Communications of the ACM

WI TH ITS POPULATION of over 740 million people and 24 official lan- guages, Europe provides a unique environment for the develop- ment 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

Panagiota Fatourou is an associate professor in the department of computer science of the University of Crete, Greece, as well as a collaborating faculty member at the Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology, Hellas (FORTH).

Chris Hankin is co-director of the Institute for Security Science and Technology, and a professor of computing science, at Imperial College London in the U.K.

Copyright held by owners/authors.

DOI: 10.1145/3309913

Welcome to the Europe
Region Special Section

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

Back row from left: Yota Papageorgiou, Julie McCann, Steven Newhouse, Joaquim Jorge, Koen De Bosschere, Guillaume Toublanc, Michael Caspersen, Chris Hankin.