Section News

Erol Gelenbe has published (together with Jean-Pierre Kahane) an eminently readable book Fundamental Concepts of Computer Science, Imperial College Press (2009).

Hermann Maurer, Graz University of Tehcnology, was appointed the new IS chair at the AE Council meeting in Berlin, April 28, 2009.

Oscar H. Ibarra was awarded a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship from the UK Royal Academy of Engineering. His visit to UK in September 2008 will include research collaborations and participation in conferences, workshops, and seminars in Liverpool, Edinburgh, and Sheffield.

Oscar H. Ibarra was a keynote speaker at the 9th International Symposium on Parallel Architectures, Algorithms, and Networks, ISPAN 2008, 7-9 May 2008, Sydney, NSW, Australia. He Co-Chaired the Program Committee of the 13th International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata (CIAA), 21-24 June 2008, San Francisco, California, USA.

At the April 2008 AE Council Meeting in Heidelberg, ten new regular and foreign (F) Members of Academia Europaea proposed by the Informatics Section were elected. They are: Cristian S. Calude (F, New Zealand), Peter Druschel (Germany), Steve Furber (United Kingdom), Yuri Gurevich (F, United States), Oscar Ibarra (F, United States), Nick Jennings (United Kingdom), Joseph Sifakis (France), Reinhard Wilhelm (Germany), Sir Maurice Wilkes (United Kingdom), and Willy Zwaenepoel (Switzerland).

On February 4, 2008 ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named Edmund M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, and AE member Joseph Sifakis the winners of the 2007 A.M. Turing Award, widely considered the most prestigious award in computing, for their original and continuing research in a quality assurance process known as Model Checking.

INRIA celebrated The 35th Anniversary of the launch of System Performance Evaluation Research in France with a Symposium on April 2-4, 2008 in Rocquencourt.

Erol Gelenbe is the recipient of the ACM SIGMETRICS 2008 Award . He is also the Opening Keynote Speaker at the IFIP World Computer Conference WCC08. He was elected to Membership of the French National Academy of Engineering on April 9, 2008, and on December 5, 2007 he was elected to the Turkish Academy of Sciences (Turkiye Bilimler Akademisi), a governmental body of approximately 160 members covering all fields of scholarship, ranging from the Humanities, to the Natural Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

A Conference honouring Giuseppe Longo was held in June 2007 in Paris. Giuseppe Longo has recently developed some ideas about the role of "Negative Results" in research.

Gerard Huet was honoured on his sixtieth birthday with a Symposium organised by his students.

Wilfried Brauer was appointed the first Fellow of the University of Bremen on 10th November, 2006.

Manfred Broy was a keynote speaker at the 21st Annual International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences that took place in Istanbul on November 1-3, 2006. The conference received 590 submissions and accepted 20% of them, with Proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS series.

Erol Gelenbe was conferred the honour of Commander of Merit of the Republic of Italy on 6th July 2006.

Dines Bjoerner visited research institutes in Shanghai and Macao in May 2006, and was on at the Japan Institute for Science and Technology in Tokyo.

Jozef Gruska gave the Abdus Salam Lecture at the 31th International Nathiagali Summer College on Physics and Contemporary Needs, 26th June to 1st July, and an invited talk at the TC1 Conf., IFIP WCC, Santiago, on 24th August 2006. He chaired the Steering Committee of the 6th Asian Quantum Information Science Conf., Beijing, 1st to 4th September, 2006.

Tony Hoare was an Einstein Visiting Professor at the Chinese Academy of Science, and visited Beijing, Shanghai, and Macau in May 2006.

Erol Gelenbe was conferred the honorary degree of "Docteur en Sciences Honoris Causa" by the University of Liege, Belgium in March 2006.