ERCIM News No.21 - April 1995
IEI-CNR - Prof. Piero Maestrini has been appointed as the new director of the Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione, CNR, Pisa. For Prof. Maestrini, who holds a Chair in Computer Architecture at the Department of Computer Science, Pisa University, this is a return to IEI after 15 years full-time at the University, where he was Chairman of the Faculty of Sciences from 1987 to 1990. Prof Maestrini's main research interests are in computer architectures, operating systems and fault-tolerant computing.
Prof. Piero Maestrini, new Director of IEI-CNR
CLRC - VDM Proof Practitioners Meet at FME'94. This year's Formal Methods Europe Symposium, held in Barcelona on 24-28 October 1994, gave the five authors of "Proof In VDM: A Practitioner's Guide" (Springer-Verlag FACIT Series, 1994) the first chance to meet in person since the book's publication. Two of the authors, Juan Bicarregui and Brian Ritchie, are members of the Formal Methods Section at CLRC. Richard Moore works at the Defence Research Agency in Malvern, England; John Fitzgerald holds an EPSRC Fellowship at the University of Manchester; while Peter Lindsay is Associate Director of the Systems Verification Research Centre of the University of Melbourne. The authors first worked together during the development of the Mural formal reasoning support system; indeed the work on Mural's theory store for VDM was the starting point for the material in the book.
The symposium's theme was "Industrial-Strength Formal Methods", and included a number of presentations on projects in which DRAL has participated: B User Trials, MaFMeth and Verification Techniques for LOTOS Specifications (also known as "The ERIL Project").
The authors of "Proof In VDM". Standing: John Fitzgerald (left), Juan Bicarregui (right); sitting (left to right): Peter Lindsay, Richard Moore, Brian Ritchie.
ILC-CNR - The second version of LIZ (Letteratura Italiana Zingarelli) is due to be released in Spring 1995. LIZ, a CD-ROM edited and structured electronically by Pasquale Stoppelli (L'Acquila University) and Eugenio Picchi (ILC-CNR) is published by Zingarelli, Bologna. It will contain a complete set of the most
important Italian literarature, from Dante and Boccaccio to Pirandello and
D'Annunzio, for a total of 500 texts and more than 21 million words. The text
management and query system implemented is the DBT system, designed and
developed by Eugenio Picchi at the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, CNR, Pisa.
CWI - On the occasion of Professor Cor Baayen's retirement from CWI, a scientific symposium was organized in Amsterdam on 20 December 1994. The proceedings, with contributions by the speakers A. Schrijver (CWI/UvA), J.F.A.K. van Benthem (UvA), D. Scott (Carnegie Mellon, VS) en A. Bensoussan (INRIA, France), are included in a special volume "From Universal Morphisms to Megabytes: a Baayen Space Odyssey" (editors Krzysztof Apt, Lex Schrijver and Nico Temme), containing some forty contributions by researchers inside and outside CWI. On this occasion Professor Baayen was knighted in the Order of Orange-Nassau. In addition, he received on 27 March the 1995 Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Cor Baayen, ERCIM's first President (1991-1994), during his farewell speech (Amsterdam, 20 December 1994).
CLRC - In a recent reorganisation of the Research Councils in the UK, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) and Daresbury Laboratory have merged under common management to become the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CLRC). CLRC supports the research councils funded by the Science Vote, that is, government expenditure on civil science. The Research Councils were originally created by Royal Charter in 1965. The 1994 reorganisation has created a new set of Research Councils with mission statements which include the support of research leading to wealth creation.
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