Welcome to the Europe Region Special Section

The computing community throughout the European Region is championing many enterprising industry, academic, and government initiatives to further develop the field and ensure a workforce prepared to take it on.

The articles in this special section, written by some of the leading voices in the region, tell stories of informatics and ICT innovations, Web science in Europe, the EuroHPC, future research directions planned for this vibrant part of the world, and much more.

With its population of over 740 million people and 24 official languages, Europe provides a unique environment for the development of a distinctive computing landscape. We believe you will see this reflected in this first Europe Region Special Section.

We invited a mix of practitioners and academics from across the Europe region, not only European Union members but also Switzerland and Israel, to suggest topics for inclusion in this Europe Region Special Section. We brainstormed article ideas with nearly two-dozen colleagues from across the region at a workshop in Paris in July 2018. The article pitches generated at that workshop went through two further rounds of review and refinement. As you will see, the resulting collection of articles offers an excellent view of some of the most exciting activities in the region.

We are proud to present this section which, like the China Region Special Section published last November, consists of two kinds of articles: shorter “Hot Topics” articles that set the context for European developments in computing, and longer “Big Trends” articles that describe exciting developments in areas such as high-performance computing, embedded systems, and computing education. Half of the Hot Topics articles describe the European consumer computing market, the innovation ecosystem, demographics, and the research agenda; the remaining articles briefly describe specific initiatives and recent developments.

Europe has played an important role in the development of the computing discipline, from the pioneering work of Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse through the modern day. The following pages show that it continues to be a vibrant, distinctive part of the global computing community. We are sure the reader will find much of interest in the following pages.

— Panagiota Fatourou and Chris Hankin
Europe Region Special Section Co-Organizers

EDITORIAL BOARD

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Andrew A. Chien
eic@cacm.acm.org

DEPUTY TO THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Lihan Chen
cacm.deputy.to.eic@gmail.com

CO-CHAIRS, REGIONAL SPECIAL SECTIONS

Sriram Rajamani
Jakob Rehof

EUROPE REGION SPECIAL SECTION CO-ORGANIZERS

Panagiota Fatourou
University of Crete

Chris Hankin
Imperial College London

Figure. Watch the co-organizers discuss this section in the exclusive Communications video. https://cacm.acm.org/videos/europe-region

Figure. Back row from left: Yota Papageorgiou, Julie McCann, Steven Newhouse, Joaquim Jorge, Koen De Bosschere, Guillaume Toublanc, Michael Caspersen, Chris Hankin. Front row from left: Fabrizio Gagliardi, Paola Inverardi, Andrew Chien, Panagiota Fatourou, Vassiliki Petousi, Lihan Chen.