A Special Thanks to Jean-Michel Chassériaux
Jean-Michel Chasseriaux's two-year term of office as Manager of ERCIM ended this November. On behalf of the representatives of the ERCIM member institutes in the Executive Committee, I should like to express my deep gratitude to Jean-Michel for all his hard work over the last two years.
During this period, Jean-Michel has fully dedicated his efforts to promoting ERCIM and has thus contributed to extending ERCIM's visibility in many ways, in particular, by interacting with the European Commission. Under his management, our activities have increased considerably. He helped to obtain funds for projects in which ERCIM is involved as co-ordinator or partner. I can mention, for example, the INCO initiatives: ESIMEAU, a project using information technologies to model water resources in semi-arid areas; SIMES, a research project on multimedia information systems for environmental remote sensing in the sub-saharan region; MtoM3D, a project that aims to introduce high technology in apparel product manufacturing in countries under development; THETIS, a TELEMATICS project on data management and data visualization for coastal zone management in the Mediterranean sea, and DiSCiPl, a project on debugging systems for constraint programming.
In addition, he was the key organizer of a very successful workshop on the Information Society in the Euro-Mediterranean context which took place in Sophia-Antipolis in Spring 1996; he was responsible for the preparation of a number of strategy reports, such as, ERCIM's comments on the 5th Framework Programme and the evaluation of Tunisian research on information technology, a study carried out for the European Commission. Thanks to his experience, he was invited to participate in numerous committees and panels at a decision-making and strategic level, where he was able to strengthen ERCIM's position in the research world.
My best wishes to Jean-Michel for success in his new endeavours!
Christos Nikolaou
Chairman of the ERCIM Executive Committee