Date and time: April 10, 2025, 9:00 AM – 2:00 PM Location: Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Arne Nováka 1, Brno, Room D51 (on-site) Language: English Organizing Faculties: Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Social Studies, Faculty of Economics, Institute of Computer Science, Faculty of Education, Faculty of Law, CEITEC The first-ever Core Facility Day Social Sciences & Humanities (CF Day SSH) presents a unique opportunity to explore the nine diverse SSH-focused research infrastructures available at Masaryk University. During the event, the visitors will have the chance to discover what equipment and services these research infrastructures offer and how they can access them for their own research projects. The participating research infrastructures: MUEEL, HUME Lab, GGP, MAFIL, Digitalia MUNI Arts, Sensitive Cloud, MUNI Data Stewardship Wizard, FAIR Implementation Profile, SONA Systems. External participants are more than welcome to join! Please register : https://forms.office.com/e/Tr5j4gzx7i?origin=lprLink
From March 31 to April 2, 2025, Masaryk University in Brno hosted the workshop “Future of ESFRI in a new ERA,” where experts discussed the future direction of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and its role in the evolving research landscape. The workshop was followed by ESFRI’s regular Forum meeting, with the next meeting set to take place in June 2025 in Kraków, Poland. ESFRI Chair José Luis Martínez Peña presented an overview of ESFRI’s main activities at the beginning of the workshop, with ESFRI currently having 63 research infrastructures from all scientific fields in its portfolio. Among ESFRI’s core activities, frequently discussed during the workshop, are the development of the ESFRI Roadmap, the Landscape Analysis which provides an overview of the European RI ecosystem, and the monitoring of ESFRI research infrastructures. Monitoring serves as a tool for tracking and assessing the progress, quality, and sustainability of key European research infrastructures. These activities are crucial for both EU Member States and the European Commission, ensuring that infrastructures listed on the ESFRI Roadmap meet the highest standards and foster international collaboration. ESFRI, composed of experts from EU Member States and associated countries, agreed on the significance of these activities. A notable recent development was the addition of Canada as a new ESFRI member. While ESFRI’s core functions remain undisputed, the ESFRI Chair emphasized the need for ESFRI, founded in 2002 to strategically coordinate research infrastructure policy in Europe, to reassess its role and prepare for new challenges. “It would be beneficial to strengthen our capacity to provide strategic advice to the European Commission, the Council of Ministers, or, as we already do, our national ministries. This could be achieved by reallocating some of the resources currently dedicated to key activities such as the Roadmap, Landscape Analysis, and monitoring. Discussions revealed that a certain level of externalization of these processes could free up ESFRI’s capacity, allowing it to focus more on strategic considerations and advisory functions,” said Jan Hrušák, member of the ESFRI Executive Board from the J. Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The discussion also touched on expanding ESFRI’s mandate. Should ESFRI also focus on technological infrastructures, digital research infrastructures, or sustainability issues? Suggestions were made to enhance collaboration with the European Commission and other entities, such as ERIC and the EIRO Forum. While the workshop did not produce definitive conclusions, it initiated a new process of shaping ESFRI’s future. A summary report based on the discussions will be prepared to inform future steps and strategic decisions. The ESFRI Forum meeting, which followed the workshop, continued discussions on current challenges in European research infrastructures. The next ESFRI meeting is scheduled for June 2025 in Kraków, where the third Stakeholder Forum will also take place, focusing on the sustainability of the research infrastructure ecosystem. photo (credit: StR-ESFRI) Author: Vladimíra Coufalová
On 7 March 2025, a press conference on the launch of the “OpenEuroLLM”, a project focused on the creation of open large-scale language models, was held at Charles University with the participation of Radka Wildová, Chief Director of the Section of Higher Education, Science and Research. Pic1_Director General Radka Wildová at the press conference on OpenEuroLLM The OpenEuroLLM project brings together twenty leading European research institutions, companies and high-performance computing centres and is led by Jan Hajič from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University. Its purpose is to create an open large language model, including fully accessible data, covering more than 32 languages from European and associated countries and from countries with which Europe has trade relations, in order to comply with European regulations. The language model will find applications in further research and especially in the commercial sphere or in the public administrations of European countries. “European companies need open access to high quality AI technologies to be able to compete in the global market. The OpenEuroLLM project and the use of open language models will help companies to increase their global competitiveness while contributing to Europe’s digital sovereignty. For public institutions, an open language model will allow them to deliver public services efficiently. High-performance multilingual models will preserve linguistic and cultural diversity,” underlined Jan Hajič, the project’s main coordinator, on the occasion of the launch meeting. Pic2_OpenEuroLLM logo Thanks to its long-standing support for research on language tools, the Czech Republic is well placed to become a leader in this field. A large research infrastructure, LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ, is funded through dedicated support from the Ministry of Education and Science to ensure the development of digital language tools and the development of digital language collections for researchers. It is both the Czech node of the pan-European infrastructure CLARIN ERIC (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – European Research Infrastructure) and the node for the European digital infrastructure consortium ALT-EDIC (Alliance for Language Technologies), which the Czech Republic joined in May 2024. The cooperation with ALT-EDIC leads to the Czech Republic’s participation in several Digital Europe projects, to which OpenEuroLLM belongs. “On behalf of the Ministry of Education, I would like to congratulate Charles University on its unprecedented success. It is not often that a Czech institution coordinates such a large international project. The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports has long supported research in the field of advanced technologies and is ready to provide a national share of project co-financing,” said the Director General of the Higher Education, Science and Research Section, Radka Wildová. She also added that similar projects that succeed in the international competition not only prove the quality of Czech science, but also bring more funds to the Czech scientific environment thanks to the resources of the European Union.