Report from the European Computer Science Summit

Posted at the CCC blog, observations from the 2009 European Computer Science Summit, recently completed in Paris (I run with the wrong crowd; my meetings are in places like Pittsburgh and DC — nice enough places, but not Paris). The Summit is the annual meeting of Informatics Europe, an organization that is the Euro analog of the North American Computing Research Association.

A recurring theme at this meeting was the concern that the European scientific research community still does not fully appreciate computing as an intellectually vibrant research discipline in its own right; instead the field is often viewed as an enabler of research in other disciplines. A number of discussions centered on ways in which the computing community can do a better job in explaining the field to others.

More in the post, including news that the ACM announced the ACM Europe Council, “a new effort recently launched by ACM to recognize and support European ACM members and activities.”