Invitation and Welcoming

It is a great pleasure and honour for Aalborg University to invite you to join the SEFI annual conference held in Aalborg, Denmark, from July 2 to July 5, 2008 in order to exchange ideas/views on the engineering curricula, new teaching methods and other important developments in the field. We are proud that the SEFI organization gave us the opportunity to arrange such an important event and it will be held at the Aalborg Congress & Culture Centre – a perfect place for larger conferences, which is located in the center of Aalborg.

Aalborg University is one of the youngest universities in Denmark. Aalborg University was established in 1974 based on different professional schools and is today a full university with five sciences represented in research and teaching. From the beginning Aalborg University was established as a full implemented project-organized problem-based learning curriculum where the physical planning of the campus area was included in order to realize the visions of such a curriculum. Today the university has 14.000 students and 2.000 staff incl. administration and doctoral students. It is a three city campus university with students in Aalborg, Esbjerg and Copenhagen. The engineering curricula are located in the Faculty of Engineering, Science and Medicine – the largest faculty at the university where we offer state-of-the-art curriculum in all kinds of important engineering disciplines. Aalborg University is the second largest engineering university in Denmark – in 2006 more than 600 received their M.Sc degree. We are offering around 50 M.Sc. programmes in English making it easy for us to collaborate and exchange students with more than 400 universities all over the world. The university has a spirit of innovativeness by new ways of doing different things in research, education and collaboration. We have just been nominated as the fourth most innovative company in Denmark.

Research is a key activity for the faculty. We have Centers of Excellences in Health Technology, Wireless Communication and have recently been given a UNESCO chair in problem based learning acknowledging our contributions in this topic. The other main areas are ICT, Energy and Environment, Mechanical and Production Engineering, Architecture and Design, Nanotech, Planning, Civil Engineering and Life Science. Recently we merged with the Danish Building Research Institute located in Copenhagen, which will form a platform for a strong virtual center in Quality in Building. The faculty keeps an open mind for external collaboration including new companies on campus close to our researchers as well as collaboration on different sites. We establish two agreements per day showing a high activity. One of the catalysts for this activity is the problem-based learning carried out through projects between the students and companies through their study.

The city is beautiful and lively, steeped in history and rich in great experiences, located by the banks of the rolling Limfjord. It was the Vikings who founded a settlement at this point where the Limfjord is narrowest, and through the years, the city developed into one of the busiest trading centres in the country. Trade and wealth set their mark on the city and many of the old buildings from that time have been preserved as natural elements in the city scene. The city has changed from being a classical industrial city with ship yards to becoming a high tech city where ICT is the fastest growing.

Aalborg has excellent flight connections to Copenhagen with about twenty daily arrivals which makes it easy to come to Aalborg – the main airport will be Copenhagen but also international departures to Oslo, London, Malaga and others cities are possible. The airport is located 6 km from hotels and the conference site making it easy to arrive to the city. Road and rail are also an easy way to come to Aalborg and to the conference site.

We hope to see you all in Denmark to learn about new trends and challenges of the engineering education but also to network and make friendship. On behalf of Aalborg University and our staff I wish you an enjoyable stay and a successful conference with excellent results.

Frede Blaabjerg
Professor, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Science and Medicine.