News — CWI Amsterdam

2018 Women@McKinsey Dissertation Award for Yllka Velaj

CWI researcher and ERCIM Fellow Yllka Velaj has won the 2018 Women@McKinsey Dissertation Award for her PhD thesis, which analyzes the problem of how to maximize the dissemination of information and opinions in social networks. The award comes with a job offer by McKinsey & Company, and a sponsorship to attend the Open Data Science Conference 2018.

Monique Laurent opened World Women in Mathematics event in Rio

Monique Laurent from CWI opened the World Women in Mathematics event (WM)² in Rio de Janeiro with a keynote lecture.

Health Innovation Seed Fund III B.V. invests in Stokhos emergency mathematics

CWI spin-off company Stokhos Emergency Mathematics receives an investment of Health Innovation Seed Fund III. With this financial injection Stokhos aims to further optimize its software called Seconds, to achieve a scale-up and further international expansion.

ERC Starting grant for CWI researcher Daniel Dadush

In July, Daniel Dadush (CWI) was awarded an ERC Starting Grant of 1.5 million euro for his proposal ‘Towards a Quantitative Theory of Integer Programming’. He aims to revolutionize the understanding of integer programming (IP), the most popular method for finding optimal solutions to optimization problems.

Veni grant for Daniël Pelt

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded a Veni grant to CWI researcher Daniël Pelt.

Machine Learning Techniques for Space Weather book published

Recently, the book 'Machine Learning Techniques for Space Weather', edited by CWI researcher Enrico Camporeale and others, was published by Elsevier. The book provides “a thorough and accessible presentation of machine learning techniques that can be employed by space weather professionals”.

Technology grant awarded to optimize plasma-assisted combustion

Incomplete combustion in engines and central heating systems can generate toxic exhaust gases. An electric discharge or plasma can preprocess the mixture of air and fuel, which could largely improve the combustion process. Researchers from CWI and TU/e were awarded a technology grant from NWO to understand and improve this.

Jie Li awarded with Best Paper Award at ACM TVX 2018

On 27 June, Jie Li of CWI’s Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group has been awarded with the Best Paper Award at ACM TVX 2018, the ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for Television and Online Video.

CWI contributes to trial new broadcasting system FA Cup Final at Wembley

H2020 EU-funded project 2-IMMERSE, of which CWI’s Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group is a member, tested their prototype end-to-end live production system for object-based broadcasting at the FA- cup final at Wembley.

Mark Raasveldt wins Student Research Competition at SIGMOD 2018

Mark Raasveldt, PhD student at CWI’s Database Architecture (DA) group, won the Student Research Competition at the SIGMOD 2018 conference for his work titled "MonetDBLite: An Embedded Analytical Database".

CWI researchers make power grid more reliable with mathematics

Researchers from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) discovered how large fluctuations in solar and wind energy, combined with the physical network dynamics of electricity, can cause failures in power grids.

Efficient models for high voltage switching

In the search for better environmentally friendly high-voltage switches, it is important to understand electrical breakdowns in various media. PhD student Ashutosh Agnihotri (CWI) developed efficient computational models to simulate these phenomena in different gas mixtures. He defends his PhD thesis at Eindhoven University of Technology on 25 June.

BEST PAPER AWARD FOR FRANCESCA DE SIMONE AT ACM MMSys 2018

On 14 June Francesca De Simone of CWI’s DIS group has been awarded with the Best Paper Award at the the ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys 2018).

Demo Prize for Steven Pemberton at 2018 Markup UK conference

Steven Pemberton (CWI) won a demo prize during the 2018 Markup UK conference in London. Pemberton, who is the co-designer of web technology and W3C standard XForms, showed that XForms can reduce the production time and costs of an application by a factor of ten.

CWI awarded Industrial Doctorates program on Financial Risk Management

Recently, Kees Oosterlee from CWI's Scientific Computing group has been awarded a project from the H2020 European Industrial Doctorates (EID) Program.

Davy Landman awarded with IPA dissertation Award

Former CWI PhD candidate and CEO of CWI spinoff SWAT.Engineering Davy Landman has been awarded the Institute for Programming research and Algorithmics (IPA) Dissertation Award 2018 for his thesis "Reverse engineering source code: Empirical studies of limitations and opportunities."

