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In this issue:
Oct 23-25: ECSS 2023 in Edinburgh – Final Call
Don’t miss out your chance to participate in this year’s European Computer Science Summit (ECSS) in Edinburgh, UK. Register now until 16 Oct!
Between 23 and 25 October, we extend a warm welcome to informatics leaders and research enthusiasts at ECSS 2023 in Edinburgh. This event holds significant importance within the European informatics research and education community. Our primary objective is to bring together decision-makers from diverse backgrounds and levels, fostering international connections, the exchange of innovative ideas and collaborations in the field of informatics and related areas, all for the betterment of society.
Explore our continually updated conference schedule and individual session webpages, featuring esteemed speakers from across Europe! Recent additional line-up at ECSS 2023 includes:
Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for the latest updates. We look forward to meeting you at ECSS 2023 in Edinburgh!
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ECSS 2023 is co-organised with our UK’s member institute the School of Informatics of the University of Edinburgh, and sponsored by Huawei and Edinburgh Innovations, the University of Edinburgh’s commercialisation service. Interested in sponsoring or even hosting ECSS? Find out more here and drop us an email at administration@informatics-europe.org.
IE’s Recommendations Statement on Cyber Resilience Act
Informatics Europe supports the goals of the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), a European regulatory initiative, aiming at increasing the quality and security standards of IT products. This initiative is nearing its final legislative phase, but along with many in the Open-Source Community, Informatics Europe is concerned with certain aspects of its framing by the European Commission and Parliament. For this reason, Informatics Europe issues a recommendations statement on CRA, emphasizing the need to protect the individual and academic contributors to Open Source from the liabilities.
We recommend that the CRA excludes all activities before commercial software deployment and ensure that responsibility for CE marks (indicating compliance with EU regulations) lies with direct commercial beneficiaries of deployment rather than other actors. This approach aims to strike a balance between regulation and the preservation of Open-Source freedoms and diversity.
Read here for our full statement.
EU-funded Project: Inclusions4EU’s survey “Teaching of inclusive design in informatics”
Inclusion4EU, our new Erasmus+ transnational project, is now calling for participation for the debut survey on teaching of inclusive design in computer science (CS) and related programmes. Led by our member institute Technical University Dublin, Inclusion4EU is an Erasmus+ transnational project in collaboration with Informatics Europe, Télécom SudParis, Mälardalen University and SAP SSC Ireland. The project aims at supporting the teaching of inclusion in Higher Education and enhancing CS lecturers' and students' understanding of inclusive software design.
The survey seeks to understand to what extent inclusive design is taught across European higher education institutes, how it is taught and assessed, and what are the challenges of teaching inclusive design in CS and related programmes. Your participation in the survey will help the Inclusions4EU team on researching how to facilitate the teaching of inclusive design and create resources for academic staff that wish to embed it in their teaching. Your assistance in completing and sharing the survey would be greatly appreciated – help us here.
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Informatics Europe partnership contributes to the success of European funded projects such as Inclusion4EU, Ethics4EU and EUGAIN. Looking for a pan-European networking partner to strengthen and support your research or education projects? Reach out to us: administration@informatics-europe.org.
Ethics & Green ICT WGs – Webinar on “AI risk as a global environmental problem”
Our new Ethics webinar series, initiated by IE’s Ethics Working Group, was successfully launched on 29 September. You can find the presentation slides and recordings of previous webinars on our webinars webpage.
The Ethics webinar series will continue on 3 November with a webinar given by Olle Häggström from Chalmers University of Technology, our member institute in Sweden. During the webinar, Olle Häggström will explain why he thinks aspects of AI risk can properly be framed as a global environmental problem, and how we might get our act together and steer towards a long and flourishing future. The webinar is free and open to all. Register here.
Interested to engage in further discussions on potential policy actions that Europe can undertake to enhance green ICT? Join our Green ICT and ICT for Green Workshop at ECSS 2023 – see you there!
EUGAIN Action Chair Invited as Guest Editor for a Special Journal Issue on Gender Equality
Recognising EUGAIN efforts and impact on the topic, Prof. Letizia Jaccheri, chair of our COST Action EUGAIN, has been invited as one of the guest editors for a special issue of Journal of Systems and Software on gender equality, diversity, and inclusion in software engineering. Also invited as a guest editor is Prof. Lafifa Jamal from University of Dhaka, esteemed speaker at our ECSS 2021 conference in Madrid. You can watch her presentation about empowering girls through information and communication technology (ICT) education on our YouTube channel here.
To submit your manuscript to the special journal issue, please follow the full manuscript submission guidelines here.
Unlock Ongoing Benefits of IE’s CV Repository
Congratulations to two lucky applicants from University of Bamberg and National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), who each won a EUR 100 cash prize for registering and completing their profiles in our CV Repository during our exclusive summer promotion.
