Cor Baayen Award 2006

Oliver Heckmann from Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, and Google Labs Zürich, Switzerland, has been awarded the 2006 Cor Baayen Award for a most promising young researcher in computer science and applied mathematics by ERCIM.

In a particularly tight competition, ERCIM has awarded Oliver Heckmann for the outstanding originality, high impact and quality of his work in the field of network science. To put it in very simple words, Oliver Heckmann tries to give Internet users better quality of service for equal or lower costs. He strives to remove inefficiencies, optimise networks and achieve technological breakthroughs that improve quality of service and/or costs for users. He also sheds light on the trade-off between these two goals. The practical applicability of his results has put him in good contact with many real providers, helped him in acquiring funding, and also led to the recent publication of his book "The Competitive ISP" which also contains many results from his excellent PhD thesis "A System-oriented Approach to Efficiency and Quality of Service for Internet Service Providers".

Oliver Heckmann studied applied economics and electrical engineering at TU Darmstadt with award for excellence. He did his PhD in computer science at TU Darmstadt with Prof. Ralf Steinmetz as supervisor and Prof. Jon Crowcroft from University Cambridge, UK as second supervisor. His PhD thesis was awarded the prestigious best dissertation award of the German Computer Science Association for 2004. After his PhD, he was working as an assistant professor / research group head at the Multimedia Communications Lab (KOM), leading a team of 7 PhD student. Recently, he joined Google Labs in Zürich, Switzerland, to continue working on improving and innovating the Internet and Internet services.

Finalists 2006

19 finalists for the 2006 Cor Baayen Award have been nominated by the ERCIM institutes. According to the award rules, each institute was allowed to select up to two finalists from its country.