LONG PROGRAM DESCRIPTION Preliminary Communications and Collaborative Work: the Coordinator

HU-0019

LONG PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Preliminary communications and collaborative work:
The coordinator institute, Department of Programming Languages and Compilers
(formally was part of the Department of General Computer Science) at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) has established and maintained relations with several universities and academic staffs in the field of informatics from Central Europe (Austria, Romania, Slovak Republic, etc.) for many years. This cooperation continued at a higher level when the four participating institutes (Department of General Computer Science, Institute of Informatics, Eötvös L. University, Budapest, Hungary; Department of Computer Science, Uni. Linz, Austria; Department of Informatics, University of Szeged, Hungary; Department of Computer Science, Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca) formed the H-81 CEEPUS network in 1998. Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv joined the network in 2001. From 2003 the network was extended by two new partners: University of Klagenfurt, Austria and Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia. This H-81 CEEPUS project has been running successfully for seven years. The Network won the Ministers' Prize of Excellence in 2004. Two new partners have joined the network from the academic year 2005-2006: Technical University of Košice (Slovakia) and Polytechnical Engineering College, Subotica (Serbia). From the academic year 2006/2007 we would like to add another new partner from Serbia, the University of Novi Sad.
Usually we have filled our quota and moreover we were allowed to use a few months over the quota. We had contacts with the H-66 network, we exchanged information and quota. We presented our experiences to the other networks at different meetings organized by the Hungarian NCO.
This CEEPUS project helps to deepen the relationship between the participating institutes. Furthermore it supports the development of a network of Central-European universities. During our collaboration we have developed courses which harmonize with the curricula of all participating institutes.

Hungarian universities including Eötvös Loránd University and the University of Szeged started a new common BSc. program in computer science in September 2005. The CEEPUS network considerably contributed to the development of this BSc. Programme, which is in conformity with the Bologna Process. Teachers gained experiences during their teaching activities at other universities. They used these experiences in the developing of the new curricula.

The visiting professors gave lectures about uncovered areas at the receiving institutes and they developed common curricula at selected new topics of informatics. The exchange students acquired up-to-date knowledge at the receiving institutes.
Some examples of guest professor courses of the previous and the present academic year:

Tibor Kmet (Nitra) gave lectures in Budapest and in Linz about “Mathematical modelling and simulation of biological systems.” Professor Lehel Csató from Cluj presented lectures in Budapest about “Estimations with Gauss Processes”.

Professors from Austria presented intensive courses in Budapest. Michael Sonntag (Linz) gave course about XML and “XML techniques for E-Commerce” at ELTE, Budapest. László Böszörményi (Klagenfurt) presented a series of lectures at ELTE about “Advanced topics in computer networking – Streaming of Continuous Media over Heterogenous Networks”. This course was recorded and presented on a CD in standard e-Learning format and available on the internet for the interested students. Markus Löberbauer (Linz) gave a course in Budapest on compiler construction.

Zoltán Porkoláb introduced students in Nitra and in Cluj into “C++ Template Metaprogramming”. Rozália Szabó-Nacsa presented a course in Linz about “C++ GUI Programming with Qt3”, Viktória Zsók gave a course in Nitra on “Parallel Functional Programming”. In autumn Zoltán Porkoláb gave in Klagenfurt a successful, 25 hours course about “Distributed Programming and Metaprogramming in C++” In the spring semester of 2005/06 there will be several courses at Cluj: Máté Tejfel (Budapest) will present lectures about “Verifications of Functional Programs” and Ildikó László about “Wavelets and Filter Banks in Image Processing”. Zoltán Istenes is invited for a course on robotics to Kosice and Linz. Judit Nyéky-Gaizler will present the “Comparison of programming languages” course in Linz.
Professors from Plovdiv have presented lectures at partner universities. Mariana Sokolova gave a lecture in Klagenfurt about “Test Classification and Development in the e-LearningEnvironment PeU”, while Hristo Krushkov at ELTE Budapest has presented “BULMORPH, a Morphological Processor for Bulgarian”. Anton Iliev (Plovdiv) presented a course in Szeged about “Simultaneous methods for solving non-linear equations”.

The Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of Cluj has also benefited from the CEEPUS program in many ways. In Cluj the lectures are not only in Romanian, but also in Hungarian and in German. Therefore they gladly accepted professors from Austria and Hungary. Prof. Zoltán Csörnyei from Budapest gives lectures in Cluj regularly in Hungarian about compiler construction. He has published a material on this subject for students in Cluj. Zoltán Horváth gave a series of lectures about functional programming which was part of the regular Functional Programming course at Babes-Bolyai University. János Szenthe presents lectures about “Lorentz-geometry and its application in the theory of relativity”, Katalin Pásztor-Varga about “Application of mathematical logic in programming and in electronic engineering”. Professor Hanspeter Mössenböck gives a Course about Compiler Construction in German at the University of Cluj.
During these years many results were presented at several conferences and published in proceedings, lecture notes and journals. Slideshows and other educational materials were prepared and disseminated at the host universities. Most of them are on the internet as university electronic lecture notes and text books for university students (for example: Iványi ed.: Algorithms of Computer Science I, Budapest 2004. and Iványi ed.: Algorithms of Computer Science II, Budapest 2005.).

A big number of the students taking part in the CEEPUS programme were postgraduate (PhD) students, who continued their PhD studies at partner institutes and gained state of the art knowledge on dynamically extending topics of informatics. About 15 PhD students from the universities of the network finished their PhD thesis much earlier due to their visits. Several students have spent a whole semester at the University of Linz and at the University of Klagenfurt and collected significant number of credits in various domains of computer science. Several undergraduate students from Plovdiv successfully completed courses in Computer Science in Budapest between 2002 and 2006. The students had the chance to participate in research programs at other universities. They have participated in joint works of the universities (publishing textbooks, writing publications and scientific papers as co-authors, translating famous books of the computer science literature, etc.).
The CEEPUS network made possible to gain professional experiences and to establish new research projects. The partners are coordinating many research projects getting together senior researchers and professors with talented young PhD students and graduate students. These projects and their disseminated results are well-known on national and international level (examples of research projects coordinated by CEEPUS members: JiniGrid; Correctness of Distributed Functional Programs; Compiler Generation Tools for C#; Static Single Assignment Form and Register Allocation in a Java JIT Compiler; Software Infrastructure for Pervasive Computing; Component-Based Programming: Tools and Languages for Component-Assembly; Flexible Notification Semantics in Distributed Objects Systems; Adaptation in Distributed Multimedia IT Systems; Modelling, Querying, Delivering Content Description and Quality Adaptation Capabilities of Audio-Visual Data; Establishment and Operation of the Regional Distance Education Study Centre in the University of Plovdiv; Formalisation of natural languages and working out of a linguistic processor; Development of methods for automated construction of machine dictionaries; Creation of a formal and computer model of a morphological processor; Creation of computer dictionaries and a morphological processor for the Bulgarian language).
The coordinator of CEEPUS Network H-81, Assoc. Prof. Zoltán Horváth received the “Teacher of the year in Informatics” award in 2002 (Hungary) partially due to the results of CEEPUS collaborations. Our CEEPUS network H-81 (Hungarian coordination) won the CEEPUS Ministers' Prize of Excellence in 2004.

Using the possibilities provided by other programs (e.g. ERASMUS, Tempus) Uni. Eötvös, Budapest has also established successful complementary co-operation in curricula development of undergraduate courses in informatics with its partner departments in Linz and in Klagenfurt. All participating institutes have relationships with several other universities besides the ones that participate in this CEEPUS network, which enlarges the dissemination possibilities of the results.

The 6th Joint Conference on Mathematics and Computer Science of Hungarian and Rumanian universities will be organized this academic year involving three CEEPUS partners.

