The Software Deparmant of the Institute of Cybernetics (IoC) of the Estonian Academy of Sciences has been founded by Prof. Enn Tõugu on 1978 with the aim to carry out basic research in Artificial Intelligence. Since January 1992, the head of the department is Prof. Jaan Penjam.
The department is looking for new forms of arrangement of basic and applied resarch that fitting better with the rapid changes in the Estonian society. The keywords of the moment are "co-operation of different research institutions" and "unification of academic research institutions with university". Such a policy helped the deparment to keep high productivity and compensate being saffered by the remarkabe "brain drain" was going with hard economical period in the history of newly independent Estonian Republic in 1991-1995. Actually, the department is a center of the network, co-ordinating activities of Estonian computer scientists in homeland and abroad. Actual number of the members of this nework exceeds three times of the number of "official" staff of the department.We have a tradition to collect all participants of our informal network at the special workshop to discuss and evaluate results obtained in current year. Meanwhile the contacts have been kept via Internet, people are applying to several foundation for support to co-operative activities (visits to each other sites, writing joint papers etc.) within the network.
To promote relations with university and to contribute to the common trend of unification of academy and university, there is founded a joint chair with Tallinn Technical University (TTU) (Chair of Tehoretical Informatics), and using the support from the TEMPUS programme, Computer Science and Inforation Technology Education Development Center for Estonian Universities (CIDEC) which co-ordinates joint activites of the IoC, TTU and Tartu University (TU). Many staff members share his position at the department with its duties at the Chair and/or in the CIDEC which can be, if treated so, considered as two projects of the Software Department. this gives a bases to present activities of all thre organisations within this report.