Overviewresearchactivities2008
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OverviewResearchActivities2008 1 Centrum Wiskunde&Informatica Visiting address Science Park 123 1098 XG Amsterdam The Netherlands Postal address P.O. Box 94079 1090 GB Amsterdam Telephone +31 20 592 9333 Fax +31 20 592 4199 Website www.cwi.nl Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) is the national research institute for mathematics and com- puter science of The Netherlands. It is supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). CWI is a founding member of ERCIM, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathe- matics. CWI is a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and it manages the W3C Office in the Benelux. CWI is located at Science Park Amsterdam. CONTENTS Preface 4 Strategic themes 5 Scientific clusters Probability, Networks and Algorithms – PNA 7 PNA1 Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization 7 PNA2 Performance Analysis of Communication Networks 21 PNA4 Signals and Images 37 PNA5 Cryptology and Information Security 40 Software Engineering – SEN 48 SEN1 Interactive Software Development and Renovation 48 SEN3 Coordination Languages 55 SEN4 Computational Intelligence and Multi-agent Games 67 SEN5 Distributed Multimedia Languages and Infrastructures 74 Modelling, Analysis and Simulation – MAS 80 MAS0 Life Sciences 80 MAS1 Dynamical Systems and Numerical Analysis 80 MAS2 Scientific Computing and Control Theory 88 MAS3 Multiscale Modelling and Nonlinear Dynamics 103 Information Systems – INS 111 INS0 Standardization and Knowledge Transfer 111 INS1 Database Architectures and Information Access 113 INS2 Semantic Media Interfaces 121 INS3 Visualization and 3D Interfaces 126 INS4 Quantum Computing and Advanced Systems Research 128 Appendices A Statistics of CWI output 140 B Publications outside the research clusters 140 C Acronyms of universities in The Netherlands 140 D Distribution of funding over research groups 141 E PhD theses 142 The CWI annual report series consists of: - Annual Report (English), a full colour document giving a general overview of CWI’s scientific activities and some research highlights - Overview Research Activities (English), a comprehensive listing of CWI’s scientific activities - Sociaal-Financieel Jaarverslag (Dutch), a supplement containing the social and financial report and the works council report These can be ordered at the department of Communication & Information ([email protected]) PREFACE This overview is a comprehensive report of the programmes; NWO Veni, Vidi, Vici grants; TI CWI research activities in 2008 and is a supple- projects and, more recently, Bsik programmes ment to the Annual Report 2008, which high- BRICKS, MultimediaN, and VL-e) and has exten- lights CWI’s scientific research. sive experience in managing these collaborative research efforts. CWI is also strongly embedded in Dutch university research: about twenty-five Mission of CWI of its senior researchers hold parttime positions as professors at universities and several projects CWI is the national research institute for math- are carried out in cooperation with university ematics and computer science. It is a private, research groups. Annually CWI hosts some 200 non-profit organization. Founded in 1946 (as visiting scientists from abroad. Mathematisch Centrum), it aims at fostering CWI hosts a staff of 216 fte, of which 164 sci- mathematics and computer science research in entific staff. It operates on an annual budget of The Netherlands. CWI receives a basic funding M 17.9 (2008). from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), amounting to about two thirds of the institute’s total income. The remaining one third is obtained through national research CWI’s research entities programmes, international programmes, and CWI’s scientific research is organized in four contract research commissioned by industry. scientific clusters, each consisting of three to five CWI’s mission is twofold: To perform fron- scientific research groups. Besides, its research tier research in mathematics and computer sci- is increasingly oriented on its strategic research ence, and to transfer new knowledge in these themes: earth and life sciences, the data explosion, fields to society in general and trade and indus- societal logistics, software as service. try in particular. This mission is realized by several means. In addition to the standard ways of disseminating Items per cluster scientific knowledge, for example through pub- - Principal research area and mission lications, presentations at conferences, organiza- - Cluster staff tion of workshops and exchange of researchers, - Research groups and their leaders CWI actively pursues joint projects with exter- nal partners, provides consulting services, and actively stimulates the creation of