured on the Portal or not; please contact svetlana.tikhonenko@informatics-europe.org in such cases. Let’s join forces to make the status of informatics education of more countries better known at a European level!

European-funded project: COST praises EUGAIN young researchers and innovators

Why women should choose IT as a career? The young researchers from our EU-funded project the COST Action European Network For Gender Balance in Informatics (EUGAIN) have developed a series of short videos to explain more. The European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) praises EUGAIN for its ground-breaking use of YouTube shorts to reach their target audience. They have featured the series in the COST Action corner, a recent COST article on diverse tech workforce and COST’s live blog for the gender equality month.

Need more inspirations to design interventions for the inclusion of younger generations in computer science? Join EUGAIN’s Young Researchers and Innovators (YRI) team on 1 March afternoon in their project presentation meeting where young researchers from four different countries would share their experiences and latest achievements. Meeting is by invitation only - please reach out to EUGAIN YRI Coordinator Anna Szlavi for the online access to the meeting.

Take part in Diversity and Inclusion Survey

IE's Diversity & Inclusion Working Group has launched a mapping study project concerning research activities, tools & initiatives to cope with diversity and promote inclusion.

If you have been involved in one of such initiatives: understanding, respecting, and preserving diversity and at promoting and facilitating inclusion, please consider filling in the questionnaire here on or before 17 February. The project’s first objective is to develop and publish a mapping study on the diversity and inclusion area. Furthermore, it aims to increase the visibility of the ongoing diversity and inclusion activities hoping that they will determine the development of best practices in the field.

Read more about the survey and how it will be conducted here. On behalf of the Diversity and Inclusion Working Group, thank you very much for answering the questionnaire!

Last spots available for Online Academic Leadership Development Course Spring ‘23

Limited spots are still available for our next online cohort of Academic Leadership Development Course starting in March 2023. The course is open to academic leaders at all levels of experience in informatics and related disciplines, especially for emerging leaders. Registration opens until 17 Feb.

If you are looking for an in-person opportunity to learn and mingle with colleagues across Europe, our next Residential Academic Leadership Course is right for you! Designed for senior/established leaders, the course will take place between 27-30 June at Krainerhütte Conference & Event Hotel in Baden bei Wien, Austria. Register early to enjoy the special early bird offer! We look forward to welcoming you in either course!

European Statistics Awards – web intelligence competition

On behalf of Eurostat: the statistical office of the European Union, we are pleased to inform you about the ongoing Web Intelligence Competition within the European Statistics Awards Program. The competition aims at stimulating innovation in the area of Web Intelligence for European statistics.  The Deduplication Challenge focuses on identifying potential duplicate job postings on websites as a basic condition to produce high quality statistics from online job advertisements.

Do you know how to code in Python or R? Register by the 1st of March 2023 and try your chances on your own or with a team of peers. You can win up to €10 000 for the Accuracy award, €3 000 for AccuracyPlus award and €10 000 for Reproducibility award. Striking first place in all three categories, your team could win up to €23 000.

Please find more information about the timeline and awards in the article on the Eurostat website: Try your chances: Web Intelligence Competition!

Association News

Board Meetings

• 24 February (Fri), 16:00-17:00, Zoom
• 31 March (Fri), 16:00-17:00, Zoom

Don’t forget: As a member representative, you can submit agenda topics and participate as an observer in board meetings. Let us know if you’d like to join us!

Executive Committee Meetings

• 24 March (Fri), 09:00-16:00, Rome

Don’t Miss These IE Activities

New Informatics Europe Members 

We are very pleased to welcome the following new National Associations members from Austria and France:

• Informatik Austria
• SIF – Societé Informatique de France

They joined a growing IE membership of over 160 institutions, associations and industry members from 33 countries. Check out our current members list.

Members News

German Informatics Society – TrainDL – How well are AI and data literacy education embedded in policy?

Funded by the European Union in the Erasmus+ program, TrainDL is a European education policy project with partners in Germany, Lithuania and Austria. Anna Sarah Lieckfeld and Elisabeth Schauermann from German Informatics Society are TrainDL’s project lead and policy advisor respectively.

TrainDL’s central goal is to provide evidence-based recommendations for the structural implementation of data literacy and AI skills in curricula and education systems across Europe. To evaluate the state of policies on data literacy and AI education and identify possible gaps in current policy, the TrainDL Policy Monitor was developed: check out the interactive map and compare systems for policies in all three countries here. It is still work-in-progress. Currently, they are focusing on improving and extending the monitor with policies from other countries. If you can provide input such as information regarding further policies or suggestions for improvement, please reach out here.

Politecnico di Milano – Donatella Sciuto is the new Rector of the Politecnico di Milano

Donatella Sciuto was elected Rector of the Politecnico di Milano for the 2023/2028 term. Prof. Sciuto, who graduated in Electronic Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano in 1984, is full professor of Information Processing Systems at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering. Congratulations!

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Would you like to reach out to other IE members? Simply email our Communication Specialist Kit Wan Chui with the relevant news from your institute to get featured in our Bulletin, Twitter and LinkedIn.

New Jobs @ Informatics Europe Job Platform

There are 19 new job openings on the Informatics Europe Job Platform.

As members, you can advertise and extend your search to attract the best candidates for your open positions on the IE job platform free of charge!