CTU and Sun to open prestigious Center of Excellence in Prague
New project is a significant expansion of long years of exemplary cooperation between both partners
PRAGUE – 3 December 2008 – Sun Microsystems and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at CTU (Czech Technical University) in Prague are intensifying their existing long-term partnership with a new project in the area of software accessibility and usability. The Center of Excellence will open in December of this year, and will place this leading Czech university among select educational institutions worldwide that already have such a center. Sun Microsystems will provide five million dollars in funding for this project, whose results will once again be publicly available through open source licensing.
Long-term cooperation between Sun Microsystems and FEE CTU in Prague has been bearing fruit since 2003. In 2004, the first Usability Lab in Central Europe (www.ulab.cz) was established in Prague, and is used for research, teaching of students and last but not least for cooperation with partners from industry. User interface design issues and making programs accessible for handicapped users (i.e. visually, aurally or physically) are also the focus of the Prague branch of the ACM SIGCHI civic association (www.sigchi.cz), which FEE CTU and Sun Microsystems actively support. As part of activities held by Prague ACM SIGCHI, the fourth annual World Usability Day conference took place in Prague (for more information, see: http://cz.sun.com/tiskove_zpravy/2008/11/wud2008.html). CTU is currently also making extensive use of Sun Microsystems solutions – from the NetBeans programming environment that serves in teaching the Java language, to the Solaris OS.
"The partnership between our faculty and Sun Microsystems has existed for several years now, and we consider it to be very successful. With the opening of the Center of Excellence at CTU in Prague, further opportunities for mutual cooperation present themselves, where our faculty will be participating in cutting-edge research, with subsequent positive results in the area of education," says Prof. Ing. Pavel Slavík, CSc. from the Department of Computer Graphics and Interaction at FEE CTU.
"We have been working with CTU for five years now, and during this time we have succeeded in implementing many projects, small and large, to our mutual satisfaction. The current cooperation on the Center of Excellence, however, shall take our partnership to an entirely new level – and into the company of select universities worldwide that have already implemented this program," adds Pavel Šuk, director Sun Microsystems' development centre in Prague.
"This is definitely not our first common initiative this year in the area of accessibility and usability – after all, there is the recent creation of the Prague ACM SIGCHI civic association," adds Jiří Mžourek, senior manager of Sun Microsystems and also the chairman of Prague ACM SIGCHI. "What's more, literally everyone can benefit from the results of our cooperation – the results will once again be available in open source form."
When and where?
The event will take place on Tuesday, 9 December 2008 from 14:00 at FEE CTU on Karlovo náměstí (Charles Square) in Prague. Important guests will participate, including Peter Korn, technical director and solution architect in the area of accessibility from Sun Microsystems. During his long years in the IT industry, he has received a number of prestigious awards, published important articles, and participated in for example accessibility technologies in Java, GNOME (Solaris), GNU/Linux environments and other UNIX-based systems, as well as for StarOffice and OpenOffice.org office suites. He also works with accessibility specialists from Mozilla and Evolution teams, and others.
What are the benefits of the Centre of Excellence?
This Sun Microsystems program belongs among long-standing successful forms of cooperation with important educational institutions and third-party organizations, and is active in about a hundred locations around the world. The Center of Excellence is a formal and fully documented form of partnership usually lasting from one to three years. Each participant brings his own resources and expertise to the project to meet preset development and research goals. A center can exist both as a physical and as a virtual one – but in every instance, it demonstrates the utilization of cutting-edge software and hardware technologies in practice, at the same time bringing results that can be utilized by the public. More information is available at www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/programs/coe/.
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About FEE CTU
Two FEE departments are participating in the Center of Excellence: The Department of Computer Graphics and Interaction, and the Department of Computers. The Department of Computers was founded in 1964, and was one of the first departments specializing in the computing in the former Czechoslovakia. The department offers three study program levels focusing on the hardware and software aspects of computing technology and informatics: BSc, MSc and PhD studies in Computing Technology. Aside from teaching, the department is also very active and successful in research and participates in a number of projects addressing current computing science issues. For more information, see cs.felk.cvut.cz. Several months ago, a group of department staff split off to start the new Department of Computer Graphics and Interaction, which focuses on teaching and research activities in two basic areas: computer graphics and human-computer interaction. The new department is very active in the field of research, for which it has been given a number of European grants. For more information, see www.cgg.cvut.cz.
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision – "The Network is the Computer" – Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.
Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Java, JavaFX, NetBeans and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.
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