CWI trainee Carla Groenland runner-up in UvA Master Thesis Award 2018

Carla Groenland, UvA alumnus and a trainee at CWI’s Networks & Optimization research group, was chosen as the runner-up in the finale for the UvA Master Thesis Award 2018. In total there were 92 competitors. You can listen to her podcast.

Serge Fehr appointed as Professor Quantum Information Theory

Serge Fehr (CWI, UL) has been appointed as Professor Quantum Information Theory at the Leiden Mathematical Institute (MI) since 1 June 2018. His research is focused on quantum cryptology.

Joint industrial PhD program with Xinhuanet

CWI has launched a joint industrial PhD program with Xinhuanet in the research area of Social Internet of Things (IoT), smart textiles, and physiological computing. Xinhuanet Co. Ltd. is a key website in China with global influence, sponsored by Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese national news agency.

Monitoring the Engagement of Groups with Sensors

The PhD thesis of CWI PhD student Chen Wang of the Distributed and Interactive (DIS) group reports on research to design a GSR system that can support and enhance actors’ awareness of remote audiences in a distributed theatrical environment.

Readers can increase retrievability of documents in the National Library collection

Crowdsourcing can help decrease the bias of the search engine of the ‘Koninklijke Bibliotheek’, the National Library of the Netherlands. CWI researchers will present that finding at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Texas, which takes place on 4 June 2018.

Bart Kamphorst finds best possible scheduling policy for servers in information-scarce settings

Nobody fancies a long wait between requesting some kind of online service and actually receiving that service. Therefore, in many situations, ICT-specialists aim to design their servers in such a way that their customers are served in an efficient manner. Research of CWI PhD-student Bart Kamphorst contributes a number of performance analyses of blind algorithms and moreover identifies a blind algorithm that is in some sense optimal.

Female members of European Parliament more likely to be featured on Wikipedia

Researchers from CWI have found that female members of the European Parliament are slightly more likely to be featured on multiple Wikipedia language editions than their male counterparts. However, the variations between language editions are large: while 10 editions over-represent women, 13 editions over-represent men.

Debarati Bhaumik developed models that can help make the energy grid ‘renewables-proof’

On 30 May 2018, CWI PhD student Debarati Bhaumik will publicly defend her thesis at the University of Amsterdam. Her work focuses on computational techniques for assessing the reliability of power grids that are integrated with renewable energy sources like wind and solar power.

Symposium celebrating life and achievements of Farhad Arbab

On Friday 25 May 2018 CWI organizes a farewell symposium on the occasion of the retirement of Farhad Arbab, ‘It's All About Coordination’. Farhad Arbab has been a researcher at CWI for 28 years and a professor at Leiden University since 2004. He is most known for his work on coordination languages in software engineering, particularly Reo, and in concurrency and software composition.

How to share sensitive information safely?

“Data protection is now in the news more often than ever before”, Thijs Veugen, a senior researcher at TNO and part-time seconded in CWI’s Cryptology group says in his recent TNO Time column. “What should a company do if it wants to share information?" "Organizations can use secure multi-party computation to securely link the most sensitive databases together.”

AIDA: Exploring space with Artificial Intelligence

The EU H2020 project 'AIDA' on using artificial intelligence in space physics was signed in May. The Multiscale Dynamics Group at CWI is one of the eight research partners involved. The ultimate goal is to create an intelligent system that enables new scientific discoveries in space.

More efficient ambulance planning with new mathematical models

In serious life-threatening situations a fast ambulance response is required. Late arrivals can have a serious impact on the well-being of the patients and can also have consequences regarding policy making. In practice, providing a fast ambulance response time is not always possible. PhD candidate Martin van Buuren of CWI has developed mathematical models that can help to realize fast response times.

Tim Baarslag finalist for New Scientist Wetenschapstalent 2018

Tim Baarslag, researcher at the Intelligent and Autonomous Systems group at CWI, is one of the five finalists for the ‘New Scientist Wetenschapstalent 2018’ prize. This prize is awarded annually by New Scientist to a young researcher with a high scientific and social impact who reaches a broad audience through his or her outreach activities.

Tackling messy blood vessels to fight cancer

With a Vici grant of 1.5 million euro, Roeland Merks (CWI and UL) looks for ways to fix messy and leaky blood vessels in tumours. To do so, he combines mathematical simulations and lab experiments in a unique way.