Francesco Barbieri, a member of the Natural Language Technologies research group, is co-author of this paper, presented at the 7th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, held on 5 and 6 June in New Orleans (USA) for which it analysed more than 22 million geotagged tweets in the United States. The good acceptance of emoticons, more commonly known as “emojis”, among the users of social networks and messaging services, and their increasingly widespread use in all types of media (mobile phones, tablets and computers), has led the catalogue of these symbols to expand. For some time now, some of the most commonly used emojis have been presented to the user in a catalogue with slight variations that refer, for example, to skin shade, from lighter to darker, or gender, male or female. These variants are available to the user at the time of inputting the corresponding emoji.

The University Rome Tor Vergata is hosting the YERUN Summer School Management Consulting in the Digital Age. A total of 30 students from 10 different YERUN Universities together with participants from other European institutions, Asia and Africa are now in Italy, in Villa Mondragone, engaging in active workshops with management consulting companies.

The car makers and aerospace manufacturers in the UK, and worldwide, are set to benefit from revolutionary new metal processing and casting techniques with the opening of the Advanced Metal Processing Centre at Brunel University London. The new centre provides a massive boost for manufacturers to work with Brunel on large-scale research and development activity, enabling innovations – such as novel structures for lightweight car parts – to make the leap from the lab to full-scale industrial trials.

YERUN is pleased to be present at THE Summit for Young Universitieskindly hosted by the University of South Florida, in Tampa. YERUN President Prof Juan Romo (UC3M) and YERUN members Prof Anthony Forster (University of Essex) and Prof Brian MacCraith (Dublin City University) are participating in various sessions of the programme. This afternoon, at a workshop on building alliances and networks moderated by USF Vice Provost Pritish Mukherjee, YERUN presented current activities developed within members to increase faculty and research exchange programmes and improving student learning. YERUN has shared panel with the Australian Technology Network (ATN), who has been highlighting their work to increase industry partnership collaboration.

A new Institute of Law and Welfare has been established at the Law School of the University of Eastern Finland. The core of research of the Institute of Law and Welfare is built around people's fundamental rights relating to welfare at different stages of life. Research carried out at the institute can also focus on social assistance and welfare service systems, authorities and other actors in operating in the welfare sector. Anna Mäki-Petäjä-Leinonen, Senior Lecturer of Elder Law, has been appointed as the Director of the new institute.