As we finalize this article November 11, 2018, and consider current and future directions for computing in Europe and across the globe, we remember the end of World War I exactly 100 years ago: the end to a war of atrocities at a scale previously unseen and the culmination of a series of events that European nations had allowed themselves to'sleepwalk' into, with little thought for the consequences.10 When this article appears in spring 2019, we will remember the first proposal for a new global information sharing system written by Tim Berners-Lee 30 years ago at CERN,4 the European organization for nuclear research. This proposal marked the beginning of the World Wide Web, which now pervades every facet of modern life for over four billion users. However, the Web 30 years on, is not the land of free information and discussion, or an egalitarian space that supports the interests of all, as originally imagined.4 Rather, egotisms, nationalisms, and fundamentalisms freewheel on a landscape that is increasingly dominated by powerful corporate actors, often silencing other voices, including democratically elected representatives. For seven decades Europe has been a political and social project, seeking to integrate what has been divisive historically and to make citizens more equal. While the proponents of the Web were driven by similar values, there is now increasing concern in Europe--and beyond--that the Web has become a vehicle of disintegration, polarization, and exploitation.

We live in the digital world, where every day we interact with digital systems either through a mobile device or from inside a car. These systems are increasingly autonomous in making decisions over and above their users or on behalf of them. As a consequence, ethical issues--privacy ones included (for example, unauthorized disclosure and mining of personal data, access to restricted resources)--are emerging as matters of utmost concern since they affect the moral rights of each human being and have an impact on the social, economic, and political spheres. Europe is at the forefront of the regulation and reflections on these issues through its institutional bodies. Privacy with respect to the processing of personal data is recognized as part of the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals.

Informatics for all is a coalition whose aim is to establish informatics as a fundamental discipline to be taken by all students in school. Informatics should be seen as important as mathematics, the sciences, and the various languages. It should be recognized by all as a truly foundational discipline that plays a significant role in education for the 21st century. In Europe, education is a matter left to the individual states. However, education, competencies, and preparedness of the workforce are all important matters for the European Union (EU).

When the signal is in the noise: The limits of Diffix's sticky noise.

For Europe, investment in advanced ICT is a must. With an aging population and a shrinking workforce, Europe needs to tap artificial intelligence (AI), 5G wireless connectivity, quantum computing, and other ICT technologies that could drive the next step change in productivity. To that end, the region can build on a long-standing scientific tradition. Thanks in part to sustained public sector support, Europe is a leading producer of high-quality scientific research. Its scientists excel in aeronautics, transport technologies, and energy and construction, based on the number of widely cited publications.a

In global terms, Europe's information and communications technology (ICT) industry is small, overshadowed by the massive software industry and the extensive electronics industry in East Asia. But it does have some world-class companies, such as telecom equipment providers Nokia and Ericsson, online music platform Spotify, e-commerce company Zalando, enterprise software provider SAP, games developer Supercell (now owned by Tencent), embedded processor designer ARM (now owned by Softbank) and Skype (now owned by Microsoft). Moreover, some of the region's telecom groups, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Orange, and Telefónica, are major multinationals with operations spanning several continents. Although it has only one of the top 10 artificial intelligence (AI) research institutionsa (CNRS in France) and no major cloud service providers or Internet platforms on the scale of Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, Europe does innovate in ICT. Whereas Europe's tech industry is cash-strapped, non-tech companies in Europe have more cash holdings than their counterparts in the U.S. or China.b

Europe is not a static entity but here is what it looks like in 2019: The European Union is made up of 28 countries. The capital is in Brussels, Belgium, and the presidency is shared among EU members each semester. In 2019, the first semester sees Romania holding presidency until June, then Finland until the end of the year. An estimated 551.8 million people live in the EU, speaking 24 official languages. Approximately 72% of the population is employed,a which is greater than the pre-economic-crisis peak of 2008.

The Octobot is fabricated by combining soft lithography, molding, and 3D printing. In a laboratory at Yale University, a soft toy horse with prosthetic coverings around its foam-stuffed legs has taken its first tentative steps. Despite its stiff and not entirely coordinated gait, the toy demonstration may point the way toward helping space agencies put lighter, more versatile robots into space. Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, assistant professor at the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science, says she was wrestling with the problem of how to allow robots to handle a wider variety of jobs than current approaches, which often focus on performing a single function well, when the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) issued a request for novel robot designs based on lighter, plastic approaches. Rather than attempt to lift many single-task robots into orbit, the space agency wants a single reconfigurable machine to be able to handle different tasks and, occasionally, to act as prosthetics for human astronauts.

These are the working definitions that most of us find adequate in daily life and daily computer science. To consider whether there is more to it is to consider an ontology, the ontology of the variable. Is there a good comprehensive definition of "variable" for students and laypersons? First, however, let's address the subject that arises prominently where variables meet worldly ontology--the professional design of an ontology for some real thing, in some domain, driven by a commercial need to capture some enterprise in a database. The question is, "What do we need to keep track of?"

We develop a novel data-driven robust model predictive control (DDRMPC) approach for automatic control of irrigation systems. The fundamental idea is to integrate both mechanistic models, which describe dynamics in soil moisture variations, and data-driven models, which characterize uncertainty in forecast errors of evapotranspiration and precipitation, into a holistic systems control framework. To better capture the support of uncertainty distribution, we take a new learning-based approach by constructing uncertainty sets from historical data. For evapotranspiration forecast error, the support vector clustering-based uncertainty set is adopted, which can be conveniently built from historical data. As for precipitation forecast errors, we analyze the dependence of their distribution on forecast values, and further design a tailored uncertainty set based on the properties of this type of uncertainty. In this way, the overall uncertainty distribution can be elaborately described, which finally contributes to rational and efficient control decisions. To assure the quality of data-driven uncertainty sets, a training-calibration scheme is used to provide theoretical performance guarantees. A generalized affine decision rule is adopted to obtain tractable approximations of optimal control problems, thereby ensuring the practicability of DDRMPC. Case studies using real data show that, DDRMPC can reliably maintain soil moisture above the safety level and avoid crop devastation. The proposed DDRMPC approach leads to a 40\% reduction of total water consumption compared to the fine-tuned open-loop control strategy. In comparison with the carefully tuned rule-based control and certainty equivalent model predictive control, the proposed DDRMPC approach can significantly reduce the total water consumption and improve the control performance.