spin-off com- Items per group panies. A technology transfer event is organized - Name and acronym annually to promote these activities. Also spe- - Mission cial efforts are made to make research results known to non-specialist circles, ranging from - MSC or CR classification researchers in other disciplines to the public at - Subgroups and their leaders large. CWI has many contacts with national or- - Staff (+ affiliation of seconded staff) ganizations for applied research with wide ex- - Scientific report: highlights, PhD students, perience in turning research results directly into and report per subgroup/project practical applications. Its researchers are sup- - Societal aspects and knowledge transfer ported by state-of-the-art computing facilities - Organization of conferences and workshops and a library of national importance. - Lectures CWI has always been very successful in se- - Other professional activities curing considerable participation in European - Awards and grants research programmes (e.g., ESPRIT, ACTS, - Academic publications TELEMATICS, RESQ, MUSCLE, and others) and national research programmes (ICES/KIS - Professional products 4 STRATEGICTHEMES Earth and life sciences (SEN4). Two highly talented scientists have been successfully attracted to CWI; Bert Zwart The earth sciences was hired as a tenured researcher in the field of stochastic optimization, and Guido Schaefer was The CWI, and especially the MAS cluster, has a hired as a tenure-track researcher in combinato- strong tradition in the earth sciences. Except for rial optimization and algorithmic game theory. the project on the reliability of the Dutch coastal The research in the area of SL encompasses a protection – that is supported by internal CWI broad range of application areas, including the funds – no special new initiatives have taken areas performance analysis of information and place in this area. communication systems, performance analysis of large-scale service systems, healthcare logis- The life sciences tics, ambulance service provisioning, transport and distribution, airport logistics, pricing and In 2008, a major project to stimulate life sciences revenue management, advanced routing algo- research at the CWI has been started up. Two rithms, and energy markets. young scientists have been hired at the tenure In the context of SL, the Franz Edelman track level, Gunnar Klau (Mathematical Life Award of INFORMS was awarded to the project Sciences, FU Berlin) and Roeland Merks (Flan- The New Dutch Timetable – the OR Revolution de- ders Interuniversity Institute of Biotechnology, veloped by CWI researchers (A. Schrijver and Ghent). Klau’s research focuses on computa- former researchers G. Maroti and A. Steenbeek) tional biology, combinatorial optimization, and in collaboration with researchers from NS, EUR algorithmic problems in the life sciences; Merks and University of Padova. works in the area of biological, multi-scale mod- Stimulated by three NWO-bonus funded elling, currently primarily of multicellular de- PhD students in the field of Revenue Manage- velopment. Both Klau and Merks immediately ment and algorithmic game theory, CWI has co- started to build up their own research groups by founded (jointly with VU Amsterdam and OR- hiring students and postdocs. TEC) a knowledge network on Pricing and Rev- During 2008, Klau, Merks and their groups enue Management (PreMa), aimed at bringing have for practical reasons been embedded in the together academic institutes and industrial par- MAS-cluster. By 01-01-2009, they are part of the ties. This network, which has already attracted new ‘pilot cluster’ Life Sciences. Several CWI- interest from a variety of industrial partners, researchers, originating from the MAS and PNA forms an excellent basis for transfer and cross- clusters and whose research focuses on the life fertilization of knowledge and experience. sciences, will also be part of this pilot cluster. External funding has been awarded for The CWI-life scientists have strong connections projects in several sub-areas ofrelated to SL, in- with the NISB (Netherlands Institute of Systems cluding the SenterNovem funded project End- Biology), in fact, Roeland Merks has been hired to-end Quality of Service in Service Supply Chains as leader of the NISB modelling group. There (SeQual), the NWO-VIDI project on Large Scale are also promising scientific interactions with the Service Systems , the SenterNovem funded project NKI (‘Netherlands Cancer Institute’). Intelligent and Decentralized Management of Elec- tricity Networks and Data. (IOP-EMVT-project Han), and the NWO Free Competition project Societal logistics Mixed-integer optimization: unification of polyhe- In 2008, significant efforts have been taken to dral combinatorics and lattice basis reduction algo- build up the research theme Societal Logistics