Student mobility is a shared goal of the member states of the European Union. One ingredient that makes student mobility possible is a universal student ID card that is accepted everywhere and can be coded with services at the institutions visited. The European Student Card (ESC) is such a universal ID card, standardized in Europe. A team of students from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology developed the software for it. It works as follows: A student with an ESC simply walks up to a self-service kiosk, presents the card to a reader, and then selects the desired services, such as cafeteria, library, lab access, etc. In this interview, the development team will explain how they made this work smoothly, including the security considerations. This project is another example of how undergraduate students can build impressive software if given a challenge, the right tools, and some supervision.

In this series of interviews with innovation leaders, Ubiquity Associate Editor and software engineer, Dr. Bushra Anjum sits down with Dr. Jesmin Jahan Tithi, a research scientist in the Parallel Computing Labs at Intel, to discuss overcoming the scaling wall that is thwarting application efficiency, specifically within high-performance computing.

Each "Communication Corner" essay is self-contained; however, they build on each other. For best results, before reading this essay and doing the exercise, go to the first essay "How an Ugly Duckling Became a Swan," then read each succeeding essay.

Language is ever changing as geographic boundaries morph and populations age. So-called grammar rules can often be arbitrary. Good writing sometimes means using punctuation and sometimes not.