by Patrick Poullie, Thomas Bocek and Burkhard Stiller

NFC tags and transceivers are ubiquitous and well supported. Like many academic research groups, the Communication Systems Group CSG of the University of Zürich owns many physical devices, which are required for research and teaching. Traditionally, a printed, human-readable inventory and attached labels have been used to keep track of these devices. A new inventory approach was developed with the aim of simplifying the data acquisition using an NFC tag-based system supported by an Android application. This approach was implemented, tested, and used productively. However, due to technical difficulties - namely, a poor response of NFC tags on metallic material - the NFC-based inventory system did not simplify data acquisition and consequently, the NFC-based inventory system was changed back to the label-based system.

TrakChain Estimates Costs for Track and Trace in the Internet of (many) Things

by Miguel L. Pardal and José Alves Marques

The TrakChain assessment tools take a description of a physical supply chain – relevant locations, how many goods are received, how often, etc. – and estimate the performance of track and trace queries in a modelled traceability system, providing predictions of how much processing and storage will be required for the working system. The tools were developed at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal and were evaluated using a Pharmaceuticals supply chain case study.

W3C Europe will celebrate its twentieth anniversary with a symposium on Tuesday, 5 May in the Paris town hall.

The Web was born in Europe and W3C is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the European branch of W3C in Paris. Europe has played a fundamental role for the success of the Web. First of all, the founding of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994 became possible with the support by CERN, DARPA and the European Commission. Since 1995, when Inria hosted the European branch of W3C, the European Commission funded W3C activities in Europe, as for example the development of Web accessibility rules, enabling people with disabilities to participate equally on the Web. Since 2003, W3C Europe is hosted by ERCIM EEIG.

W3C will celebrate 20 years of work accomplished by European stakeholders for the benefit of the Web with a symposium on 5 May. Speakers will include, among others, representatives from Paris city council, the European Commission and the French government. The closing talk will be given by Tim Berners-Lee, Web Inventor and W3C Director. About 250 invited guests - global strategists, business leaders and developers - are expected to attend.

More information:
http://www.w3.org/20/Europe/

by Antoine Petit

Over the last 25 years, ERCIM has earned a reputation as one of Europe’s leading expert groups in the areas of ICT and Applied Mathematics. In 2012, the ERCIM community was restructured and is now supported by two organizations, the ERCIM Association (AISBL) and the ERCIM European Economic Interest Group (EEIG). While the Association is carrying out and supervising all of ERCIM’s scientific activities, the EEIG, composed of a subset of the Association's members, is responsible for managing the ERCIM Office and the European branch of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The ERCIM Office, hosted by Inria in its Sophia Antipolis Research Centre in Southern France, manages all administrative and financial aspects of the ERCIM community with a talented team of professionals.

Hosting and managing the European branch of W3C is a major task of the ERCIM EEIG. The change of the W3C European host from Inria to ERCIM in 2003 aimed at strengthening research relationships throughout Europe to better support Web technology development. ERCIM was a natural candidate as host since many of the European W3C Offices were already based at ERCIM member institutes. When Inria became the first W3C European host in 1995, W3C Europe had 50 members in four countries. Today, the W3C Membership in Europe exceeds 140 organizations, with representation in 20 countries in Europe. But more important, during the last twenty years we have witnessed the Web revolution with tremendous advances in Web technology, changing not only the world of research but also the whole of society. The evolution of Web standards is a challenging task, yet is crucial to maintain an open Web and to transform W3C into a more long-term international standardization organization. This year, W3C Europe will celebrate its twentieth anniversary at an event on Tuesday, 5 May in Paris, in conjunction with the ERCIM Spring meetings, and ERCIM representatives are cordially invited.

The ERCIM Office is also providing assistance and services to the whole ERCIM community. An important activity is the management of European projects involving ERCIM members or the W3C. Through ERCIM, our members have participated in more than 80 projects funded by the European Commission by carrying out joint research activities while the Office manages the complexity of the project administration, finances and outreach. The ERCIM Office also handles ERCIM AISBL financial matters and supports the whole ERCIM community in administrative tasks such as the management of the well established ERCIM Fellowship Programme, and in communications, for example by hosting and maintaining web sites and by producing ERCIM News.

