ISET students visiting Stockholm have returned to Georgia after spending a week in Sweden as guests of the Stockholm School of Economics. While the students attended several lectures at a number of different universities, their time was not limited to studying alongside their Swedish counterparts: instead of a solely academic trip, the students were also taken to visit the Swedish Central Bank and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Sweden, which allowed them to compare the inner workings of one of Europe’s leading economies with their own country.

A warm welcome back to all returning students, faculty, researchers, and staff. Special greetings to our new students who will henceforth be part of our strong academic and professional community. Also, warm welcome to our new and continuing international students and international faculty. We wholeheartedly offer ISET to be your home and family, as is Georgian and ISET tradition.

Almost as soon as they are through the front doors, new arrivals to ISET are told that the institute is like a family, and it does not take long before the truth of these words is proved. ISET alumni frequently come back to visit, and not just to pay friendly visits to their old professors: many have gone on to work prestigious jobs in both the government and private sectors or earn PhDs in American and European universities, and so return to ISET to present on topics that will be of interest to the community, both old and new.

‘There are two types of people’ is the common opening for a number of jokes and idioms, but as research carried out by ISET alumnus Ala Avoyan (now of the University of Indiana) shows, there is some truth to this old adage.

On 27-28 May, ISET organized a Data Hackathon in the framework of the “Building Capacity in Modern Data Analysis in Georgia”, a project being carried out with Tartu University.