German Climate and Environment Innovation Prize for Researchers at Fraunhofer SCAI
A research group from the Department of Optimization at the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI won the 25,000 Euro innovation prize for Climate and Environment (IKU) in the "Environmentally friendly products and services" category. The award is donated by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) and the Federation of German Industries (BDI). The award was handed to the researchers in a ceremony on March 15 in Berlin. Worldwide, over 7,000 companies use the optimization solutions provided by Fraunhofer SCAI. The best known applications are AutoNester (automatic placement of pieces onto textiles, leather, metal sheets and wood) and PackAssistant (optimizing packing configurations of identical parts into containers). The potential savings are enormous: "When cutting metal, wood or leather skins our software saves up to 30 percent of material, depending on the industry," says Dr. Ralf Heckmann, Director of the Department of Optimization at Fraunhofer SCAI. http://www.iku-innovationspreis.de
On the occasion of the 65th anniversary of CWI in Amsterdam, the Hungarian computer scientist Éva Tardos and the New Zealand mathematician John Butcher received the Van Wijngaarden Award 2011 on 10 February 2011. The award is intended for scientists who contributed significantly to their fields. Éva Tardos is Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University in Ithaca, USA. Her research interests comprise algorithms and algorithmic game theory, in which she especially takes selfishness into account. The mathematician John Butcher, Emeritus Professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, works on numerical methods for ordinary differential equations. Applications include the simulation of waves. The Van Wijngaarden Award is named after Adriaan van Wijngaarden (1916 – 1987), one of the founders of computer science in the Netherlands.