ERCIM Latest News

The responsible and ethical conduct of research in science and engineering is critical for excellence, socially relevant impact and public trust. Digital and connected technologies have increasingly become intertwined with our individual and collective daily lives, mediating our communications, profiling our behaviours, changing how we think, live and act, and presenting new tensions that interrogate the applications of standard guiding ethical principles. Research in digital sciences - including computer science, automatic control, robotics and applied mathematics - raises many new ethical challenges resulting from interactions between humans and deep tech. Researchers in digital sciences face tough ethical questions in their daily activity for which there aren't yet consensual answers.

The ERCIM Selection Committee for the Cor Baayen Young Researcher Award unanimously selected Rianne de Heide, nominated by CWI, as the winner for 2023. An honorary mention is given to Denis Merigoux from Inria.

Dr. Rianne de Heide's research activity stands out for its quality and breadth. Her work covers a wide variety of topics within the general field of mathematical statistics, with focus on learning from data. In her work, Bayesian learning is used as a tool, sometimes critically evaluated, sometimes extended, always with a strong mathematical-theoretical component. Her work reaches breadth by (a) the aspects of learning from data/statistics that are studied: optional stopping, misspecification (statistics with incorrect but useful models), philosophical problems in induction, bandits, and (b) the scope across various other disciplines: philosophy and logic, psychology, and machine learning and AI.

The ERCIM EEIG board of Directors is pleased to announce the appointment of Dominique Hazael-Massieux as the new manager of ERCIM EEIG, effective from June 2023. Dominique will be taking over from Philipp Hoschka, who has served as the manager since December 2016.

A collaborative workshop on privacy, transparency, sovereignty, and security was held on 27-28 April 2023 at the Inria Mediterranean Campus in Sophia Antipolis. The workshop was co-organized by the European projects TRAPEZE and E-CORRIDOR, and co-sponsored by Inria and ERCIM - the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. The two-day workshop aimed to explore new ideas, share insights and collaborate on solutions that can benefit society in the fields of privacy, cybersecurity, and technology. This report presents a brief overview of the presentations and discussions held during the workshop.

The Institute of Software Engineering and Technology (ITIS, or ITIS Software) is a unit of the University of Malaga dedicated to scientific and technical research [L1]. The main objective of ITIS is to contribute to the development and application of software technologies through research, innovation, training, and technology transfer. Due to the transversal characteristics of software, the Institute is an interdisciplinary center in which specialists in different technological areas and application domains work together to advance these technologies. ITIS is oriented towards the foundations, tools, and applications of Software Technologies and Software Engineering for industry and society, with a special focus on five main areas: Automated Software Engineering, Data Science and Engineering and Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Smart Networks and Services, and Applications of Software Technologies and Software Engineering. The working language at the Institute is English.

Pedro Merino, Director of ITIS (left) and Bjoern Levin, RISE, President of ERCIM.

Co-organised by TRAPEZE and E-CORRIDOR Innovation Actions, co-sponsored by ERCIM and Inria, held at the Inria Mediterranean Campus in Sophia Antipolis on 27-28 April 2023.

The ERCIM postdoctoral Fellowship Programme has been established as one of the premier activities of ERCIM. The programme is open to young researchers from all over the world. It focuses on a broad range of fields in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. Deadlines for applications are currently 30 April and 30 September each year. http://fellowship.ercim.eu

The ERCIM Ethics Working Group organised jointly with Inria and CNPEN (the French National Pilot Committee for Digital Ethics) a forum targeted at scientists and Research Ethics Boards on 17-18 October 2022 in Paris. This successful event, which brought together researchers interested in ethics of digital and connected technologies, consisted of keynotes, presentations and tutorials, and provided ample space for interactive sessions and open discussions. 

Most of the recorded presentations are available on the ERCIM Youtube channel. See also the report in ERCIM News and the Workshop programme with links to the slides and the recorded presentations.