ERCIM is taking a leading role in Europe for driving research activities in VRE. This demonstrated by the contributions featured in a section of of ERCIM News 109. How researchers collaborate is per se a research topic! Many scientific problems are related across different domains: for example, the global climate changes involve knowledge from eco-system, ocean, atmosphere and earth as well as from energy science and human-related activity modelling.  Scientists face great challenges in handling collaboration among different disciplines and in modelling and discovering knowledge in massively available data from a wide diversity of domains. Today, data-driven approaches are considered as good alternatives to drive scientific research activities.
Read the whole section at https://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en109/research-and-society-virtual-research-environments

Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, co-hosted by ERCIM, receives the 2016 ACM Turing Award.

12 March was the 28th birthday of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web writes about how the web has evolved, why he is worried about recent trends, and what must be done to in order for the web to fulfill its true potential as a tool which serves humanity. Read the full message at http://webfoundation.org/2017/03/web-turns-28-letter/

The ERCIM EEIG board of Directors has appointed Philipp Hoschka as manager of the ERCIM EEIG. Philipp Hoschka took office on 1st of December. He succeeds Jérôme Chailloux who served as manager since May 2005.

Over 40 researchers from academia and industry attended a workshop on Computational Intelligence for Multimedia Understanding organized by the MUSCLE working group in Reggio Calabria, Italy, 27-28 October 2016.

The yearly workshop of the ERCIM Working Group on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS) was organized as a joint event together with the workshop on Automated Verification of Critical Systems (AVoCS). The resulting FMICS-AVoCS 2016 workshop took place on 26-28 September in Pisa at the CNR premises.

Michał Pilipczuk from the University of Warsaw is a prominent young researcher in the area of algorithms. He contributed to the breakthrough results which solved fundamental problems in the field of parameterized complexity, some of which have been unsolved since more than 20 years.

Lufthansa Systems is organising the Future of Clouds Conference (see http://futureofclouds.com) on 27 September 2016 in Budapest. The event aims at showcasing the results of several EU-funded research projects and in particular will feature the market introduction of the PaaSage (see www.paasage.eu) open source platform.