Chapter 1

Annual Survey

Volgt

Prof.dr.ir. Frans C.A. Groen

Director

Chapter 2 Fundamental Research

A. THE LABORATORY FOR COMPUTING, SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE, AND PROGRAMMING

1. Computational Informatics

General information

Contact person : Prof Dr P.M.A. Sloot Telephone : +31 - 20 - 525 7462URL : http://www.science.uva.nl/research/scs/Fax : +31 - 20 - 525 7419E-mail : sloot@science.uva.nl

Position within the Organisation

"Computational Informatics" is one of the three research groups of the Computing, System Architecture and Programming Laboratory of the Informatics Institute of the Faculty of Science.

The Computational Informatics group closely collaborates with other groups within the University, especially in Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, and is an important player in the Amsterdam Centre for Computational Science (ACCS). (See http://www.science.uva.nl/research/accs/) The Section Computational Science Participates in the Dutch graduate research school `ASCI'.

Characterization

Nature has a very efficient way to process information. Most natural processes are inherently parallel. We seek to discover, describe and use the way information is being processed in natural systems. We adopt the notion of complex systems to study how (global) macroscopic processes emerge from (local) microscopic rules and interactions. High dimensional cellular automata are used as a representation of these computational processes. The applicability of this approach is validated through realistic, high performance simulations of natural processes.

Key Words

Problem Solving Environments and Metacomputing; Distributed and Grid Computing; Interactive Algorithms; Modelling and Simulation of Complex Systems; Parallel Discrete Event Simulation, Self-organized criticality.

NOAG-I -Themes Modelling, Simulation and Visualization; Parallel and Distributed Computing.

Main themes

Our research on how global macroscopic processes emerge from local microscopic rules and interactions is inspired by the paradigm of complex systems. Through modeling and simulation we seek to discover the way information is being processed in such systems. High dimensional cellular automata are used as a representation of the computation. The applicability of this approach is validated through the development of high performance problem solving environments for asynchronous natural processes.

Modelling and Simulation

Nature is inherently asynchronous: Hubermann, PNAS, 1997

Modelling and simulation requires mapping of (natural) phenomena onto a model, mapping the model onto a parallel solver, and finally mapping the parallel solver to the computing resource. We do not follow the conventional partial differential equations approach in modelling, rather we try to model by directly mapping natural phenomena on (intrinsically parallel) solvers. For this we adopt the concept of Cellular Automata (CA). CA are spatio-temporal discrete, decentralized, finite state systems consisting of a large number of simple identical components with local connectivity. The research focuses on the information processing in asynchronous CA's and their execution behaviour on distributed systems.

Problem Solving Environments and Visualization

Progress in natural science comes from taking things apart, progress in computer science comes from bringing things together: W.D. Hillis, MIT, 1982.

We strongly believe in experimental validation of theoretical work. We investigate the mapping of Cellular Automata (CA) to parallel, distributed and hybrid architectures. Both architectural design and parallelisation of CA-models for these designs guide our research. The usability, efficiency, stability, and the correctness of our models are tested through their use in interactive Problem Solving environments. We adopt the common software-component architecture approach to obtain inter operable, modular PSE's that integrate modelling, simulation, interaction and visualization on Grid-like distributed compute systems.

2003 Results

Introduction

Within each of the two main themes in our research, a number of projects are being pursued. Sometimes these projects intersect both themes. We will start this section with a overview of the theses defended in 2003, and then move on to a thematic report on the projects that were active in 2003.

Theses

The principal highlight for 2003 was the fact that four of our Ph.D. students successfully defended their thesis. In chronological order: R.G. Belleman, R.M.H. Merks, P.F. Spinnato and A.M.M.A.M.H. Artoli.

In his thesis “Interactive Exploration in Virtual Environments” Belleman describes his research on the development and use of virtual exploration environments, specifically in the area of medical applications. His work has resulted on the one hand in an extensive collection of software tools that allow the manipulation and quantitative evaluation of medical image in a 3D environment, and on the other hand, the development of relatively low-cost hardware for these applications (the Drive System). Much of this research was performed for the ViSE-VL project.

In his thesis “Branching Growth in Stony Corals” Merks describes extensive simulation studies on the interaction between environmental factors, such a flow on the growth and morphology of stony corals. His principal research vehicle is the lattice-Boltzmann simulation code for the simulation of incompressible fluid flows, extended with mechanisms to study the diffusion

of food particles and the gradual growth of the coral. Important factors in his model are the interaction between the local morphology of the coral, the fluid flow and food availability and the local growth. This research was performed within the theme modelling and simulation and was funded by the university (first stream).

