ERCIM 25th Anniversary Celebration

On the occasion of ERCIM’s 25th anniversary, a special session and panel discussion took place on 23 October in the auditorium of the CNR Campus. Speakers and representatives from research, industry, the European Commission, and the ERCIM community presented their views on research and future developments in information and communication science and technology (ICST).

Domenico Laforenza, President of ERCIM welcomed more than 100 ERCIM delegates, ERCIM postdoc fellows and guests to the special anniversary session and symposium. He gave a brief overview on ERCIM’s history, achievements and outlook.

Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli, Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California at Berkeley gave insight in cyber-physical systems with his talk “Let’s get physical: marrying computing with the physical world”.

Carlo Ratti, Director of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA described some of the Lab’s projects such as exploring the spatio-temporal patterns of mobile phone activity in cities, and “Ambient Mobility”, a smart mobility research project to analyze, design, develop and test senseable and sustainable mobility systems in interaction with other future urban systems. “Ambient Mobility” is a joint initiative between the Senseable City Lab at MIT and the Mobility Innovation Lab at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO.

Alain Bensoussan, former President of Inria and one of the co-founders of ERCIM, now Professor of Risk and Decision Analysis at the School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas, discussed the question: “Big data and big expectations: Is a successful matching possible?”

The following two speakers introduced the latest ERCIM White Papers. Rigo Wenning, W3C presented the White Paper “Security and Privacy Research Trends and Challenges”. The White Paper “Big Data Analytics: Towards a European Research Agenda”, was presented by Fosca Giannotti, ISTI-CNR (see also articles on pages 9 and 10).

Radu Mateescu, senior researcher at Inria Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes and chair of the ERCIM Working Group on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems then presented the achievements of two decades of this ERCIM Working Group which has achieved world-wide recognition in this field.

The presentations were followed by a panel discussion on the topic “ICT Research in Europe: How to reinforce the cooperation between the main actors and stakeholders”. The panel was moderated by Carlo Ghezzi, President, Informatics Europe (Politecnico di Milano, Italy). The participants were Domenico Laforenza, President, ERCIM AISBL (CNR), Fabio Pianesi, Research Director, ICT Labs, European Institute for Innovations and Technology, Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, President of the European Research Council (ERC), Paola Inverardi, ICT Italian Delegate, Rector of the University of L'Aquila, Italy and Thomas Skordas, head of the FET Flagships Unit, European Commission, DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CNECT).

Juan Reutter, Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer science at the Catholic University of Chile, received the 2014 ERCIM Cor Baayen Award from Cor Baayen, ERCIM’s president d’honneur himself and closed the session with a talk about his work, which deals mainly with foundations of data management (see article on page 8).

In conjunction with the anniversary event, CNR also hosted the fourth ERCIM ABCDE Fellowship Seminar and the regular ERCIM Fall meetings. The Fellowship Seminar was a two-day event for postdoctoral ERCIM fellows hosted in the frame of the ERCIM ABCDE fellowship programme, supported by the FP7 Marie Curie Actions - People, Co-funding of Regional, National and International Programmes (COFUND). 20 fellows participated in the seminar.

Domenico Laforenza