Informatics in Higher Education
Fifth Conference on Informatics in Higher Education Debrecen, Hungary

J.UCS Special Issue

The Conference series "Informatics in Higher Education" is a three-annual event held since 1993 for the fifth time in Debrecen, Hungary. It is organized by the University of Debrecen in collaboration with the John von Neumann Computer Society and other Hungarian professional societies which are active in the field of informatics. This conference is an important meeting point for all those interested in education, research and development in the field of informatics. Accordingly, the main topics of the conference series include

• Education
• Curicula
• PhD courses
• Connection between academia and industry
• Didactics
• Research
• Basic research
• Applied research
• Application of computer science in other disciplines
• Impact of EU projects
• Development of the institutions
• Strategic plans in computer science
• Role of the human factor
• Role of information technology in the integration of the institutions
• Accreditation processes
• Infrastructure and information systems
• Library information systems
• University LAN's
• Management information systems of universities

In the 2005 Conference which was held from 24 to 26 August, special attention was devoted to informatics education since this field of education is in the forefront of the implementation of the Bologna process in Hungary as informatics BSc courses were the first BSc courses offered in Hungary in 2004. (You may find further information at the home page of the conference: http://agrinf.agr.unideb.hu/if2005/)

The 2005 Informatics in Higher Education conference attracted nearly 400 participants from academia and industry. Although this is a national conference there were participants from the neighboring countries Austria, Rumania and Slovakia, but also from Germany and from the USA. Naturally most of the talks dealt with local problems, but many contributions may be of interest for the international computer science community as well, especially in the framework of the European Higher Education and Research Area. For this reason we selected a collection of 26 papers from the 270 presentations held at the conference which may be of broader interest. Of course, the published papers underwent the usual review process. We thank the referees for their valuable comments which helped to increase the clarity of the presentations and the value of the published papers.

The editors wish to thank Professor Hermann Maurer (Managing Editor) of the Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS) for providing us with the opportunity of editing this special issue on Informatics in Higher Education.

We wish all readers of this Special Issue of J.UCS that they may find the papers of personal interest.