INRIA -Gérard Huet, Senior Scientist and Head of International Relations department
has received the Herbrand Award during CADE-15 in Lindau, Germany
8 July. Gérard Huet, Associate mem-ber of the French Académie
des Sciences, is known for his deep work in automatic theorem
proving, with a lasting international influence. He is the originator
of the Coq system, under development at INRIA-Rocquencourt, with
which a number of companies such as Dassault-Aviation, Bull CP8
or France Télécom are experimenting today.
INRIA - Jean-Pierre Merlet, Senior Scientist at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, head of the SAGA
project proposal, has received a special mention from the Jury
of the Altran Foundation Prize, Innovation, pain, deficiencies
and physical handicap. The micro-robot that has received the prize,
under development at INRIA can be used for inspection as well
as surgery proper. It is less than 1cm in diameter, it is bio-compatible
and transparent with respect to NMR and radiological apparatus.
It may be autonomous, because its head contains both a source
of energy and control, which is activated remotely.
CNUCE-CNR - The Michelangelo prize, awarded annually by the town
of Carrara and the province of Massa-Carrara for an original work
of art, was won this year by the cyber painter Marco Cardini, together with Leonello Tarabella, Massimo Magrini
and Giuseppe Scapellato of the Computer Music Lab, CNUCE, Pisa. The unusual theme of
Michelangelo ‘98 was technological research of particular artistic
value. Cardini uses the Aerial Painting Hands system, created
by Scapellato, and the sound system, developed at the Music Lab
by Tarabella and Magrini, to produce graphical and musical works
in real time. At the prize-giving ceremony on 1 August in the
town hall of Cararra, the very avant-garde performance by Cardini
was received with great enthusiasm and interest by the invited
audience.
INRIA - Serge Abiteboul, Senior Scientist at INRIA Rocquencourt , head of the VERSO research
team, has received the 1998 Innovation Award from ACM SIGMOD.
ACM SIGMOD is the special interest group of the Association for
Computing Machinery including the best known researchers in the
field of Data Bases. The SIGMOD Innovation Award is given for
innovative contributions to the development or use of database
systems and databases. The contributions must have been reduced
to practice and adopted widely in significant use. SIGMOD acknowledges
both the fundamental research work of Serge Abiteboul as well
as his cooperation in the creation of the O2 software. The award
is presented yearly by SIGMOD since 1992, and all earlier recipients
have been working in the United States.
Sir James Lighthill, brilliant mathematician who foresaw the use of communications
satellites and space shuttles, has died aged 74. In the mid 1950s
he was one of the British scientists at work on suppressing noise
from the jets of the prototype Boeing 707. In the early 1960s
Lighthill developed the first communications satellites. News
of the project was reported under the headline “A telephone in
space”. At the same time Lighthill was investigating the feasibility
of using high-altitude aircraft as launch platforms for spacecraft.
In 1963 he took part in talks at Chequers to explain to ministers
and Service chiefs the future importance of satellites. The next
year, he was appointed to a Royal Society research professorship,
attached to Imperial College, London. He also set up an Institute
of Mathematics and its Applications, of which he served for two
years as president. In 1969 he became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics
at Cambridge, where he stayed for 10 years. Lighthill was elected
Provost of University College, London, in 1979. From 1990 to 1995
he served on the Special Committee on Natural Disaster Reduction
sponsored by the International Council of Scientific Unions. In
1964 Lighthill was awarded a Royal Medal by the Royal Society,
of which he had become a Fellow in 1953, when he was only 29.
He was Secretary and then Vice-President of the Royal Society
between 1965 and 1969. In 1961 he became a Fellow of Royal Aeronautical
Society. He received honorary doctorates from 24 academic bodies,
ranging from Tallahassee to St Petersburg. He was knighted in
1971.
INRIA - Olivier Faugeras, Senior Scientist at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis and Adjunct Professor
at MIT, head of the ROBOTVIS research team, has been awarded in
June the Grand Prix France Télécom by the French Académie des
Sciences for his work on geometry and image processing. Olivier
Faugeras is one of the world leading scientists in computer vision.
His work is also at the foundation of a newly created high technology
company, Realiz, which specializes in computerized special effects
for video and motion pictures.
