News — CWI Amsterdam

Science, games and theory at CWI

Crude graphics and a simple idea were enough to create the first computer games like Pong and Space Invaders. Thirty years later, the consumers' desire for life-like graphics and challenging game play make increasingly high demands upon the technology involved. CWI's annual business day CWI in Bedrijf on October 17, 2003 is dedicated to the role of research and science in game design and theory. Experts from the industry and universities will elaborate on topics like virtual reality and intelligent computer opponents.

Prestigious prizes awarded to Lex Schrijver and Bert Gerards

On Monday, 18 August 2003, Lex Schrijver received the Dantzig prize for his complete work in optimization. Furthermore, he and Bert Gerards both received the Fulkerson prize during ISMP 2003 in Copenhagen. Schrijver is one of CWI's top researchers and holds a part-time professorship at the University of Amsterdam. Bert Gerards is theme leader at CWI and is also a part-time professor at the Technical University Eindhoven.

Enabling more effective multimedia search queries

Ph.D. student Menzo Windhouwer has developed a method to enable semantic queries in multimedia databases. To provide access to stored multimedia objects, database systems use annotations, particular features describing the objects. When annotations are generated automatically, several difficulties occur. For example, the significance of annotations like cheerful or grim depends on the cultural context of the user. Windhouwer's feature grammar system can handle these ambiguities.

Willem Hundsdorfer wins Peterich Prize

Willem Hundsdorfer has submitted the best mathematical research proposal in the 2003 Open Competition of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). As a result his project receives the Peterich Prize. This was announced by NWO on July 21, 2003. The proposal was selected from a total of sixty submissions.

Appointment Rob van den Berg

Rob van den Berg has been appointed professor of spatial stochastics at the Faculty of Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam since July 1, 2003. Van de Berg leads CWI's Stochastics group (PNA3). Among his research interests are percolation, a branch of stochastics studying transitions in connectivity in random systems, and telecommunication networks. More information can be found at: www.cwi.nl/pna3.

Jan Willem Klop new KNAW member

CWI's Prof. dr. Jan Willem Klop has been elected as a member of the KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). Klop is researcher at CWI and the Catholic University Nijmegen, and professor of Applied Logic at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. In 2002, he received a doctor honoris causa degree at the English University of East Anglia. He cooperated with Jan Bergstra and Jos Baeten on the development of process algebra (ACP). Currently he works in the area of term rewriting systems, amongst others as co-author of the impressive book 'Term Rewriting Systems'.

Farewell Gerard van Oortmerssen

On May 15, 2003, Gerard van Oortmerssen bade farewell to CWI, after many good years as its General Director. CWI paid honour to him with the symposium `Managing in Knowledge Land', where Peter Nijkamp (NWO) spoke, as well as Ben Veltman (AWT), Martin Kersten (CWI and UvA) and Pieter Adriaans (UvA, and chairman of CWI's Governing Board).

Sander Bohte receives NWO grants

The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO has granted a VENI subsidy to CWI researcher Sander Bohte. Bohte will use the grant, approved in March 2003, to further his research on spiking neural networks. These types of networks incorporate the latest insights in functional biological neurons. In theory they are much more powerful than traditional artificial neural networks. Bothe's work is aimed at using spiking neurons in large-scale networks that can learn to deal with symbolic structures like grammar in language or compact descriptions of objects in vision.

New Scientist: Software to unzip identity of unknown composers

New Scientist wrote the following text about recent research of Paul Vitányi and fellow researchers at CWI: "A standard PC file-compression program can tell the difference between classical music, jazz ad rock, all without playing a single note. This new-found ability could help scholars identify the composers of music that until now has remained anonymous."

Mathematics of influenza

CWI contributes to the largest influenza survey ever conducted in the Netherlands and Flanders. The Grote Griepmeting, organized by science website Kennislink, magazine Natuurwetenschap & Techniek and several research centres, maps the spread of influenza and common cold from November 1, 2003 until April 1, 2004. People are invited to contribute to the survey by signing up on the Grote Griepmeting website . On a regular basis they will be asked to report any symptoms like fever, a sore throat or a runny nose.

Lecture Edsger Dijkstra at CWI

Lecture Edsger Dijkstra On Tuesday, October 10, 2000, the famous Edsger Dijkstra will give a lecture at CWI, entitled: 'On avoiding avoidable case analyses'. Prof.dr. Dijkstra is Professor Emeritus of the University of Texas at Austin. In the list of most cited Dutch computer scientists on the Web, Dijkstra holds the second place.Abstract On avoiding avoidable case analyses

Security of E-commerce threatened by 512-bit number factorization

On August 22 1999, a team of scientists from six different countries, led by Herman te Riele of CWI (Amsterdam), found the prime factors of a 512-bit number, whose size models 95% of the keys used for protection of electronic commerce on the Internet. This result shows, much earlier than expected at the start of E-commerce, that the popular key-size of 512 bits is no longer safe against even a moderately powerful attacker. The amount of money protected by 512-bit keys is immense.

W3C accepts New Multimedia Standard for Web Presentations

The W3C consortium has accepted a new standard for multimediapresentations on the Internet. This was announced by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium's director and inventor of the World Wide Web (WWW), in a press release on the Web (http://w3c.org) on June 15. The world-wide W3C consortium was established in order to guide the Web's development.CWI hosts the local W3C office in The Netherlands. The new standard, SMIL (pronounced 'smile'), is a specification language for synchronized, interactive multimedia presentations on the Internet.

CWI Director Van Oortmerssen elected ERCIM President in 1998

At a meeting of the Board of Directors of ERCIM, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, in Bonn on 29 May 1998, CWI Director Gerard van Oortmerssen was elected ERCIM President for a period of two years. Jointly with INRIA (France) and GMD (Germany), CWI founded ERCIM in 1989. The consortium's aim is to foster cooperation within the European research community in informatics and applied mathematics, as well as with the European Trade & Industry sector.