CWI aims at playing a leading role in setting the national research agendas in mathematics and computer sciences. Together with other top institutions such as INRIA (France) and the Max Planck Institute (Germany) CWI forms the backbone of European research in mathematics and computer science. Some of the results are highlighted in this section.
New factorization record demonstrates vulnerability cryptographic keys
Workshop on side-channel attacks
Side-channel attacks – attacks that use physical leakages to break the security of electronic devices like smart cards or RFID chips – are becoming a major problem. For instance, by measuring the power consumption or electromagnetic radiation, criminals might extract information from banking cards and electronic car keys. For a long time, side-channel attacks were seen as a practical problem. However, recently new cryptographic principles were discovered against all known or unknown side-channel attacks, making only minimal assumptions on the hardware.
In February, cryptographers and hardware engineers gathered at the workshop ‘Provable Security against Physical Attacks’ to develop new methods and tools. CWI, Leiden University, MIT, the K.U. Leuven and ENS Paris organized this event at the Lorentz Center in Leiden. Scientists from over 40 universities and institutes participated at the workshop, the first in Europe in this format.
More information:
http://www.cwi.nl/2010/1054/side-channel-attacks
YouTube Movie Room for Women at ‘Talent to the Top’ Charter
In March, CWI signed ‘Talent to the Top’ Charter, highlighting the objective of the national task force to increase the number of women in senior positions.
To illustrate this, CWI created the short film ‘Room for Women’. In this film four female scientists – Ute Ebert, Lynda Hardman, Martina Chirilus-Bruckner and Sara Ramezani – tell about their lives, research and ambitions, as role models for a new generation of scientific talent. The movie was posted on YouTube and shown at CWI. Guest of honour at the premiere was Constance van Eeden, the first female scientist at CWI in 1954 and now Honorary Professor at the University of British Columbia.
At present, CWI has 16 percent women in its research staff. CWI implements measurable targets to have more women on top positions. The ambition is to increase the number of women at CWI in 2016 with 30 percent in general.
More information:
http://www.cwi.nl/general/room-for-women
CWI Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/CentrumWI
Research on efficient use of renewable energy
CWI has started a large multidisciplinary project exploring the efficient use of renewable energy sources. In the project ‘Computational Energy Systems’, scientists from various disciplines conduct basic fundamental research about our future energy grid. The research project was designed in collaboration with Keuring Elektrotechnische Materialen Arnhem (KEMA). Results can be utilized by governments, policy makers, network providers and energy suppliers.
CWI researchers examine sustainable energy issues in logistics, production, distribution and consumption. They focus on the transition to alternative energy sources, distribution over the electrical network with uncertain decentralized supply and storage, the development of smart grids and the degree to which smart buildings can contribute to saving energy.
CWI stimulates collaborations between different disciplines so that knowledge can be widely employed. Broad research as described here is a good example of this.
More information:
http://www.cwi.nl/2010/1074/renewable-energy
CWI Lectures in Mathematics and Computer Science 2010 Data Intensive Research
On 25 June CWI organized its annual CWI Lectures. The keynote speakers gave their vision on Data Intensive Research: Hector Garcia-Molina (Stanford University, USA), Alex Szalay (Johns Hopkins University (USA), Stratos Idreos and Daan Crommelin. Discovery based on data-intensive science is becoming more and more important: A Fourth Paradigm (J.Gray). The data-centric setting requires a new look at computing architectures, algorithms and strategies to exploit the accumulation of data.
During the CWI Lectures, Garcia-Molina discussed the opportunities for large scale text analysis. Szalay gave a lecture on data intensive research in numerical data, such as the Sloane Digital Sky Server – the world’s largest database of astronomical data. Idreos and Crommelin showed examples of data intensive research in database architectures and modelling from earth and life sciences. The CWI Lectures were organized by Martin Kersten.
More information:
http://www.cwi.nl/en/lectures2010
Woudschoten Conference
The Thirty-fifth Woudschoten Conference of the Dutch & Flemish numerical analysis communities was held on 6‒8 October in Zeist, The Netherlands. Hundred and fifteen participants attended this annual event, which was organized by the Werkgemeenschap Scientific Computing (WSC). CWI, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Nonlinear Dynamics of Natural Systems (NDNS+), and the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) supported this meeting.
Themes of the conference were parallel numerical linear algebra and immersed boundary methods and Cartesian grids. Keynote speakers were Patrick Amestoy (Université de Toulouse, France), Peter Arbenz (ETH Zurich, Switzerland), Alex Pothen (Purdue University, USA), Gianluca Iaccarino (Stanford University, USA), Petros Koumoutsakos (ETH Zurich, Switzerland), Rajat Mittal (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA).
CWI actively contributes to WSC, thereby stimulating young talent and the communication within the research community. Jan Verwer (1946–2011) was chair of the WSC Committee; Margreet Nool is secretary of both the WSC Committee and the Woudschoten Conference Committee.
