ECSS 2009: Challenges and Opportunities in Informatics

This year, 80 of the leading CS faculties, department chairs research institutes in Europe gathered in a humid Paris for the European Computer Science conference to delve into the new role Informatics should play among the sciences. Put forward this year was the need for a multidisciplinary approach uniting research, curricula as well as education.

The several keynotes of this first day of conference addressed different aspects of the matter. While Mark Harris opened the conference with a keynote on ¡¥The Role of Informatics on Addressing the big Global Challenges¡¨, he stressed the importance of an all-rounder, well trained IT specialist, able to take on a much-needed leadership role in the field. He pointed out to the need for multi-disciplinary training in order to produce graduates who are both generalists and specialists as the only answer to fill the leadership gap inherent to the field of ICT at the moment. The talk raised quite a few questions, particularly salient seemed to be the issue that a lot of faculty are either not aware of the multi-core ¡¥tsunami¡¦ coming their way or don¡¦t know how to tackle it.

After him, European Commission Head of strategy for ICT Research and Innovation, Khalil Rouhana, then presented the EU strategy for ICT research and innovation, explained the gaps of private & public sector investments in the EU compared to the US. Proportionally, companies invest much less in ICT R&D in EU member states compared to the US but more surprisingly the EU public sector invests even less (60% lower). He linked it to the fragmentation of markets present in the EU where a lack of a single European market for innovative ICT, a fragmented public demand as well as R&D investments explain in great part these shortcomings. Luckily, 3 new initiatives in private-public partnerships around the fields of energy efficient buildings, energy efficient factories and green cars have recently been put in place by the EU to remedy this.

Wendy Hall- ACM President- closed the keynotes in beauty with an expose of her study of the Web and its evolution. One of her conclusions highlights nicely the central issue of the conference; computer science is a relatively new discipline which is still working through some of its issues and trying to come to terms with its identity; while it had a huge impact on society, it is still taught in a very boring or limited way in schools, underestimated by public spending and in dire need of leadership. But these challenges are also loaded with opportunities such as parallelism, multi-disciplinary approaches, etc…will they be taken advantage of?

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The path to a better world is paved through Informatics: European Computer Science Conference 2009 Paris

It was a sunny day last Thursday in Paris after a very stormy night,  I was sitting in the sun filled conference room with 80 deans and Rectors of the top universities in Europe attending the European Computer Science Summit where the first Keynote speaker Dr. Mark Harris, Intel GMBh highlighted how science addresses many of the urgent global issues.  Examining global warming Mark talked about the effect of the increase in temperature, such as coastal flooding, increasing incidences of malaria and  hunger,  the effects of the changing age of world population,  increased water scarcity and how these issues will affect our future.     

The theme of this conference is ‘Informatics among the Sciences – Scientific principles in Informatics’  focusing on the multidisciplinary approach of combining research,  curricula and teaching.  By combining efforts of other engineering diciplines with Computer Science we can move forward on tackling  the global issues and challenges facing us today. 

Dame Wendy Hall addresses the European Computer Science Conference

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Dr. John Busch from Schooner Information Technology

You may have already watched some of the videos that were recorded in the Intel booth at OSCON, but if not, you can still catch up on the earlier videos:

• Ken Drachnik from Canonical on Landscape for Ubuntu Systems Management
• Sven Dummer from Wind River on Developing Open Source Mobile Applications
• Joseph Hill from Novell talking about Mono
• Glynn Foster from Sun Discussing OpenSolaris

In this video from the Intel booth at OSCON, Dr. John Busch, President and CEO of Schooner Information Technology talks about where we are in computing now and gives some perspective on trends for the future in data centers, appliances and technology. He also talks in more detail about web 2.0 applications and the cloud computing infrastructure and the building blocks used to support those applications.

You can watch more of our open source videos on the multimedia page.

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