Prof. Dr. Manfred Hauswirth was appointed as Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communications Systems FOKUS in Berlin. Hauswirth assumed his new post on 1 October 2014. Concurrently, he will take over the professorship in “distributed open systems” at the Technical University of Berlin. Hauswirt succeeds Prof. Dr. Popescu-Zeletin who retired from his position as Executive Director of Fraunhofer FOKUS on 30 September 2014.
Antoine Petit was appointed Chairman and CEO of Inria for a term of five years on 26 September 2014. Associate Professor of Mathematics and Doctor of Science, University Professor at ENS Cachan, he was formerly Deputy Managing Director of Inria.
Antoine Petit. © Inria / Photo C. Helsly
Antoine Petit joined Inria in July 2006 to head the Paris-Rocquencourt Research Centre, later acting as interim Director of the Saclay Research Centre from March to September 2010. As Deputy Managing Director, he coordinated relations with supervisory ministries and institutional partnerships with research bodies, businesses and local authorities, in France and abroad. He has also been in charge of training through research programmes. Antoine Petit specialises in formal methods, mainly transition system based methods, for the specification and verification of parallel and real-time systems. Antoine Petit succeeds Michel Cosnard who remains President of ERCIM EEIG until the end of 2014.
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) is extremely happy and proud to now have two Nobel Prize Laureates in their scientific staff. Professors May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser at NTNU have been awarded the Nobel Prize for 2014 in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of how the brain creates a map of the space around us to navigate complex surroundings. They share the award with John O'Keefe of University College London, and they are only the second married couple to win a Nobel in medicine.
The Fondazione Cassa di Risparmi di Lucca is Co-funding two Projects Proposed by two Institutes of the National Research Council in Pisa. The first project, MONSTER (Monito-raggio strutturale di edifici storici con tecnologie wireless e strumenti di calcolo innovativi), proposed by the Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI), will monitor the Bell Tower of the San Frediano Basilica in Lucca through a non-invasive wireless sensor network (WSN). The sensors will collect data relevant to the atmospheric conditions and the stresses the tower is subjected to. The goal is a continuous, cheap and non-invasive monitoring of an historic heritage, in order to have the possibility to immediately intervene when structural problems are detected.The second project, Well Being @ Lucca (WB@ Lucca), proposed by the Institute of Informatics and Telematics (IIT), is addressed to elderly people; some parameters related to their health and the quality of their sleeping will be monitored. They will also be provided with a tool to stimulate their domestic physical activity and their smart phone will be used to increase their social contacts.
