5. November 2019
Prof. Lynda Hartmann: »Computer Science along the New Silk Road: Competition or Collaboration?«
Manager Research & Strategy at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam
Perhaps surprisingly, there has been active research collaboration between INRIA, France, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences for more than 20 years through the joint LIAMA initiative. In the early days, the collaboration could be seen as stimulating our Chinese colleagues to aspire to publishing in international venues. As can be clearly seen from the Elsevier report "Artificial Intelligence: How knowledge is created, transferred, and used" published in 2018, this situation is changing rapidly.The question now is to what extent Europe can compete with a system that is being stimulated with huge amounts of money and, perhaps more importantly, attracting Chinese scholars who have trained abroad to come back to China and run their, well-funded, research groups there.
The response at the European level is to collaborate openly in science. What does this mean for computer science departments and research institutes in Europe? What does this mean for individual researchers? Should we feel threatened? Or should we welcome the opportunity to collaborate with our excellent Chinese colleagues to accelerate the development of our field?