ERCIM News 91
October 2012
Special theme What is Computation - Alain Turing’s Legacy
Guest editors Gilles Dowek (Inria) and Samson Abramsky (University of Oxford)
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by Tobias Berka and Marian Vajteršic
In the future, all data centres will be parallel with racks of modular servers housing multi-core CPUs with fast interconnection fabric. We investigate how to build peak-efficiency data analytics software for parallel text analysis, scalable enough for large corpora, but responsive enough for interactive use. The goals are clear: to achieve supercomputer performance at cloud prices and to push the limits of text search.
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by Stephan Kiefer and Michael Wilson
Financial and health records are often stored in record management systems which ensure that any changes are auditably recorded to justify that the retrieved information represents that deposited, within the constraints of regulatory requirements. When the regulated retention period expires, the records are normally deleted. In contrast, data from publically funded science is becoming preserved for the long term in repositories, to be open to discovery and access for future uses for which it was not originally collected. The experience gained from preserving scientific data over the long term is being transferred to the preservation of commercial data.
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by Jaldert O. Rombouts, Pieter R. Roelfsema and Sander M. Bohte
From the infinite set of routes that you could drive to work, you have probably found a way that gets you there in a reasonable time, dealing with traffic conditions and running minimal risks. Humans are very good at learning such efficient sequences based on very little feedback, but it is unclear how the brain learns to solve such tasks. At CWI, in collaboration with the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN), we have developed a biologically realistic neural model that, like animals, can be trained to recall relevant past events and then to perform optimal action sequences, just by rewarding it for correct sequences of actions. The model explains neural activations found in the brains of animals trained on similar tasks.
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by Martin Nilsson
Compared to a contemporary robot, the human body comprises a large number of actuators and sensors. Nevertheless, the central nervous system can efficiently extract just the right low-dimensional subsets of these for fast and precise motion control. How is this achieved? In the EU FP7-ICT project THE, scientists from neurophysiology, physics, computer science, and robotics are working together in order to try to answer this question. SICS' role is to try to understand and model some of the functioning of the mammalian central nervous system in order to apply it to adaptive control of robot limbs.
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by Mark G.J. van den Brand and Jan Friso Groote
Empirical evidence shows that the use of model driven software engineering can result in an up to 10-fold quality improvement and decreased development time. Researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology tested this on a detector control system at CERN. This brings Turing’s vision of software another step closer.
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by Farhad Arbab and Sung-Shik Jongmans
Decades after Turing proposed his model of computation, we still lack suitable means to tackle the complexity of getting more than a few Turing Machines to interact with one another in a verifiably coherent manner. This dearth currently hampers software engineering in unleashing the full potential of multi-core platforms. The coordination language Reo, developed by the Foundations of Software Engineering group at CWI, offers a promising approach to overcome this obstacle by fulfilling the role of a domain specific language (DSL) for compositional specification of protocols.
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by Florian Skopik and Thomas Bleier
In recent years, the Internet has rapidly expanded to a massive economic sphere of activity – not only for the new economy, where Internet-based businesses have grown from startups to multinational and billon-dollar enterprises, faster than any businesses before, but also for the “dark side” of entrepreneurship. Exploiting weaknesses in information and communications technology (ICT) systems has become a profitable business model. In order to better cope with these threats, we argue that tight cooperation between all parties in the digital society is necessary. The project CAIS deals with the implementation of a cyber attack information system on a national level, whose ultimate goal is to strengthen the resilience of today’s interdependent networked services and increase their overall availability and trustworthiness.
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by Zaza Tabagari, Zaza Sanikidze and George Giorgobiani
Many countries with emerging democracies aspire to a system similar to European democracy. International Organizations aim to help these countries to introduce a fairer election environment but their efforts are not always successful. Rigged elections mean that many electoral candidates are unfairly disadvantaged In this situation, tension can escalate and, in the worst case scenario, this can lead to military confrontation.
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by Bruno Levy
The project GoodShape, funded by the European Research Council ("Starting Grant Project"), aims at advancing the state of the art in 3D meshing.
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by Kersti Hedman
SICS and the Swedish Winter Sport Research Centre at Mid Sweden University have initiated a collaborative project to demonstrate how cutting edge technology and advanced mathematics can help to develop new training methods to achieve success at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. The tool measures how skiers move, and helps optimize technique and training.
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by György Kovács
The LUDUS project aims to create a European network for the transfer of knowledge and dissemination of best practices in the innovative field of serious gaming.
The South East Europe Transnational Cooperation Programme of the EU (SEE) aims to develop transnational partnerships on matters of strategic importance, in order to improve the territorial, economic and social integration process and to contribute to cohesion, stability and competitiveness of the region. To this end, the programme seeks to realize high quality, result-oriented projects with a strategic focus, relevant for the programme area.
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by György Kovács and Imre Paniti
In the summer of 2011 a new robot laboratory began operation in SZTAKI, in the Computer Integrated Manufacturing Research Laboratory, with the aim of supporting international networking and raising the public and professional profile of research and development in this field.
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by Christos Koulamas, Petros Pistofidis and Christos Emmanouilidis
In the modern era of global competition, reduced financial operation margins, and rapid market changes, enterprises cannot afford to underutilize their resources. The efficiency of a production line is largely influenced and ultimately defined by the reliability of its technical equipment. Optimal and cost-effective management of engineering assets is essential. This cannot be achieved with the traditional “fail-and-fix” policies (corrective maintenance). Rather, a more proactive preventive maintenance is necessary.