The CoreGRID Summer School 2006 (CSS'06) took place in Bonn, Germany from 24 to 28 July. Organising the yearly summer school, CoreGRID - The European Research Network on Foundations, Software Infrastructures and Applications for large-scale distributed GRID and Peer-to-Peer Technologies - aims at providing the possibility of advanced training to students and researchers in a trend-setting domain of computer science, which is currently under-represented in the curricula of universities. CoreGRID summer schools are organised by a different CoreGRID partner each year and take place in distinct European cities.

Oliver Heckmann from Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, and Google Labs Zürich, Switzerland, has been awarded the 2006 Cor Baayen Award for a most promising young researcher in computer science and applied mathematics by ERCIM.

For more information, see http://www.ercim.org/activity/cor-baayen.html

Net-WMS is a new project managed by ERCIM with the objective to integrate virtual reality and optimisation techniques in a new generation of networked businesses in Warehouse Management Systems under constraints. The project has been set up in the frame of the ERCIM Working Group 'Constraints'.

For the first time, the DELOS and MUSCLE Networks of Excellence organised a joint summer school. The event was held in San Vincenzo, Italy from 12 to 17 June 2006 and the topic covered was Multimedia Digital Libraries.

by Tom Mens, Jean-Marie Favre and Salah Sadou

The ERCIM Working Group on Software Evolution has begun to establish some local chapters in order to achieve a better dissemination of results at a national level and to achieve a better interaction with local companies. This is important since the language barrier is still an issue in many countries and the introduction of national activities that are carried out in the native tongue address this problem.

by Thomas Lux

The 13th workshop of the ERCIM Working Group Environmental Modelling was held on 31 August - 1 September 2006 at Fraunhofer FIRST, Berlin, Germany.

by Lubos Brim and Martin Leucker

The 11th International Workshop on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS 06) was held in Bonn, Germany, on August 26-27, 2006 as a satellite event to the 17th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2006). The workshop, being also an annual meeting of the ERCIM Working Group, continued successfully the aim of FMICS workshop series - to promote the use of formal methods for industrial applications, by supporting research in this area and its application in industry. The emphasis in these workshops is on the exchange of ideas between researchers and practitioners, in both industry and academia.