Julien Mairal from Inria has received the 2013 ERCIM Cor Baayen Award. Honorary Mentions are given to Alexander Bertrand, KU Leuven and Ben Glocker, Microsoft Research Cambridge. The Cor Baayen Award is awarded annually by ERCIM to a promising young researcher in the field of Informatics and Applied Mathematics.

It is with great sadness that we remember Professor Michael Wilson (Scientific Computing Department, STFC) who died suddenly and unexpectedly at the end of April. Michael joined RAL (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) in 1986 after having been a researcher in psychology at Cambridge. He led a team of researchers who worked on user interface design and visualisation of scientific data. He also worked on projects concerning knowledge-based assistance to querying and explanation, and heterogeneous distributed information systems.  His work on time-based media for the web was a major contribution to the SMIL language which later became the basis for the Multimedia Messaging System (MMS) used universally on mobile phones. He was also involved in work on web ontology languages, OWL and SKOS.

Later, Michael became increasingly involved in promoting science and technology, managing the UK and Ireland office of the World Wide Web Consortium and leading the communications activities for e-Science. In his most recent role Michael was on secondment to the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, leading the work of the e-Infrastructure Leadership Council Secretariat.

Within ERCIM Michael was well-known as an active member of the Executive Committee and project participant, contributing greatly to financial management, governance and the change to the new structure of ERCIM. 

Michael will be sadly missed by colleagues. Always good company, Michael was an accomplished speaker and had a remarkable ability to quickly identify the core issues in any discussion.

Our thoughts are with his family and friends at this time.

ERCIM and Ideal-ist have established a cooperation to disseminate ICT partner searches with the objective to increase the participation of ERCIM member organisation in the European Unition's ICT Programme.

Read more: "ERCIM Ideal-ist partnership"

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.