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.
Front row from left: Fabrizio Gagliardi, Paola Inverardi, Andrew Chien, Panagiota
Fatourou, Vassiliki Petousi, Lihan Chen.
Watch the co-organizers
discuss this section
in the exclusive
Communications video.
https://cacm.acm.org/
videos/europe-region