News — CWI Amsterdam

Tracing Stars with MonetDB in the Cloud

The Dutch database technology company MonetDB Solutions and CWI will develop new techniques to facilitate the storage and analysis of the vast data volumes from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope. The project will be funded by a grant in the AstroCompute in the Cloud program of the SKA Organization (SKAO) and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Hannes Mühleisen in media about insecure wifi in trains

Hannes Mühleisen, a postdoc researcher at CWI, recently found that he could see too much information from the wifi network in NS trains, which are passing close by his home - a houseboat in Amsterdam near Central Station. The network information is not encrypted.

ERCIM News 102 on Trustworthy Systems of Systems published

In July 2015 ERCIM News No. 102 was published at http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en102

CWI to improve ICT for radiotherapy

CWI launches a research project with the Academic Medical Center (AMC) and the company Elekta Brachytherapy to improve the ICT that is used in radiotherapy for cancer patients. In the next years, researchers of these organizations will investigate the improvement of medical software and instruments that are used for internal radiation.

Veni grants for Daniel Dadush and Hannes Mühleisen

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded Veni grants to Daniel Dadush and Hannes Mühleisen of CWI. 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.

Daniel Dadush receives A.W. Tucker Prize 2015

Daniel Dadush of CWI's Networks & Optimization group has been awarded the A. W. Tucker Prize 2015. He received the prize for his doctoral thesis that he completed at Georgia Tech in 2012.

Lex Schrijver receives EURO Gold Medal 2015

Researcher Lex Schrijver of CWI has been awarded the EURO Gold Medal 2015. This prize is considered the highest European distinction in Operational Research (OR) and is awarded by the Association of European Operational Research Societies (EURO).

Lodlam Open Data Prize for Polimedia

Researchers from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), VU University (VU), Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vison have been awarded the Lodlam Open Data Prize for the Polimedia research project.

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.