Date and time: Tuesday, 6 October 2026 at 17:00 CEST (UTC+2).
Speakers: Gaétan Hains (Université Paris-Est Créteil, France), Paola Inverardi (Gran Sasso Science Institute, L’Aquila, Italy), Alexander Wolf (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA);
Moderator: Hannes Werthner (TU Wien, Austria)
Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping or even disrupting higher education and prompting fundamental questions about the future of Computer Science as an academic discipline and its place within the university. CS departments around the world are rethinking their educational mission, research priorities, and institutional role. This panel will explore three central questions:
- What should we teach in the future?
- How will we conduct research, and what will be the key research topics?
- What should be the role of Computer Science within the university of the future?
Join us for a discussion on how the discipline can respond to the opportunities and challenges created by AI.
Slides and recording of the panel will be made available on our Youtube channel.
How to join
Join the panel via Zoom. Password: wmYZPH0r.
The panel will be livestreamed and recorded on the Digital Humanism YouTube channel.
Speaker and moderator biographies
Gaétan Hains
Gaétan Hains is a professor of computer science in the Faculty of Science and Technology at Université Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC) and a member of the Algorithms, Complexity, and Logic Laboratory (LACL). He is currently vice-president for digital affairs of the university.
A former recipient of scholarships from Quebec, Canada, and the Commonwealth, he graduated from the University of Oxford and served as a faculty member and researcher at the University of Montreal and then the University of Orléans before joining UPEC in 2006. He has served as director of computer science laboratories, program manager for software programs at the French ANR, and head of R&D teams in the private sector. He is the author of more than 100 publications in Computer Science and supervised a dozen PhD students.
Paola Inverardi
Paola Inverardi is Rector of Gran Sasso Science Institute, L’Aquila, Italy. She was Professor of Computer Science at University of L’Aquila, and Rector of University of L’Aquila from October 2013 to September 2019. Paola Inverardi’s research area is in the application of rigorous methods to software production in order to improve software quality. In the last decade her research interests concentrated in the field of software architectures, mobile applications and adaptive and autonomous systems. Currently she leads a project to develop software solutions to protect users’ ethics in the interaction with autonomous technologies. Inverardi served in the editorial boards of IEEE, ACM, Springer and Elsevier Journals. She has been general chair or program chair of leading conferences in software technology (e.g. ASE, ICSE, ESEC/FSE) and chair of the ICSE and ESEC Steering Committees. She has been member of the ACM Europe Council and she is vice-chair of ACM EUTPC. She is member of Academia Europaea. She is the Italian National Delegate for the European H2020-ICT Committee and the Italian representative in the Eurohpc Governing Board. She is 2021- G20 sherpa for the Italian Ministry of University and Research. She has received a Honorary Doctorate at Mälardalen University Sweden and a Honorary doctorate at Shibaura University, Tokyo Japan, she has received the 2013 IEEE TCSE Distinguished Service Award http://www.cs-tcse.org/awards.
Alexander L. Wolf
Alexander L. Wolf is a Distinguished Professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz (US). He served as Dean of the Baskin School of Engineering from 2016-2026.
Prof. Wolf received the B.A. degree from Queens College of the City University of New York, majoring in both Geology and Computer Science. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Prof. Wolf was a Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories (now AT&T Labs Research and Bell Laboratories) in Murray Hill, New Jersey, before joining the University of Colorado faculty. During his years at the University of Colorado, Prof. Wolf held the ranks of assistant, associate, and full professor. He also held the Charles Victor Schelke Chair in the College of Engineering. At the University of Lugano he helped found the Faculty of Informatics, the first computer science faculty in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland. Before moving to his present position, Prof. Wolf held a chaired professorship in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London.
Prof. Wolf’s research interests span the areas of distributed systems, networking, and software engineering. His achievements include seminal work in software architecture, business analytics, and information-centric networks. His more recent projects concern cloud computing, data-center networking, and service-based systems hosted on MANETs.
Prof. Wolf served as President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and chaired the Executive Committee (EC) of the ACM Council, the governing authority of the association. He was also a founding member of the ACM Europe Council and was a long-time participant in the ACM Distinguished Speakers Program (DSP). He previously served as Secretary-Treasurer and then Vice President of the ACM, Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) Governing Board (SGB), Vice Chair and then Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Software Engineering (SIGSOFT), and Chair of the ACM Software System Award committee. He served on the editorial boards of the Research Highlights section of ACM’s flagship publication Communications of the ACM (CACM), the ACM journal Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), the IEEE Computer Society journal Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), and the Wiley journal Software Process – Improvement and Practice (SPIP), and has chaired a number of international program committees.
Prof. Wolf is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the AAAS, a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS), holder of a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award, two-time recipient of an ACM SIGSOFT Research Impact Award ([1],[2]), recipient of both the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award and Distinguished Service Award, and recipient of an Alumni Award for Outstanding Achievement in Research from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Hannes Werthner
Hannes Werthner is a retired Professor for E-Commerce at the Faculty of Informatics, TU Wien. Prior to joining TU Wien, he had several professorships at Austrian and international Universities. His research is in several fields such as Decision Support Systems, E-Commerce, E-Tourism, Recommender Systems, and lately in Network Analysis and Text Mining. Besides research and teaching he is active in starting new initiatives, such as the Vienna PhD School of Informatics and the i2c (Informatics Innovation Center). In the area of E-Tourism, the International Federation for IT and Tourism (IFITT) grants the “Hannes Werthner Tourism and Technology Lifetime Achievement Award” to outstanding academics and/or professionals in the field.