News — CWI Amsterdam

Software Renovation by Reverse Engineering Source Code

Currently, software renovation is a hot topic, because our society is depending more and more on aging software. By renovating software we refresh aging software to better match the current technical and business environment. In his thesis CWI PhD candidate Davy Landman studied the automation of software renovation by using Reverse Engineering.

Best Paper Award for Training DevOps engineers

Researchers from CWI's Formal Methods group won the Best Paper Award in the 6th European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing (ESSOC) in September 2017. They were awarded the prize for their work on 'Human-in-the-Loop Simulation of Cloud Services'. The researchers are one of the first to carry out live, interactive simulation of DevOps engineers inside simulated cloud environments.

Jaap Akkerhuis admitted to Internet Hall of Fame

Monday evening 18 September 2017 in Los Angeles, the Internet Society (ISOC) announced that Jaap Akkerhuis of NLnet Labs was to be admitted to the Internet Hall of Fame. Akkerhuis began his career at the Mathematical Centre, which is now CWI.

CWI and Meyn Food Processing start joint research project on non-destructive 3D spectral Imaging

CWI’s Computational Imaging group and Meyn Food Processing will collaborate in a joint research project with the goal of developing novel 3D spectral imaging techniques that will be applied in the poultry industry. The research will be executed by using the technology made available in CWI's ’FleX-ray’ lab.

Hans van den Berg receives international Lifetime Award

Hans van den Berg has been granted the 2017 Arne Jensen Lifetime Achievement Award for his extensive, outstanding contribution to the field of performance, control and reliability of communication networks.

KIEM funding for developing a smart urban jacket

CWI's DIS group led by Pablo Cesar has been awarded KIEM funding by NWO Humanities. The funding will go to "Project Cairo: an intelligent soft-robotic jacket". DIS will work on this project together with two partners: Borre Akkersdijk (Byborre) and Bas Overvelde (Amolf).

CRYPTO 2017 Best Paper Award for breaking SHA-1 security standard

A team of researchers from CWI and Google have won the CRYPTO 2017 Best Paper Award for being the first to break the SHA-1 internet security standard in practice. Marc Stevens (CWI) explained this research during a plenary talk at CRYPTO 2017 in Santa Barbara (USA).

Quantum revolution at Lowlands

Quantum experts Harry Buhrman (CWI, QuSoft and UvA) and Ronald Hanson (QuTech, TU Delft) showed a glimpse of their scientific minds at the Lowlands pop festival 2017, discussing the quantum revolution.

ERCIM News 110 focuses on Blockchain Engineering

ERCIM News No. 110 is now available on ERCIM News website. The focus of this issue is on Blockchain Engineering, with a contribution by CWI's Eric Pauwels.

CWI PhD student Jasmijn Baaijens wins Best Talk Award at the ISMB-HitSeq conference

Jasmijn Baaijens, PhD student from CWI’s Life Sciences and Health group, has won the Best Talk Award at ISMB-HitSeq, the world's leading conference on high-throughput genomics.

Veni grants for CWI researchers Tim Baarslag and Stacey Jeffery

NWO has awarded Veni grants to Tim Baarslag and Stacey Jeffery. The funding allows these researchers, who have recently obtained their PhD, to conduct independent research and develop their ideas for a period of three years.

CWI and Google research team wins Pwnie Award for Best Cryptographic Attack

Researchers at CWI and Google have won the Pwnie Award for Best Cryptographic Attack at the BlackHat USA security conference. They were awarded the prize for being the first to break the SHA-1 internet security standard in practice.

Marc Stevens’ project awarded funding in ‘Big Data: real time ICT for logistics’ programme

NWO has granted five applications within the ‘Big Data: real time ICT for logistics’ research programme. CWI’s Marc Stevens is the main applicant of one of the five granted research projects: 'Secure scalable policy-enforced distributed data processing'.

DIS contributes to MPEG’s work on Point Cloud Compression

The Distributed and Interactive Systems group has been a core contributor to the effort of Moving Picture Experts Group on 3D point cloud compression technologies. This effort aims at providing efficient representation of static objects and scenes, as well as dynamic objects and real-time acquisition environments. It has resulted in a call for proposals from MPEG.

Instable blood supply may help healthy cells compete with tumor cells

Researchers of CWI’s Scientific Computing group have found that instabilities in the blood supply in cancerous tissue can, surprisingly, lead to a less favorable environment for tumor cells. Their findings shed light on the potential negative side effects of current treatments that aim to actually normalize the blood supply in cancerous tissues.

Paper by Tim Baarslag and Michael Kaisers selected as visionary paper AAMAS 2017 Workshops

A paper by CWI researchers Tim Baarslag and Michael Kaisers has been selected as one of the most visionary papers of the AAMAS 2017 workshops, the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multi-agent systems.

