News

Pieter Kleer, former NETWORKS PhD student, has been awarded the Gijs de Leve Prize 2018-2020. He received the prize on 22 January 2021 on the occasion of the annual congress of the LNMB, the Dutch Network on the Mathematics of Operations Research. In awarding Pieter Kleer this prestigious prize, the jury recognized his PhD thesis as the 'best PhD thesis in the area of Mathematics of Operations Research defended in the last three years'.

The Applied Probability Society of INFORMS announced that Sem Borst is the 2020 Markov Lecturer.

The board of NWO-I, the institute organisation of NWO, appoints Prof. Ton de Kok as director of CWI. On 1 October 2020, Ton de Kok will succeed the current director, Prof. Jos Baeten, who has led the institute since 2011 and will retire. Ton de Kok will also succeed Jos Baeten as a member of the NETWORKS Supervisory Board.

Quantum researcher Harry Buhrman joins the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and

Sciences (KNAW). The KNAW is the most relevant Dutch society of top scientists. Together with seventeen other researchers, Buhrman will be installed as a new Academy member on September 14, 2020. 

Within the NETWORKS programme, Buhrman (CWI and UvA) is one of the leading scientists of theme “Quantum Networks”

He is also director and founder of research institute QuSoft, which focuses on the development of quantum software and applications of quantum computers and quantum networks. 

Former NETWORKS PhD student Sándor Kisfaludi-Bak was awarded the Distinguished Dissertation Award of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), an international organization whose goal is to promote theoretical computer science, to facilitate the exchange of ideas and results among theoretical computer scientists, and to stimulate cooperation between the theoretical and the practical community in computer science.

Sándor received his PhD cum laude from TU Eindhoven, where he did his research co-supervised by Mark de Berg and Hans Bodlaender.

The NETWORKS consortium has received a COFUND grant of around €1.5 million euro from the Horizon2020 programme. NETWORKS will use the money to set up a programme to train 14 young and talented PhD students in mathematics and computer science. 

In the March issue of Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde Onno Boxma is interviewed by Nicos Starreveld about both his work as a researcher and his administrative functions at i.a. Eurandom, NWO and the Wiskunderaad.

In the NWO Open Competition ENW-GROOT programme, a grant has been awarded to the project ‘Optimization for and with Machine Learning’, in which Leen Stougie, Nikhil Bansal and Monique Laurent are involved. The NWO Open Competition ENW-GROOT programme is intended for consortia in which research groups create added value through collaboration.

From 20 to 22 January 2020, the Gravitation Programme NETWORKS organised the Networks Match Making Event, jointly with the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Gravitation Programme SCOOP. The aim was to bring together researchers from social sciences, economic sciences, mathematics and computer science sharing an interest in complex networks, with the aim to discover valuable synergies. Over 45 participants from the academic partners, and from research intensive companies like CBS and RaboBank, came to Kaap Doorn to exchange ideas about available theories, techniques and methods, and to identify common challenges.

On January 16th Fiona Sloothaak succesfully defended her PhD thesis entitled 'Criticality in Power Networks: A Probabilistic Approach'.