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.
VRE4EIC, an H2020 European research project, coordinated a week of project meetings in Rome 11-15 September 2017 bringing together representatives of major European initiatives involved in environmental multidisciplinary data-driven science.
The ERCIM spring meetings 2017 were hosted by Inria on 23-24 May in Paris
As part of the 2017 ERCIM spring meetings in Paris, ERCIM held a half-day workshop on blockchain technology on May 23 2017. Co-chaired by Georges Gonthier (Inria) and Wolfgang Prinz (Fraunhofer FIT), the workshop provided a high-level overview of blockchain technology and its opportunities for computer science research to the senior-level workshop attendees. The attendees included executives of ERCIM member institutes as well as a number of researchers (see list of attendees).
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/