2015 News
Cooperative behaviour is not instinctive, but learnt
Cooperative behaviour is not an instinctive impulse or deliberate choice, but a learning process. Researchers of CWI and LUISS Guido Carli in Rome showed in an experiment that people living in a low-trust society intuitively choose non-cooperation in games. However, after playing several times their intuitive choices become more cooperative.
Start of lightning explained: hail and cosmic particles
For the first time researchers demonstrate how lightning is started: by a combination of hail and high energy particles from space, originating from exploding stars. A cosmic ray produces a shower of electrons.
Spinque and Institute for Sound and Vison launch CultuurLINK
Spinque, a spin off company of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) for advanced search technology, and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision have launched CultuurLINK, a new public service for cultural heritage organizations.
CWI PhD's visit NIOZ colleagues at Texel
Each year the PhD’s from CWI organize a weekend trip. This year the young mathematics and information technologists of the national research institute chose Texel.
Rare events in sustainable energy grids simulated
The transition to renewable energy sources poses new challenges to the reliability of power grids. As renewable energy is very variable, rare combinations of factors might lead to instabilities and even black-outs. Wander Wadman of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) developed new simulation methods that can determine the probability of such rare events.
Bayesian statistics not as robust as commonly thought
The widely used method of Bayesian statistics is not as robust as commonly thought. Researcher Thijs van Ommen of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) discovered that for certain types of problems, Bayesian statistics finds non-existing patterns in the data. Van Ommen defends his thesis on this topic on Wednesday 10 June at Leiden University.
"Remembering ARRA: A pioneer in Dutch Computing"
On 4 June, the premiere of the short internet movie "Remembering ARRA: A pioneer in Dutch Computing" took place at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI).
Jurgen Vinju and Tijs van der Storm at Bits & Chips conference
Today, CWI researchers Jurgen Vinju and Tijs van der Storm (from the research group Software Analysis and Transformation) participate in the Bits&Chips software engineering conference.
Workshop Joy of Coding
Last Friday, CWI researchers Jouke Stoel and Tijs van der Storm (from the research group Software Analysis and Transformation) organized the workshop "Hack your Language with Rascal" at the third Joy of Coding, the conference celebrating the art, craft, science and joy of software development.
Wearing Sense: smart fashion measures user responses during CWI in Bedrijf event
Wearable technology is becoming more integrated into everyday life. By embedding sensors in textiles, fashion that senses the wearer reactions can be produced.
New mathematical models predict success rate of drug trials
A large part of drug trials fail when it turns out that the results for laboratory animals do not transfer to humans (1). New mathematical models developed at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) are able to predict the transferability of results between different organisms.
Software Engineering Distinguished Service Award for Paul Klint
Paul Klint, Research fellow at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) is awarded the 2015 IEEE TCSE Software Engineering Distinguished Service Award. The award is presented annually to individual researches for their contributions.
Internet pioneers Beertema and Pemberton in XS4ALL movie
Internet provider XS4ALL interviewed Internet & Web pioneers Piet Beertema and Steven Pemberton from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam in a movie - 'De Nederlandse helden van het internet' (The Dutch heroes of the Internet).
Mohammed El-Kebir receives BioSB Young Investigator Award
Mohammed El-Kebir of CWI’s Life Sciences group has been awarded the BioSB Young Investigator Award for best PhD thesis in the field of bioinformatics and systems biology in the Netherlands.
Christian Schaffner receives Vidi grant for quantum cryptography
The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded a Vidi grant to Christian Schaffner (UvA/CWI) for his research on quantum cryptography. Schaffner is affiliated with the University of Amsterdam's Institute of Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) and also has a part-time agreement at the Algorithms & Complexity research group at CWI.
Marc Stevens keynote at Security in Times of Surveillance event
Marc Stevens (CWI) was one of the keynote speakers at the Eindhoven Institute for the Protection of Systems and Information (Ei/PSI) event on Security in Times of Surveillance on Friday 8 May 2015.
Big Data at High Performance
Computer hardware systems have evolved from monolithic machines in which each component performed one specific task, to complex systems with a wide range of heterogeneous components such as spinning disks, SSDs, RAM, and CPUs.
Simulations for nuclear fusion
The plasma inside a nuclear fusion reactor is prone to instabilities due to the extreme temperatures and high magnetic fields necessary for nuclear fusion. The future of nuclear fusion as an energy source depends on a large extent on methods to control these instabilities.
Exploding stars help to understand thunderclouds on Earth
How is lightning initiated in thunderclouds? This is difficult to answer – how do you measure electric fields inside large, dangerously charged clouds? It was discovered, more or less by coincidence, that cosmic rays provide suitable probes to measure electric fields within thunderclouds. This surprising finding will be published in Physical Review Letters on April 24nd.
W3C presentations on WebRTC and HTML5 Webapps online
On 2 April Dominique Hazaël-Massieux from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) gave two inspiring lectures in Amsterdam on WebRTC and HTML5 Web Apps. The afternoon programme was held at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the national centre for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands, where the W3C Benelux Office is hosted.
Dutch keynote from Cees Links in ERCIM News 101
In April 2015, ERCIM News No. 101 was published at http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en101
Van Hemelrijk-prize for best master thesis
Rutger Kerkkamp has been awarded the Van Hemelrijk-prize for the best master thesis in 2014 in the field of Statistics and Operations Research in the Netherlands.
Efficient Abstractions for Visualization and Interaction
Interactive systems with appealing visualizations are the hallmark of todays, mostly web-based, systems. Under the hood, the implementation of such systems leaves much to be desired which makes them hard to extend and maintain. Atze van der Ploeg, PhD student at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam,
Bert Zwart receives Van Dantzig Prize
Researcher Bert Zwart of CWI has been awarded the Van Dantzig Prize. This prize is considered the highest Dutch award in statistics and operations research and is awarded once every five years.
AMC, KiKa and CWI join forces in new research project
The Foundation Children Cancer free (Stichting Kinderen Kankervrij), the Department of Radiation Oncology of the Academic Medical Center (AMC) and the research group Life Sciences of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) join forces in a new research project to survey radiation-related long-term effects more accurately than ever before.
Candidate Highly-Versatile Crypto-Systems Less Secure
A handful of recent cryptographic proposals rely on the conjectured hardness of the following problem in the ring of integers of a cyclotomic number field: given a basis of an ideal that is guaranteed to have a “rather short” generator, find such a generator. In the past year, Bernstein and Campbell-Groves-Shepherd have sketched potential attacks against this problem.
Researchers develop neural model for working memory
Neuroscientists of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) and the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) have developed a biologically plausible neural network model that can learn to remember past events in order to use them in the future. The researchers developed their model by combining theoretical principles from machine learning with insights from neuroscience.
25 Years of Python at CWI
At the ACM website an interview was published with Guido van Rossum on 25 years of Python.
European consortium starts research on financial risk models
A European consortium of partners in academia and industry from the Netherlands, Italy and Spain has been granted 1,5 million euro for the Horizon 2020 research project WAKEUPCALL. The project, which is coordinated by the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, combines academic expertise in financial mathematics with experience from partners in the finance and insurance industries.
Inaugural lecture Roeland Merks at Leiden University
