"Boston calling": TU Berlin and the Weizenbaum Institute organize a conference in USA

In addition to talks to be given by renowned experts such as Professor Gerald C. Kane from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and Professor Fábio Duarte of the Senseable City Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the program also includes a discussion forum on the highly topical theme of “Data Sovereignty – Privacy and Security in Consumer IT and Public IT”.

Representatives from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH), the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) will also be presenting opportunities for research in Germany. The conference is aimed at research alumni from a range of disciplines currently residing in the USA and Canada.

“The conference offers an outstanding opportunity to engage in a professional dialogue with scholars and researchers working in North America and to inform them of the the various options for a research stay in Berlin. The Weizenbaum Institute and its consortium partners represent a very wide range of possibilities in this regard,” says Professor Dr.-Ing. Ina Schieferdecker, head of the Chair of Quality Engineering of Open Distributed Systems at TU Berlin and one of the three founding directors of the Weizenbaum Institute.

TU Berlin's concept for a conference was one of the winning concepts submitted to a competition organized by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for a research alumni meeting abroad and was awarded a prize of EUR 40,000. Research alumni are international scholars who conducted research in Germany before moving to another country to continue their projects. As key figures, they can serve as ambassadors for their host institute in Germany and inform both experienced colleagues and junior scholars about the options for a research stay in Germany.

The Research Alumni Strategy competition is part of the International Research Marketing Project jointly operated by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the German Research Foundation and the Fraunhofer Society. The project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and is part of the “Research in Germany” initiative.

The TU Berlin Alumni Program is both one of the largest programs of its kind at German universities as well as one of the richest in tradition. It maintains contacts to some 35,000 alumni in 139 countries. Around 1,300 of these alumni are research alumni. The excellence of TU Berlin's research alumni strategy was first recognized by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2013. In the five years since then, the Alumni Program has organized a total of 20 continuing education seminars for its members both in Berlin and abroad.

The Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society was founded in 2017 and is run by TU Berlin and the other Berlin universities together with the University of Potsdam and Fraunhofer FOKUS and is coordinated by the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). The German Internet Institute conducts interdisciplinary and basic research into the interactions between digitization and society and outlines options for action for the networked future. This involves the close cooperation of social scientists, economists and legal scholars as well as experts from the areas of design research and information science.

Further links:

http://www.alumni.tu-berlin.de/researchalumni/

http://www.weizenbaum-instiut.de

http://www.alumni.tu-berlin.de

http://www.research-ingermany.org

http://www.forscher-alumni.de

Further information can be obtained from:

Stefanie Terp
Spokesperson of TU Berlin
Tel.: +49 – (0)30/314-23922
Email: pressestelle@tu-berlin.de
Web: http://www.alumni.tu-berlin.de/researchalumni/