INRIA and ERCIM have lost one of its pioneers: Georges Nissen, an iconic figure at INRIA who spent his entire career working for the Institute, passed away on Tuesday 9 March 2010.

The second annual meeting of the MLQA Working Group will take place on July 9 July 2010 as part of FLoC 2010 in Edinburgh (Scotland). The theme of the meeting is: "Static Analysis versus Model Checking: similarities, differences, synergies"

Euro-India SPIRIT (Euro-India Synchronisation of Policy Initiatives & Research and Innovation Trajectory) is a Europe-driven initiative with strong Indian partners supporting the objectives of the call “ICT-2009.9.1: International co-operation support to Information Society policy dialogues and strengthening of international cooperation” in specifically contributing to the definition and development of a European and Indian policy dialogue for sustainable ICT policy and research priorities, thereby aiding in the build-up of the European Research Area. The project was lauched at a kick-off meeting in Pisa, 26-27 January 2010.

There are many applications of agent-based technology in the mathematical, physical and social scientific communities. Multi-agent systems are very complex applications to implement and optimise for large populations of agents. The optimisation of agent interactions and the management of initial data and outputs for large scale simulations are but two areas that need research and development efforts. Although there are many conferences where work on agent-based system is presented we would like to find out whether there is a sufficient number of interested groups within the ERCIM community to merit setting up an ERCIM Working Group on Agent-Based Technologies.

In Fall 2009, on behalf of the EC DG Information Society, Arian Zwegers convened a group of experts on the theme of Software Evolution and Maintenance, in order to discuss about the medium and long term research challenges (timeframe of 2015 and beyond). To the extent possible, the EC will take into account these challenges while preparing their next framework workprogramme.

The expert group was moderated by Prof. Tom Mens, chair of the ERCIM Working Group on Software Evolution. He started out with a presentation of the main research challenges in software evolution, based on feedback received from various members of the ERCIM WG.