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CWI, Amsterdam, 8-9 May 2018

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With Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology has gained widespread attention by the general public. Major companies like Facebook have announced that they are considering significant projects based on this technology.

The purpose of this workshop is to look at what the general excitement about blockchain technologies means for computer science research and to identify the major research challenges in this area. The aim is to establish Blockchain Engineering as a new field of computer science research.

Join us for our workshop on "Data Privacy Controls and Vocabularies" on 7–8 March 2018 Vienna, Austria. The workshop is held under the auspices of SPECIAL, one of the H2020 projects at ERCIM.

ERCIM is a great organisation with a lot of potential. I am proud that I am the third CWI director since ERCIM’s foundation in 1989 who has become a President of ERCIM, after Cor Baayen and Gerard van Oortmerssen. I will outline my ideas on ERCIM’s strategy below.

The 10th International Conference of the ERCIM WG on Computational and Methodological Statistics (CMStatistics 2017) took place at the Senate House and Birkbeck, University of London, UK, 16-18 December 2017. Tutorials were given on Friday 15th of December 2017 and the COST IC1408 CRoNoS Winter Course on Copula-based modelling with R took place the 13-14 December 2017. The conference took place jointly with the 11th International Conference on Computational and Financial Econometrics (CFE 2017).

Lead by ERCIM member Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the aim of the group is to build a community of European researchers exploring the opportunities for computer science research in  the area of blockchain technology. The group was established in the follow-up of the ERCIM workshop on Blockchain Technology in May 2017 in Paris and the special theme of ERCIM News 110 "Blockchain Engineering" in July 2017.

The General Assembly of the ERCIM AISBL, held on 24 October in Lisbon, unanimously elected Jos Baeten, general director of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands as its new President for a period of two years as of  January 2018. Jos Baeten succeeds Domenico Laforenza from the Institute for Informatics and Telematics (IIT) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) who served as President of ERCIM since January 2014.

Tim Baarslag from CWI was selected as the winner of the 2017 ERCIM Cor Baayen Award, in a very tough competition with 15 finalists. The award committee recognises Tim’s skills and the results that he has achieved. His enthusiasm for internationally oriented research cooperation, his talent for recognising the potential use of mathematical tools, and his cooperative skills make him a young researcher of outstanding quality.

ERCIM invites researchers to participate in the workshop "WebVR Authoring: Opportunities and Challenges" in Brussels, 5-7 December 2017. The event is organised by W3C and hosted by DigitYser. The primary goal of the workshop is to bring together WebVR stakeholders to identify unexploited opportunities as well as technical gaps in WebVR authoring.