Since its launch in April, the IE CV Repository is empowering our informatics talents, helping them gain visibility among employers across Europe. We encourage students and recent graduates of informatics and related disciplines to add and update their profiles in our CV Repository. Boost your prospects of securing rewarding career opportunities, from job and internship offers to grants and exclusive invitations to industry events. The IE CV Repository is a free service dedicated to students and recent graduates affiliated with our member institutes.
Recruiters keen on utilizing the platform are welcome to get in touch with our office. Access is complimentary for IE’s academic and industry members. Sponsors can enjoy tailored access to our CV Repository through subscription to one of our sponsorship plans. We are pleased to arrange a free trial period for recruiters who express interest. Thank you for your support to our CV Repository, bringing together the next generation of informatics talents with employers across Europe.
Association News
Board & Executive Committee Meetings
- 22 Oct (Sun), 14:00-18:30, ECSS2023/Edinburgh
- 24 Nov (Fri), 16:00-17:00, Zoom
- 26 Oct (Thu), 08:30-16:00, Edinburgh (Executive Committee only)
Member representatives are welcome to submit agenda topics and participate as observers in board meetings. Let us know if you’d like to join us!
New Informatics Europe Members
We are very pleased to welcome the following new members:
They joined a growing IE membership of nearly 200 informatics institutions, national associations, companies and research centers from over 30 countries. Check out our current members list.
Don’t Miss These IE Activities & Benefits
We invite you to visit our Open Activities webpage frequently to discover how you can actively participate in and gain advantages from our activities. Here are a couple of noteworthy highlights for you:
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Complete the Survey on Teaching Ethics in Informatics at Higher-level Education Institutes across Europe: https://www.informatics-europe.org/survey/index.php/561146
Aiming at offering a better understanding of the needs and requirements of Informatics lecturers in terms of teaching Ethics, and building on the results of the Ethics4EU project, our IE's Ethics Working Group initiated the survey on teaching ethics in informatics. Given the recent rapid advances in technologies such as Generative AI and the emergence of forthcoming legislation such as the EU AI Act, there is a crucial role for educators to play in the instruction of informatics students with regard to the development of ethical technologies.
Regardless of whether your institution teaches ethics in informatics programmes or not, it is important for us to get your feedback on this highly important topic for the community. Please complete the survey, preferably by end of October. Results will be made available as a technical report via the Informatics Europe website. Thank you for your contribution!
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Showcase your institution with our Informatics Europe Research & Education Directory. The Directory welcomes all European institutions engaged in research and education in informatics/computer science/IT and related fields. We invite our European informatics community to explore the directory and encourage institutions to maintain accurate and up-to-date data. Follow the simple instructions here.
Events by Members
Members News
TU Wien – New Doctoral College on “Trustworthy Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems”
To make Austria competitive in the emerging field of Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems (ACPS), new professional figures trained to solve scientific problems relevant to ACPS are needed. For this reason, TU Wien decided to establish a new doctoral college on “Trustworthy Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems”.
The doctoral college will start in the winter of 2023 with eleven Ph.D. students of which TTTech Auto and B&C Privatstiftung will sponsor three positions, providing €825,000 in funding. The college is looking for nationally and internationally highly qualified researchers encouraging female applicants. Several training opportunities will be provided for doctoral students such as industrial internships, workshops, summer schools, and secondment activities or research stays abroad at top universities. A sustainable know-how exchange between industrial and university partners is also planned, focusing on foundational problems (basic research) in the field. To make this doctoral program sustainable and interdisciplinary, TU Wien plans to extend this pilot project to members of other topic-related faculties by jointly applying for additional funding. Read the full story here.
King’s College London – New software detects money laundering faster than ever before
Researchers from the Department of Informatics of King’s College London have designed an entirely novel approach to detecting money laundering, based on algorithms which rapidly identify when criminals are dividing a large sum of money into multiple smaller transactions between many bank accounts – a technique known as ‘smurfing’.
The algorithms run on data taken from several bank accounts which are represented as nodes on a large, complex graph, and the software is programmed to focus on the part of the graph where it detects the most suspicious activity. As detailed in a paper published in the Proceedings of the 2023 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, lead researchers Dr Huiping Chen and Dr Grigorios Loukides, together with Dr Robert Gwadera and Dr Solon Pissis, say the new software is over three times more effective than current detection methods and can also analyse larger amounts of data.
The software for the new tool is open source and freely available to access. Because it can be used with much larger amounts of data than conventional detection methods, researchers say it can analyse large amounts of data over long periods of time, filtering out and sounding an alarm to indicate to the bank when it detects suspicious activity. Researchers say the new tool also has potential use beyond the detection of suspicious financial activity, as it could optimise marketing campaigns by enabling retailers to find and detect the most profitable bundles of products; improving the accuracy of retail data at speed. Read the full story here.
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Would you like to share the latest updates about your institute to fellow IE members and professionals in informatics and related fields? Simply email the relevant news in brief to our Communication Specialist Kit Wan Chui to get featured in our Bulletin, LinkedIn and Twitter.
New Jobs @ Informatics Europe Job Platform
There are 9 new job ads 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!
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