‘Startimpuls’ funding for eight research projects Dutch National Research Agenda

NWO has granted ‘Startimpuls’ (Initial Boost) to eight routes of the Dutch National Research Agenda. CWI and QuSoft are involved in two of the awarded programmes.

Comparing medical images better

Together with the radiation oncology department of AMC, Peter Bosman of CWI’s Life Sciences and Health group has been awarded 1.4 million euros for a project in NWO’s Open Technology Programme for the research and development of a new medical image registration method. This project is co-funded by companies Elekta and Xomnia.

CWI spin off Stokhos nominated for Computable Award: vote now!

CWI spin off Stokhos has been nominated for a Computable Award in the category 'Best ICT project in healthcare 2017'. You can vote for Stokhos as of now. The winning project is determined for 50% by jury and 50% by public voting.

CWI Database Architecture researchers awarded with best paper runner up award at SSDBM

Researchers of CWI's Database Architecture group have been awarded with a best paper runner up award at 29th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (SSDBM 2017) in Chicago. The researchers received the award for their paper 'Multi Hypothesis CSV-parsing' by authors Till Döhmen, Hannes Mühleisen and Peter Boncz.

A puzzle with a million pieces: assembling viral genomes from sequencing data

Researchers from CWI’s Life Science and Health group have developed a new computational tool, SAVAGE, for reconstructing the genomes of the different virus strains that affect an infected person. SAVAGE makes it possible to reconstruct the different strains – of which there can be plenty in an infected person – even when so called reference genomes are not available

CWI researcher simulates complex financial developments, from interest rates to the possibility of bankruptcy

PhD student Alvaro Leitao Rodriguez proposes new methods to tackle complex problems in the financial sector. With these methods, Leitao Rodriguez successfully simulates the movements of the interest rates in the Foreign eXchange (FX) markets and evaluates corresponding risks.

DIS researchers receive Excellence in DASH Award at MMSys 2017

Jan Willem Kleinrouweler of CWI’s Distributed and Interactive Systems group has received the Excellence in DASH Award at ACM Multimedia Systems 2017 in Taipei, Taiwan.

Sung-Shik Jongmans wins IPA Dissertation Award 2016

Research school IPA awarded Sung-Shik Jongmans with the IPA Dissertation Award 2016. The jury wrote: “The thesis contains theoretical contributions, novel ideas, and practical implementation results. The results have been impactful and are deemed to be of high quality and significance.”

Steven Pemberton wins 2017 Best Demo Award at XML London

On 10 June 2017 Steven Pemberton won by acclamation the Demo Award at the XML London conference for his demonstration 'XForms Game'. XForms is a web technology and W3C standard, co-designed by Pemberton, originally intended for handling forms on the web. It now has been generalized to allow the description of more general applications.

Best Doctoral Consortium Paper Award for Jan Willem Kleinrouweler at TVX 2017

On 14 June Jan Willem Kleinrouweler of CWI’s DIS group has been awarded with the Best Paper Award at the the ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for Television and Online Video (TVX 2017) . He received the award for his paper “Enhancing Over-the-Top Video Streaming Quality with DASH Assisting Network Elements”.

Harry Buhrman and Yfke Dulek give ‘Paradiso lecture’ on artificial intelligence and quantum computers

On 18 June, Harry Buhrman and Yfke Dulek will give a ‘Paradiso lecture’. These lectures, which take place in music venue and cultural centre Paradiso in Amsterdam, are intended for a broad audience. Harry Buhrman is leader of the Algorithms and Complexity group, director of QuSoft and professor at the University of Amsterdam. Yfke Dulek is a PhD student in the A&C research group. Their lecture will focus on artificial intelligence and quantum computers. Buhrman and Dulek will address the question: will computers take over in the future?

CWI researchers selected as ACM Future of Computing Academy members

CWI researchers Tim Baarslag and Wouter Koolen have been selected as members of the of the ACM Future of Computing Academy (FCA).

Researchers develop robot friend to support children

A team of researchers led by CWI will investigate the use of robots in order to emotionally support children that suffer from cancer. The robots must act as a personal, social friend for the children at times their parents cannot be around.

Nanda Piersma appointed Professor by Special Appointment in Urban Analytics

The Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS) has appointed Nanda Piersma as a Professor by Special Appointment in ‘Urban Analytics’. Her new research group strengthens the collaboration between both the AUAS Technology and Digital Media and Creative Industry faculties and CWI in Amsterdam, where Piersma will work part-time (50%). Urban Analytics focuses on big data analysis as a basis for new products and services that can contribute to solutions for the many challenges that Amsterdam is facing in the 21st century. Piersma will start her work at CWI on 1 September 2017.