News — CWI Amsterdam

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.

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

Java Bug Fixed with Formal Methods CWI

Researchers from CWI fixed a bug in the widely used object-oriented programming language Java in February 2015. They found an error in a broadly applied sorting algorithm, TimSort, which could crash programs.

Network analysis reveals new information on tax treaties

Mathematical analysis of a data set collected by Centraal Planbureau (CPB), the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, revealed new information on how bilateral tax treaties can be exploited to form ‘tax routes’ that minimize profit taxes.

Vici grant for Bert Zwart

Researcher Bert Zwart of CWI has been awarded a Vici grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for his proposal ‘Rare Events: Asymptotics, Algorithms, Applications’. With the 1.5 million euro grant, Zwart can develop his own line of research and research group in the next five years. It is one of the largest research grants in the Netherlands.

Cum laude for thesis on financial mathematics

Marjon Ruijter graduated with honours ('cum laude') on her thesis on Fourier methods for finance and economics. She defended her thesis on Friday 6 February 2015 at Delft University of Technology.

CWI spin-off MonetDB Solutions teams up with Numascale

CWI spin-off company MonetDB Solutions and the Norwegian appliance company Numascale have joined forces to develop database appliances that enable companies and organizations to perform easier and more affordable big data analytics.

CWI on Belgian TV

CWI could be seen on the national Belgian TV, in the programme 'Iedereen beroemd' - 'Everybody Famous'. The item was broadcasted on Tuesday 3 February 2015 on channel Eén at 19.40h - and again after the late news. Broadcaster VRT visited CWI on 22 January.

Bert Zwart appointed professor at TU/e

Bert Zwart has been appointed professor of Stochastic Operations Research at the Eindhoven University of Technology's (TU/e) department of Mathematics and Computer Science

Marie-Colette van Lieshout appointed professor in Spatial Stochastics

Starting 1 February 2015, Marie-Colette van Lieshout of CWI has been appointed Professor of Spatial Stochastics at the University of Twente, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science.