Sylvain Lefebvre, researcher at INRIA, has won the Eurographics Award in the category ‘Young Researcher’. This award comes in recognition of his research work on texture synthesis. He views this award as acknowledgement of the collective work carried out within the teams he has worked with at INRIA on algorithms and methods to facilitate the creation and display of virtual environments. Sylvain Lefebvre has focused his research on textures and the automated creation of graphic content with the aim of improving the quality of interactive environments. "Texture" is the method used to give an appearance to the surface of virtual objects. Textures complement geometric modelling, which defines the shape of virtual objects. Sylvain Lefebvre and his colleagues have attempted to answer questions such as how colour points can be attached to a surface to imitate a material such as wood, and how colours can be composed automatically by an algorithm to represent stone or paper, using the ‘example-based synthesis method’.

More information:
http://www.inria.fr/actualites/2010/eurographics2010.en.html

Peter Bosman, researcher at CWI has won a Best Paper Award during the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2010 in Portland, Oregon (USA). This is one of the most outstanding conferences on Evolutionary Computation. Bosman received the prize for his publication ‘The Anticipated Mean Shift and Cluster Registration in Mixture-based EDAs for Multi-Objective Optimization'. He won the prize in the category of Estimation of Distribution Algorithms. Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) are advanced genetic algorithms that are mainly used for the solution of general optimization problems. Bosman's winning article studies the characteristics of probability distributions and their influence on the optimization by EDAs. EDAs are broadly used, especially when it's difficult or impossible to use other techniques.

After 13 years of successful work at STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, the W3C UK and Ireland Office has a new home at Nominet. Nominet runs the one of the world’s largest Internet registries, the registry for .uk domain names, with over eight million domain names. Phil Kingsland, Director of Marketing and Communications at Nominet, will be the new Office manager. He said, "We believe the work W3C does promoting Web accessibility standards, and developing other standards that help Web users to trust in the reputation of the Internet is well aligned with Nominet’s public purpose remit and vision, which is to be a leading force in making the Internet a trusted space, which everyone can be part of and has a positive impact on people’s lives." The Office plans a ceremonial launch later this year.