Mikael Degermark Winner of the 1999 Cor Baayen Award

Mikael Degermark, researcher at Luleå University of Technology and SICS, has been awarded the Cor Baayen Award 1999. The award, including a cheque for 5000 Euro and an award certificate, was presented to Mikael Degermark at a ceremony in Amsterdam the 4th of November, during the ERCIM 10 years anniversary celebrations. It is the fifth time the Cor Baayen prize is awarded.

The annual Cor Baayen Award for the most promising researcher in computer science and applied mathematics was created in 1995 to honour the first ERCIM President. The Cor Baayen award is open to any young researcher having completed his/her PhD-thesis in one of the fourteen ‘ERCIM countries’: Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

The winner of the award, Mikael Degermark, is today conducting research at the Department of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering at Luleå University of Technology and the Computer and Network Architectures Laboratory at SICS. His research focus is Internet protocols. He is also one of the founders and a board member of a router and firewall company Effnet AB.

Mikael received his doctor´s degree at Luleå University of Technology in 1997. His research provided the basis for a new standard of the Internet Engineering Task Force, for IP Header Compression (IETF RFC 2507). He is also a co-inventor of the Luleå-algorithm underpinning the Effnet’s products. Mikael is continuing his work on wireless networks, creating new potential Internet standards in the area of mobile multimedia and ad-hoc networking, and on high-speed packet forwarding. He has also filed a number of patents in this area.

Effnet AB, which in two years has grown to +40 employees, has offices in Luleå (HQ), Stockholm and Boston. Effnet AB went public on the Stockholm stock exchange in April 1999. The main products of Effnet are a series of routers and firewalls which were developed with the starting point in Degermarks published work on high-speed address lookups. The routers and firewalls have excellent price/performance and their algorithms are protected by several patents of which he is a co-inventor. See also his article ‘Robust Header Compression enables IP Telephony to Mobile Phones’ in this issue.

More information about the Cor Baayen Award at http://www.ercim.eu/activity/cor-baayen.html