In the academic year 2004/2005 we held the Central-European Functional Programming School (4-16 July 2005) supported by the European Commission Socrates Programme Erasmus IP project and by CEEPUS (http://plc.inf.elte.hu/cefp). This event leads to new relationships between universities, common research and curricula development on international level.
Planned exchange actions:
The aim of this application is to provide funding for continuation and even for raising the level and the intensity of educational co-operation between the involved institutes. However also the publication of the results of these collaborations is very important. Without this CEEPUS project the present co-operation would become formal and we would lose the results of the established relationships.
In case of successful competition in the 2006/2007 academic year we would provide the possibility for the best graduate and postgraduate students to participate in the education programme and international research projects at universities abroad.
We would like to update and improve the graduate and post-graduate courses in informatics by inviting lecturers from the collaborating institutes, especially in the field of object-oriented and functional software development, software technology, distributed systems, compiler construction, distributed multimedia systems and dynamic systems that are currently among the most intensively researched areas in computer science. This project would also help us in providing international environment for our students. These plans are strongly connected to the long term development strategy of the Faculty of Informatics at Budapest and of the partner institutes. The long term strategy includes the research and the education of programming methodology, functional and object-oriented program development models, compiler construction. These subjects are involved also in this application.
Undergraduate students either spend a whole semester at the host institution or participate in an intensive course. In both cases students receive credits for the completed courses. On the Traffic sheet 1 month quota means the quota for a PhD student or for a student who enrols on an intensive course.
Additional value:
From the academic year 2003/2004 we started to organize intensive courses. Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv organizes every spring an intensive course. The topic in 2004 was “Java applied programming with network aspects”, in 2005 "Information theory and data compression", and the planned topic of the intensive course in Plovdiv in 2006 is "Programming with PL/SQL". Thanks to the state of the art topics, these intensive courses are very preferred by the students. Every year there are participating about 15 students from Budapest and 8 from Cluj. Participating in an intensive course is a good opportunity for students to gain basic knowledge in a special field of computer science which is not taught at their home university. Organizing intensive courses is a very effective way of using CEEPUS scholarships. Since the duration of an intensive course is only 1 month, more students can participate and get credits at the host university.
Eötvös Loránd University has organized last year the “Central-European Functional Programming School” in the framework of the Socrates Erasmus Intensive Programme (http://plc.inf.elte.hu/cefp). There was additional financial support from CEEPUS to cover some parts of the costs. This event led to new relationships between universities, common research and curricula development on international level. This cooperation will be continued at the Workshop of Implementation and Application of Functional Programming Languages (http://plc.inf.elte.hu/ifl2006), organized by ELTE in September 2006. Our network plans to organize a summer school next academic year too. It is planned to be held at Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj in 2007. Ten universities were participating in the last school including five partners from our CEEPUS network (ELTE, Cluj, Nitra, Plovdiv and Szeged). There were participants from Linz and Kosice too. The number of the participating universities may increase till 2007 – as also our network is growing. There will be 10 topics covered in the field of functional programming. The lecturers will be the most recognised functional programming specialists in Europe. This event will bring together students and professors from our CEEPUS and Erasmus partners and from other European countries.

Eötvös Loránd University will organize the Symposium of Programming Languages and Software Tools in 2007 involving CEEPUS partners and participants from Estonia and Finland.

The Hungarian National Scientific Conference of Students in computer science will be held in 2007 at Miskolc. This national conference is organized every two years for the best students to present the results of their scientific research (ELTE Budapest, the coordinating institute organized this conference in 2005). The conference is not only for students from Hungary, but also for guest students from other Central European countries. There will be several participants from Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca like in 2005, and we expect additional motivated students from our CEEPUS network partners to participate with their scientific work. On the other hand Zoltán Csörnyei from the Eötvös Loránd University is regularly invited into the jury of the Scientific Conference of Students at Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. The series of the conferences for the students give new dimensions to our CEEPUS network and to the Central-European higher education cooperations.

In the academic year 2005/2006 the network was extended by two new partners (the universities of Kosice and Subotica).
The new partners needed some time to integrate and get to know the other partners. Technical University of Kosice provides its experiences in Functional Programming, Compilers, Parallel Programming, Computer Graphics, Object Oriented Programming, Virtual Reality, Sytems Supporting Software Engineering, Polytechnical Engineering College of Subotica provides its experiences in application of e-learning in engineer training, especially in teaching of mathematics. The enlargement of the network was successful. Several students got interested in the new topics and applied for a scholarship to one of the new partners.