ERCIM has gained a leadership position for cooperating for excellence in research and is a recognized expert organization in Information and Communication Technologies in Europe. To maintain its position, and increase its impact on European strategy and policy, I’m convinced that ERCIM has to increase its membership by attracting the best research performing organizations and by developing new strategically important activities such as the “ERCIM white papers series” started last year with support of Domenico Laforenza, my fellow president of ERCIM AISBL. ERCIM groups of experts identify emerging grand challenges and strategic research topics in Information and Communication Science and Technology (ICST). In 2014, the first two white papers were published on the topics “Big Data Analytics” and “Cyber-Security and Privacy” with recommendations for future research. A white paper on Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), another current hot topic, is currently in work.

I also support Domenico’s efforts in cooperating with leading European organisations, in order to play a role in shaping Europe’s digital future through the platform of the European Societies in Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies (EFICST). I encourage ERCIM to strengthen relationships with organisations such as Informatics Europe and the ICT Lab, a Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) of the European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT).

With our two organisations, ERCIM EEIG and ERCIM AISBL, I believe that we have the potential to strengthen our position as recognized leader in field of European research and innovation in ICST, to increase our impact on European strategy and policy, and to successfully continue our mission of “Cooperating for Excellence in Research”.

Antoine Petit, Chairman and CEO of Inria, was nominated President of ERCIM EEIG by the ERCIM EEIG Board of Directors on 24 October 2014 in Pisa for a two year term from January 2015 to December 2016. Antoine Petit succeeds Michel Cosnard, who took office as ERCIM President in January 2011. Photo © Inria / C. Helsly

by Paolo Cignoni, Nico Pietroni, Luigi Malomo and Roberto Scopigno

Mesh joinery is an innovative method to produce illustrative shape approximations suitable for fabrication. Mesh joinery is capable of producing complex fabricable structures in an efficient and visually pleasing manner. We represent an input geometry as a set of planar pieces arranged to compose a rigid structure by exploiting an efficient slit mechanism. Since slices are planar, a standard 2D cutting system is sufficient to fabricate them.

by Andrea Cristofaro and Tor Arne Johansen

In unmanned aerial vehicles, it is vital to be able to detect and accommodate ice adhesion on wings, control surfaces and airspeed sensors, since ice accretion modifies the shape of the aircraft and alters its measurements, thus changing the aerodynamic forces and reducing manoeuvring capability.

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for civil applications – largely surveillance and monitoring - has increased markedly in recent years. UAVs are very often suited for harsh conditions that are unsafe for humans, such as those typically encountered in Arctic operations. Reliable, appropriate, and efficient UAV operations are needed in such conditions.

by Christian Bauckhage, Markus Ketterl and Ulrich Nütten

LEARNMINER is an interactive social eLearning platform that integrates advanced analytics and linked data processing to assist users in structuring course material. Tools for analyzing crowd behaviour allow instructors to identify overly simple or difficult material and provide means for planning deadlines or tests. LEARNMINER allows for mobile access and provides interactive visualization of learning material and progress.

by Chengchen Hu and Yuming Jiang

Mobile applications, web services and social media generate huge data traffic from many sources. This is described as ‘big network data’ with the ‘4V-characteristics’ - that is, variety, velocity, volume and veracity. Analysis on such big network data can discover problems, reveal opportunities and provide advice for the service and network providers for fine-grained traffic engineering with close to real-time adjustment or application acceleration [1].

by Stephan Paredes, Brian Burg, Patrick Ruch, Ingmar Meijer and Bruno Michel

An earlier article in ERCIM News described a system for cooling integrated circuits with re-usable hot water. The result is a sharp increase in energy efficiency and a sharp reduction in the carbon footprint of data centers. The same technique is being applied to photovoltaic electrical energy production, again with a huge gain in system efficiency due to the parallel recovery of waste heat. In hot climates heat from datacenters as well as solar systems is converted into cooling by means of adsorption heat pumps.

The German VAVID project develops improved techniques for data compression as well as new methods of data analysis, data management and interactive data visualization.

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.