In the last 18 months, the LIDER project has organized several roadmapping events to gather a broad community around the topic of linguistic linked data. In July this year, LIDER will engage with two selected communities. On 6 July, the 5th LIDER roadmapping workshop will be held in Rome at Sapienza University of Rome. The topic will be cross-media linked data and the event will provide several high level speakers from the multimedia area. On 13 July LIDER will organize the 6th roadmappping workshop in Munich. The event will be hosted by Siemens and will focus on content analytics and linked data in healthcare and medicine.

For the first time researchers could explain how lightning starts: by a combination of hail and high energy particles from space, originating from exploding stars. This mechanism is modelled by researchers from the Multiscale Dynamics research group at CWI, together with colleagues from the University of Groningen and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The research was partly funded by the Technology Foundation STW and the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) . The article “Prediction of lightning inception by large ice particles and extensive air showers” is published on 30 June in Physical Review Letters.

Prof. Christos Nikolaou passed away on April 30, 2015. Christos was a renowned researcher in the area of distributed systems and an enthusiastic teacher for more than three decades. He obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1982 and worked as a researcher and group leader at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Crete in 1992 and served as Rector of the University from 1999 to 2004. During his term as Rector he implemented many innovative practices and reforms in the academic, administrative and student services domains. He undertook many initiatives that resulted in the ranking of the University of Crete in the top 100 young universities worldwide. Christos was also the head of the Pleiades Distributed Systems Group in the Institute of Computer Science of FORTH.