CWI - Hans van Duijn, leader of CWI’s research cluster on Modelling, Analysis and
Simulation, and professor in the Mathematical Analysis of Flows
through Porous Media at Delft University of Technology, received
the Max Planck Research Award for International Cooperation. The
award of DM 250.000 was presented during a festive ceremony on
3 December in Bonn. It was granted in recognition of Van Duijn’s
outstanding research achievements and provided for cooperation
with German scientists over a period of three to five years.
CWI - a CWI research team led by Dick Bulterman has won one of the three main prizes (Hfl 50.000) of the McKinsey
New Venture 98 competition in The Netherlands for the best business
plan of prospective entrepreneurs in the research world. The team
(Dick Bulterman, Lynda Hardman, Sjoerd Mullender, and Jack Jansen)
won the prize with their idea of GRiNS, an authoring system for
multimedia applications on the Internet (see, eg, ERCIM News 33,
p.45). GRiNS can be used to develop the full potential of SMIL
(Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language), which became a
W3C Recommendation in June 1998. There were over six hundred submissions
for the competition, which was organized in three rounds by McKinsey
in cooperation with the Dutch universities, research institutions
and the Twinning Network
CWI - Ronald Cramer received the Christiaan Huygens Award (Hfl 20.000), granted by
the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for the most
innovative Ph.D. thesis over the past four years in The Netherlands
in the field of Information & Communication Technology. Ronald
Cramer worked at CWI under Paul Vitányi. After having completed
his Ph.D. thesis on secure, yet practical cryptographic systems
he went early 1997 to ETH Zürich to continue research in this
direction. Jointly with Victor Shoup (IBM Research Laboratory
Zürich) he devised a ‘hacker-proof’ encryption system which protects,
eg, Internet transactions against so-called active attacks (successful
attacks on the best encryption systems so far were carried out
earlier in 1998). The result was announced at the Crypto’98 conference
held in September in Santa Barbara, California and received wide
publicity.
CWI - Debby Lanser, now a Ph.D. student in CWI’s research theme on Numerical Algorithms
for Air Quality Modelling (led by Jan Verwer), received at Delft
University of Technology the annual prize (Hfl 1.000) for the
best Master’s Thesis in the field of Technical Mathematics. The
work concerned the modelling and computing of a complex industrial
flow problem.
INRIA - Olivier Faugeras, Research Director at INRIA and head of the ROBOTVIS research
team at Sophia-Antipolis adressing the computer-aided vision issue,
has been elected as full member of the French Academy of Science.
A former graduate of Ecole Polytechnique, he holds a PhD from
Utah University and from University Paris 6. He is a part-time
professor at MIT and lectures in various French universities.
His book ‘Three-dimensional Computer Vision:a Geometric Approach’
has become a classic.
