by Pedro Guedes de Oliveira and João Falcão e Cunha

Portugal is back in ERCIM after more than ten years' absence. While INESC (Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores) was in fact a member of ERCIM back in 1991, internal problems, both financial and organizational, meant it was necessary for it to leave in 1998. It is only now with PEG - the Portuguese ERCIM Grouping - that Portugal again has a representative institution. PEG was a recent initiative to allow the country to have a wide institutional representation, thus providing a wider group of researchers and research groups with access to ERCIM.

Adam Dunkels from SICS, Sweden, is the winner of the 2008 Cor Baayen Award for a promising young researcher in computer science and applied mathematics. Sixteen finalists competed for this award established by ERCIM in 1995 to honour the first ERCIM President Cor Baayen.

ERCIM is a partner in the Virtual Physiological Human Network of Excellence (VPH NoE), which is funded by the EU Seventh Framework programme and aims to connect and support researchers in the VPH field. In particular, the network will promote and facilitate research in the field of patient-specific computer models for personalized and predictive healthcare and ICT-based tools for modelling and simulation of human physiology and disease-related processes.

The CoreGRID Symposium held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, 25-26 August 2008 marked the end of the ERCIM-managed CoreGRID Network of Excellence funded by the European Commission. Most important, it corresponds to the re-launch of CoreGRID as the self-sustained ERCIM Working Group covering research activities on both Grid and Service Computing while maintaining the momentum of the European collaboration on Grid research.

ERCIM will be present with a booth at ICT 2008 in Lyon, France, on 25-27 November. This event is organised by the EC DG Information Society and Media. Some of the European projects managed by ERCIM or with ERCIM participation will have a booth too: Vitalas, EchoGRID, GridCOMP, EuroIndia, and Digital World Forum. 'Networking Sessions' will be held for InterLink, EchoGRID and EuroIndia.

by Nicolas Guelfi

The rececntly established ERCIM Working Group on Software Engineering for Resilient Systems (SERENE) is the result of a joint cooperation of the former ERCIM Working Group on Rapid Integration of Software Engineering Techniques (RISE) and the co-chairs of the conference series "Engineering Fault Tolerant Systems (EFTS). The SERENE Working Group will thus benefit from research experts coming from the RISE community on software engineering as well as from the EFTS community on fault-tolerance.

Costantino Thanos has announced his retirement from the ERCIM Executive Committee. One of the longest serving members of the Executive Committee, Costantino was also the prime promoter of CNR and Italy's entry into ERCIM in June 1991. Over the years, Costantino has ensured that Italy has played a very active role in ERCIM initiatives, in particular as the coordinator of a number of important ERCIM projects. The best known of these is, of course, DELOS. DELOS began life as an ERCIM working group in 1995, and received funding via the 4th, 5th and 6th Framework Programmes, growing from an ERCIM Working Group and thematic network to become a Network of Excellence with more than 60 members.

by Darren Cofer and Alessandro Fantechi

The 13th FMICS workshop was held in L'Aquila, Italy, on 15 and 16 September 2008, co-located with ASE 2008, the 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering conference. The aim of the FMICS series of workshops, yearly organized by the ERCIM FMICS Working Group, is to provide a forum for researchers who are interested in the development and application of formal methods in industry. In particular, these workshops are intended to bring together scientists and practitioners who are active in the area of formal methods and interested in exchanging their experiences in the industrial usage of these methods. These workshops also strive to promote research and development for the improvement of formal methods and tools for industrial applications.