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The Agora Center is a separate institute at the University of Jyväskylä in Central Finland. By its nature, the Agora Center is interdisciplinary and networked. Its purpose is to conduct, coordinate, and administrate top-level research and development that relates to the knowledge society and which places emphasis on the human perspective. The research and development is conducted in the form of fixed-period projects in cooperation with the University of Jyväskylä’s other faculties and separate institutes, businesses, the public sector and other relevant parties. The Agora Center also promotes researcher training through its various research projects. One of the core missions of the Agora Center is to effectively combine research and development with education. The project staff includes a high number of students and post-graduate students. The Research in the Agora Center is mainly based on Human Technology. Human Technology refers to the human-centred approach to technological systems and methods that takes into account human needs and requirements as well as its implications for humans. The Agora Center’s administration model follows the requirements of being a separate institute of the University of Jyväskylä and the needs for networking. The directors of the Agora Center are professors from different departments who work in this position in addition to their departmental commitments and activities. The Agora Center has an interdisciplinary Managing Board, on which all of the faculties of the University of Jyväskylä are represented. The Agora Center also has an international Advisory Board. ==History== In order to enable growth of Human Tech research, the facilities of the Agora Human Technology Center were built in 2000. The University simultaneously created the Faculty of Information Technology, combining the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, the Department of Mathematical Information Technology and the Information Technology Research Institute. The faculty plays the main role in technological research within the Agora concept. The other essential side of the Agora concept is constituted by the human and social sciences. From the beginning it was evident that to study human technology, an interdisciplinary approach was needed. The networked activity started in the form of the Psykocenter in 2000. In the initial period of the Center’s history, the network was associated with the Centre of Excellence in Psychology in order to coordinate the human-centred research related to the knowledge society. However, it soon became clear that for the intended interdisciplinary research to function, the research operations needed an independent entity with its own, in other words autonomous, administration. Thus, in 2002, the University of Jyväskylä established the Agora Center as a separate institute that also included the Psykocenter. The Agora Center’s first operating period was from 1.2.2002 to 31.7.2005. Nonetheless, in April 2004, the lifespan of Agora Center was extended to the year 2009. In order to support the functioning and networking of the Agora Center’s interdisciplinary research environments, the Agora Center takes various forms of action. For example, it promotes researcher training and university education, supports researchers in managing interdisciplinary projects, holds open events and forums for multiple disciplines and sectors of society, surveys and promotes the wellbeing of its personnel and conducts Public Relations exercises. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Agora Center」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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