We had the honour of visiting the Presidential Palace and meeting the President of Cyprus, Mr Nikos Christodoulides, during the United Nations Human Rights event. The experience underscored the importance of international cooperation, in promoting human dignity and equality. We are grateful for the opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue and contribute to advancing human rights. We look forward to future events that foster collaboration and drive positive change globally.

The Youth Board of Cyprus organized another successful National Youth Conference, 'Act with a Plan,' where I had the honor of participating. Around 200 people of different ages and backgrounds came together to exchange views on various issues young people face in our country and to propose reforms to existing laws. The event took place at the Presidential Palace, where Mr. Nikos Christodoulides, the President of the Republic of Cyprus, was present to answer questions and receive suggestions. My team was tasked with proposing ideas on how to increase employment and entrepreneurship among the young population. A big thank you to our advisor, the event organizers and UCLan Cyprus for giving me this incredible opportunity!

I feel very lucky that I participated in this event. We met a lot of people and made connections including students from other universities from various fields but also professionals from the industry. More specifically we had to work with our team to find ideas for managing issues about employability and present them so they can be considered as options for future use by the government. Moreover, we had the chance to talk to the President of Cyprus and the Minister of Education and ask questions regarding the Cypriot educational system and suggest ideas of how it could be improved or address issues that we have encountered.

We are extremely proud for our BSc (Hons) Computing students Kyveli Christoforou, George Lazari, and Panagiotis Hadjidemetriou who were amongst the participants at the 5th National Youth Conference, 'Act with a Plan' serving as active agents contributing to the betterment of our society.

...During the weekend on 15/11-17/11, I had the amazing opportunity to attend a Hackathon in Bologna, Italy and represent Team Cyprus. The Hackathon was called “Digital Future of Justice 2.0”. The participating teams had to create an innovating solution to automate the process of comparing and finding similar law cases with the power of AI. [...] The competition was very challenging due to the little amount of time we had to complete it. After working tirelessly through the night we managed to pull through with a finished product. The team consisted of two Software Developers and 2 Lawyers. The combination of knowledge from both sides gave the team insights from both fields on how the app should work, since the app was supposed to be used by lawyers. Overall, it was an amazing experience to work with such talented professionals, and make strong connections in the field. I gained a lot of new skills and I hope to be fighting for the top spot in the next Digital Future of Justice!
My team and I built a fullstack web-application that utilizes an NLP model pretrained on hundreds of thousands of law cases called LegalBERT. The frontend of the application was built with Angular, and the backend technology connecting the frontend with the model was a FastAPI application built with Python. Docker was used to put everything together in a container that could be run on different environments and operating systems without dependency issues. Additional features were Translation and Graphs & Visualized Data. As a Proof of Concept, a database could be implemented to keep track of past searches and fetched cases. Additionally the NLP model can be even more fine-tuned to even more law cases.

The hackathon was a great opportunity to rapidly develop new skills and make lots of new friends. It was fun and I would definitely do it again!

It was very interesting to hear from fellow students at the university from various fields like Psychology and Business Administration on examples of activities or projects in their classes that made them directly interact with the industry. Moreover, we talked about the process of starting from just a small groupwork of a class assessment to building important soft skills that make you stand out to be a top candidate for a job opening in the industry.

The session by the HigherED4Industry, provided us with a strong stepping ground in order to discuss and delve into the future of the relationship of the industry and academia.
The session gave me the insight on how I need to approach my next steps as i work in the industry, and how to elevate academia to secure a healthy and highly placed position. I believe that the future of the industry and academia, is closely intertwined as many new topics emerge which require much research, such as AI. Therefore, it is instrumental that individuals try to combine the both to enhance the opportunities that can be created from such combinations.

• Good industry engagement and partnerships in all levels creating good opportunities for students.
• EDI activities.
• Links with research and feeding into the programme.
• Staff having to be at minimum Fellows of the HEA.