On 27 and 28 March, the University of Tartu hosted the ENLIGHT Student Network Conference, which brought together about 100 students from the network’s ten partner universities. This year’s conference focused on the impact of digitalisation and artificial intelligence on European universities.
Students gathered for the annual ENLIGHT student conference to discuss how European universities are coping with the impacts of digitalisation. The discussions, workshops and lectures focused on sustainable digitalisation in higher education, the role and necessity of large language models, and the effect of artificial intelligence (AI) on the healthcare system.
One of the conference organizers, Liisa Maria Matsar, noted that although she had been nervous before the conference, the event was successful and received positive feedback.
“Before the conference, the organizers felt anxious: there were a lot of participants, the programme was interesting, and organizing a conference that would meet the participants’ expectations meant a lot of work. However, we supported each other, and everything went wonderfully. The programme was well-considered and clear, and enabled us to help participants effectively. Students’ feedback was also positive, and thanks to this year’s experience, we will certainly be able to contribute to organizing a successful conference next year in Groningen,” Matsar said.
The programme included 15 workshops. One of them, Enter the Black Box, was co-led by Alexander Cremer, a third-year engineering and physics student at Uppsala University. The workshop explored the basics of building an AI model and the social aspects involved.
“We analysed the supervised classification models and their social dimension: what the consequences of these models are, and how human decisions and biases are reflected in them. We may claim that AI models can be more objective than humans, but this is often not the case – AI models are an extension of human bias and opinion,” Cremer said.
ENLIGHT, the European university Network to promote equitable quality of Life, sustainability and Global engagement through Higher education Transformation, was established in 2020.
The network comprises ten classical research universities: the University of the Basque Country, the University of Bern (as an associated partner), the University of Bordeaux, Comenius University Bratislava, the University of Galway, Ghent University, the University of Groningen, the University of Göttingen, the University of Tartu, and Uppsala University.
The ENLIGHT project is funded by the Erasmus+ European Universities Initiative and focuses in particular on the internationalisation of the field of study.
More information: Tiina Jaksman, Area of Vice Rector for Development, tiina.jaksman@ut.ee.