In it's latest report, the IST Advisory Group (ISTAG) - the advisory body to the European Commission in the field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT or IST) stresses that "missing the strategic importance of software technology as a key enabling technology will lead to a significant drawback for global competitiveness."

ERCIM, together with 13 European partners, has launched PaaSage, a major research initiative with the goal of developing an open and integrated platform to support model based lifecycle management of Cloud applications.

ERCIM has selected Paweł Parys from the University of Warsaw as the winner of the 2012 Cor Baayen Award for a promising young researcher in computer science and applied mathematics. In a tight competition Paweł Parys was chosen from 21 excellent candidates from all over Europe as an exceptionally gifted young researcher.

ERCIM is pleased to announce its 2012 one-day Symposium to be held on Thursday 26 October. The morning session features presentations from European Commission representatives on ERC Starting Grants and on the People programme "from the end of FP7 to the beginning of H2020", a presentation by ERC starting grant winner Paola Gaotin on "Traffic Management by Macroscopic Models", the 2012 Cor Baayen Award winner, as well as short presentations by current ERCIM fellows.

For the afternoon session, a sience and a strategy panel/round table discussion is scheduled. Jean-Jacques Quisquater (UCL - Université catholique de Louvain, ERCIM Science Task Group member) will moderate a round table discussion on the topic "Is cybersecurity a research job for computer science?". A strategy panel, moderated by Domico Laforenza, IIT-CNR and ERCIM Vice-President will discuss "the role and strategies of the European ICST Public Research Organisations towards Horizon2020" - The panel intends to address how the European public research organisation on ICST can contribute to the success of the Horizon2020 in its three strategic directions. The strategy panel participants are: Keith Jeffery, ERCIM President, Michel Cosnard, Inria CEO and Chairman, Jan van Leeuwen, Utrecht University, Chair of the European Forum for ICST, Jos Baeten, CEO, CWI, Matthias Jarke, ICT coordinator, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, Olivier Da Costa, European Commission, Digital Futures Task Force, DG Connect.

Participation is free, but advance registration is required. Places are limited.

The Industrial Systems Institute (ISI) of Research Centre ATHENA (RC ‘Athena’) is delighted to join ERCIM. ISI, a public research institute, was founded in Patras, Western Greece in 1998. Since 2003, ISI has been part of the ’Athena‘ Research and Innovation Centre in Information, Communication, and Knowledge Technologies, operating under the auspices of the General Secretariat of Research and Technology of the Greek Ministry of Education, Lifelong Learning and Religious Affairs.

The Euro-India SPIRIT project published its final recommendations booklet "The New Digital Paradigm - Harnessing EU-India ICT Cooperation". The project's aim was, in brief, to examine the state of the art in Indian ICT and develop a set of recommendations for a mutually beneficial research agenda between the EU and India.

This year, ERCIM has exceptionally selected two winners for the Cor Baayen Award: Stratos Idreos, researcher in the Database Architectures group of CWI and Luca Mottola, researcher in the Networked Embedded Systems Group at SICS.