ERCIM Latest News

ERCIM, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, recently celebrated its 20th anniversary in Paris. The event, co-hosted by INRIA, included presentations by renowned personalities from research and industry, and representatives from the ERCIM community.

ERCIM aims to foster collaborative work within the European ICT research community and to increase co-operation with European industry. Leading research institutes from twenty European countries are members of ERCIM, which therefore represents a force of more than 12,000 scientists and engineers.

GridCOMP, Grid Programming with COMPonents, to stand out as an Advanced Component platform for an Effective Invisible Grid.

GridCOMP is a Specific Targeted Research Project on Grid programming with components, partially funded by the European Commission in the sixth Framework Programme (FP6) from June 2006 to February 2009.

According to Denis Caromel, INRIA, Scientific Coordinator, “The main goal of the project was the design and implementation of a component based framework suitable to support the development of efficient grid applications. The produced framework implements the "invisible grid" concept: abstract away grid related implementation details (hardware, OS, authorization and security, load, failure, etc.) that usually require high programming efforts to be dealt with. Therefore, GridCOMP makes it possible to seamlessly compose applications and services deployed on small to large scale infrastructures.“

Portugal is back in ERCIM after more than ten years' absence. While INESC (Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores) was in fact a member of ERCIM back in 1991, internal problems, both financial and organizational, meant it was necessary for it to leave in 1998. It is only now with PEG – the Portuguese ERCIM Grouping – that Portugal again has a representative institution. PEG was a recent initiative to allow the country to have a wide institutional representation, thus providing a wider group of researchers and research groups with access to ERCIM.

Adam Dunkels from SICS, Sweden, is the winner of the 2008 Cor Baayen Award for a promising young researcher in computer science and applied mathematics. Sixteen finalists competed for this award established by ERCIM in 1995 to honour the first ERCIM President Cor Baayen.

Steven J. Murdoch from University of Cambridge received the best thesis award of the ERCIM Working Group on Security and Trust Management for his excellent Ph.D. thesis "Covert channel vulnerabilities in anonymity systems". Steven's thesis represents an outstanding contribution on the study of privacy and anonymity aspects in real systems and meets all the desired requirements. The evaluation committee particularly favoured its exceptional practical impact.

DANAIM (Danish Research Association for Informatics and Mathematics), a research consortium established by seven major Danish universities and university collaborations, has become a member of ERCIM. Denmark is the nineteenth country to join ERCIM.

Boris Motik from University of Oxford, United Kingdom, has been awarded the 2007 Cor Baayen Award for a most promising young researcher in computer science and applied mathematics by ERCIM.

In a tight competition with 17 finalists, ERCIM has awarded Boris Motik for the outstanding quality of his work concerning reasoning algorithms and systems for Description Logics (DLs) - a family of knowledge representation formalisms with applications in numerous areas of computer science. DLs provide the basis for the Web Ontology Language (OWL) - the ontology language defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that has become the de facto standard for ontology development in fields as diverse as geography, geology, astronomy, agriculture and the life sciences. Boris has already made wide ranging contributions to research, including both new theoretical results, and practical systems that promise to change our notion of tractability in ontology reasoning.

PLERCIM, the newly created research consortium established by two major Polish universities, the University of Warsaw and the University of Wroclaw, has become a member of the ERCIM European Economic Interest Grouping. Poland is the 18th country to join ERCIM.