Challenges and Creativity in IT Research

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Challenges and Creativity in IT Research

• Dunja Mladenic
• Institut Joef Stefan, Slovenia

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Location ofSlovenia
Europe
Slovenia
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Location of Institute
Department of Knowledge Technologies
Ljubljana
J. Stefan Institute
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IT Research today

• Male dominated
• The addressed research problems are
  gender-neutral
  
• Enwise report of European commissions expert
  group offering some general insides

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Low percentage of women in research and science
especially on higher positions

• Slovenia, 2001
• over 59 of all higher education graduates are
  women
  
• 49 of PhDs are held by women
• only 36 of all registered researchers were women
  
  
• Czech Republic, 2000
• only 2.4 of all women in research at the highest
  academic position (compared to 14.1 of men)
  
• men were 7 times more likely to get promoted to
  the highest position

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TO BE OR NOT TO BE a researcher

• before the World War I, only a small percentage
  of women were employed
  
• between the two World Wars many women to get
  employed and contribute to their family budget
  
• resulting in an increasing number of women in
  high schools and universities
  
• after the World War II, the new communist regime
  has recognized importance of education and
  provided for free education from primary school
  to the university graduation resulted in
  further increasing no. of students in communist
  countries

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Growing number of students
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Growing proportion of women
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Actions stimulating research career example of
Slovenia

• indirectly contribute to better conditions for
  researchers and especially women in research
  
• Special funding for young scientists
• enables a full time employment involving research
  while take graduate courses
  
• Support for families with children
• affordable day-care facilities and paid maternity
  leave

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Special funding schema for young scientists

• stimulating young people to go for MSc and PhD
• 5 years later
• instead of having 178 (as in 1985) there were 466
  students getting MSc degree (36 of them were
  women)
  
• number of successful PhD students also grew (from
  89 in 1985 to 121 in 1990)
  
• in 1995 among all the PhDs 36 were women,
  compared to 21 in 1985

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Support for family life

• socialism paved the ground for increasing role of
  women in society
  
• 1970s and 1980s opening many day-care
  institutions for small children, elderly homes,
  health centres
  
• pre-school children in day-care institutions
• 33 in 1979, 52 in 1987 and 58 in 1997
• 1974 women got right to freely decide on giving
  birth
  
• the maternity leave prolonged 84 days in late
  40s, 105 in 50s, 135 in 60s, 6 months in 70s, 1
  year in 80s (including the full compensation of
  income!)

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1976 parental leave introduced

• to be shared between the partners
• 1990s, only 2 of fathers used this
• 2003, fathers in Slovenia became entitled to an
  additional 15 days
  
• (to be extended to 90) paternity leave
• on the top of 1 year parental leave

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HOW TO SEE WHAT IS HERE

• to better understand the situation look into the
  available data
  
• data available, for instance gathered by funding
  agencies
  
• European commission collecting data about all the
  funded projects
  
• national funding bodies having evidence of their
  funding
  
• sometimes in electronic form, usually contains
  some written description of the proposed
  research, in most cases does not include gender
  information about the project leader and project
  team
• The data is available, it is not perfect but it
  is there

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European projects (abstract, list of
institutions,)
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Slovenia basic info. on researcher, projects,
publications
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Gender information rarely there, but

• European projects - in the last years the grant
  application forms also include a compulsory field
  on the gender of the project leader in each
  organization
• Slovenian national database of registered
  researchers contains gender information
  

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• An action plan for promoting and connecting
  researchers could be made based on the results of
  such data analysis

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Group of 15-20 people (researchers and students)
with several international projects
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Discussion

• Promote research in IT
• it offers many challenges some of them can have
  great influence to our everyday life and life of
  future generations
  
• in AI text, web and data mining
• a lot of creativity
• sometimes we are faced with questions of possible
  consequences of our research
  
• it is all but isolated from everyday life, too
  rigid or too technical
  
• freedom to express yourself, to be creative, to
  pursue problems that you find interesting
  
• challenge of
• developing new ideas and algorithms, implementing
  and testing them and, putting into some broader
  context of application

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