In February an interview with Guido van Rossum was published on the ACM website, celebrating 25 years of Python. This popular programming language originates from CWI in Amsterdam, where Van Rossum designed Python in December 1989 and finished the first working version in the first months of 1990. He named the language after his favourite British comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Guido van Rossum

Researchers from the Formal Methods group at CWI fixed a bug in programming language Java in February 2015. They found an error in a broadly applied sorting algorithm, TimSort, which could crash programs and threaten security. The bug had already been known from 2013 but was never correctly resolved. When researcher Stijn de Gouw attempted to prove the correctness of TimSort, he encountered the bug. His bug report with an improved version has now been accepted. This version of TimSort is used by Android.

A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) “Binaural Hearing for Robots” will be available on the platform France Université Numérique from 11 May to 12 June 2015. It will be taught by Radu Horaud, research director at Inria Grenoble Rhône-Alpes.