More information:
http://wsc.project.cwi.nl/woudschoten/2010/conferentieE.php
Symposium Large-Scale and Uncertain Optimization
In November CWI organized the symposium ‘Large-Scale and Uncertain Optimization’, in honour of Aharon Ben-Tal, currently visiting CWI as ‘Distinguished Scientist’. Ben-Tal is professor and head of the Minerva Optimization Center at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He has developed mathematical methods and computational algorithms to solve optimization problems arising in medical applications and civil and aerospace engineering.
Optimization problems stemming from applications like medical imaging, radiation therapy, machine learning, or shape design of mechanical structures in engineering, pose severe challenges due to the large number of decision variables and the uncertainty affecting the problems’ parameters. For instance, in radiotherapy, the actual tumor size and location are uncertain due to slight movements of the patient.
Safer and more effective treatment programs can be designed using Robust Optimization, a relatively new methodology which takes uncertainties a-priori into account.
The four speakers at the symposium, Aharon Ben-Tal, Marco Campi (University of Brescia), Dick den Hertog (Tilburg University) and Arkadi Nemirovski (Georgia Institute of Technology), presented state-of-the-art methodologies and computational schemes addressing the above challenges.
CWI Distinguished Scientist
In 2010 the Distinguished Scientist Programme started at CWI. Once a year CWI invites a prominent scientist from abroad as a distinguished guest for a period of three to six months on a basis of ‘most expenses paid’. The scientist is honoured with a one-day symposium for a broad scientific audience and is encouraged to give lectures in the Netherlands. The first Distinguished Scientist to visit CWI was Professor Aharon Ben-Tal.
More information:
http://homepages.cwi.nl/~monique/Optimization-Symposium-Day/
CWI and ERCIM
ERCIM, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, fosters collaboration between researchers in Europe and co-operation with European industry. Members are leading research institutes from nineteen European countries. In November the Board of Directors chose three Vice Presidents: CWI’s general director Jan Karel Lenstra, Andreas Rauber (AARIT, Austria) and Keith Jeffery (STFC, United Kingdom). President is Michel Cosnard (INRIA, France).
In 2010 the ERCIM ABCDE project started, supported by the European Commission to co-invest in the ERCIM Alain Bensoussan Fellowship programme. With the subsidy, young talented researchers can extend their fellowship in ERCIM institutes with three months. They will also be trained in a range of non-scientific skills. Dick Broekhuis from CWI is member of the steering committee.
The ERCIM News magazine published four issues, two of which were co-coordinated by CWI researchers. ERCIM News 81 on ‘Computational Science: Simulation & Modelling for Research and Industry’ was coordinated by Ulrich Trottenberg (SCAI, Germany) and Han La Poutré (CWI); ERCIM News 82 on ‘Computational Biology’ was coordinated by Gunnar Klau (CWI) and Jacques Nicolas (INRIA, France).
More information:
http://www.ercim.eu
W3C and CWI
CWI plays an active role in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which develops technologies to lead the Web to its full potential. Several CWI research groups (Distributed and Interactive Systems, Interactive Information Access) actively participate in the W3C Working Groups. Some researchers have special positions within W3C. Ivan Herman is Semantic Web Activity Lead, coordinating all W3C Semantic Web related work worldwide. Steven Pemberton (photo) chaired the XHTML2 Working Group, and is Forms and HTML Activity Lead.
Ivan Herman organized the RDF Next Steps workshop at Stanford (USA), resulting in a new RDF Working Group. Another major output was the publication of RIF (Rule Interchange Format), as well as the continuing work on RDFa (together with Pemberton), or SPARQL.
W3C Benelux Office
CWI hosts the W3C Benelux Office (W3C-Benelux), the regional contact point for Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. It is managed by Fons Kuijk and cooperates with the Dutch and Belgium Internet Society (ISOC). On 14 January W3C-Benelux and many ICT-related organizations jointly organized a new year’s event at science center NEMO in Amsterdam. In June W3C-Benelux supported the First Amsterdam Semantic Meetup, bridging academic research to business applications. In November the Second Semantic Meetup with the W3C Benelux Office took place, where Ivan Herman presented the newest Semantic Web (SW) technologies.
To improve the quality and accessibility of websites, W3C-Benelux and the Bartiméus Accessibility Foundation coordinated the Dutch translation of the ‘Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2’ (WCAG), which was published in December. Twenty-four organizations participated. A seminar on the translation was organized in Zeist in December. CWI speakers were Steven Pemberton and Fons Kuijk.
Translation: http://www.w3.org/Translations/WCAG20-nl/
CWI facilitated a Dutch Software Freedom Day 2010, which took place on 17 September at CWI. The goal of this annual day is to educate people on free and Open Source Software (OSS). CWI plays an active role in developing open internet recommendations (W3C), and has since long been involved in the open source community. The programming language Python created at CWI is a good example. In September, several speakers from international companies, universities and the government gave presentations on open source software.
Speakers from CWI were: Jurgen Vinju on Rascal (a domain specific language for source code analysis and manipulation), Jack Jansen on SMIL (W3C’s Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language), Jacco van Ossenbruggen on the MultimediaN Eculture project (providing multimedia access to distributed collections of cultural heritage objects) and Fabian Groffen on MonetDB (an open-source database system for high-performance applications).
More information:
http://www.softwarefreedomday.eu/2010/index.html