Spinnato, in his thesis “Hybrid Systems for N-body Simulations” studied the application of a hybrid computer system consisting of a parallel computer and very high performance special hardware, the GRAPE to the dynamical modeling of stellar systems. He develops a simulation model of such hybrid computer systems to study the interaction between the application and the hardware configuration. In his final chapter, a study is presented of the infall of a black hole into the Galactic Centre, using three different N-body algorithms. The research by Spinnato was funded through KNAW and NWO grants.

The thesis of Artoli, “Mesoscopic Computational Haemodynamics” is concerned with the modeling of time-dependent blood flow using the lattice-Boltzmann technique. Stability, boundary conditions, validation and performance of the simulation code are key issues in this complex application domain. The work is closely related to the CrossGrid project.

Modelling and Simulation

AMCGPeople involved J.A. Kaandorp, J.Cui.The bioinformatics group of Amsterdam Genomics Center (AmGC) is a collaboration between researchers from SILS-UVA, IvI-UvA and Academic Medical Center Amsterdam working on bioinformatics. The bioinformatics group is coordinated by Antoine H.C. van Kampen (Academic Medical Center Amsterdam) and Jaap Kaandorp (Section Computational Science, UvA). One of the major current research themes within the AmGC is the analysis and modelling of biological networks. The bioinformatics of biological networks involves a broad range of research and approaches. This research includes topics like identification of common regulatory elements for genes in a pathway, the modelling and simulation of pathways, the reconstruction of pathways from experimental data, the visualization of pathways, and the representation of pathways in graphs and databases. To accelerate our understanding of the (dynamics) of biological networks it is imperative that these efforts are combined and subsequently have to be applied to real biological problems. Recently three projects related to modelling and simulation of biological networks have been started up within the Section Computational Science (Mesoscale simulation paradigms for biological systems, Simulation of developmental regulatory networks, Mathematics and Computation for the System Biology of Cells). In March 2004 the bioinformatics group is organizing an international symposium on networks in bioinformatics.

BMIPeople: P.M.A. SlootIn the BMI project, we work on the modelling of HIV infections and drug therapy of HIV-infected patients in collaboration with C. Boucher of the University of Utrecht and A.V. Boukhanovsky and A.B. Degtyarev of the IHPCIS in St. Petersburg. In 2003 significant results describing the Stochastic Modeling of Temporal Variability of HIV-1 Population were published.

Simulation in Marine BiologyPeople: J.A. Kaandorp, R.M.H MerksIn the bio-informatics field our research in the area of marine biology also continues. Understanding external deciding factors in growth and morphology of reef corals is essential to elucidate the role of corals in marine ecosystems, and to explain their susceptibility to pollution and global climate change. A model has been developed for simulating the growth and form

of a branching coral and simulated morphologies have been compared to three-dimensional images of the coral species Madracis mirabilis. With this model it is possible to generate morphologies that are virtually indistinguishable from the three-dimensional images of the actual colonies (see a “Turing test” for corals). Such models can be used to test hypotheses on mass transfer through boundary layers and the impact of the physical environment on coral growth.

Nato SfPPeople: A.G. HoekstraIn the context of the Science for Peace program of Nato we collaborate with institutes in Minsk (Belarus) and Novosibirsk (Russian Federation) on new sensitive methods for cytological analysis of heamatological samples. We concentrate on the computational science aspects and HPC simulations in the field of computational electromagnetics of the project.

LBM:A.G. Hoekstra, A.M.M.A.M.H. ArtoliThe work on mesoscopic modeling and simulation concentrated on adapting the LBM method, and specifically the L-BGK method, for unsteady flow, and to apply this to modeling flow of blood during a full heart beat in the lower abdominal aorta. We als initiated research to adapting the models to take advantage of state of the art (parallel) numerical algorithms (such as multi grids).

PECVDInvolved: V.K. Krzhizhanorskaya, P.M.A. SlootIn this project a grid-based PSE to study the plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition of thin films is being developed. Internally funded project in close collaboration with the IHPCIS in St. Petersburg. The research was conducted with financial support from the Dutch National Science Foundation NWO and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research under grants number 047.016.007 and 047.016.018, and with partial support from the CrossGrid EU project IST-2001-32243.

Cluster of GrapesPeople involved: S. Portegies Zwart, A. Gualandris, P.F. Spinnato, M. Sipior, P.M.A. Sloot, G.D. van Albada + collaboration with the Pannekoek Astronomical InstituteOne of the other research areas in which the SCS group is active, is computational astronomy. "A Cluster of Grapes", a joint NWO proposal with the astronomical institute "Anton Pannekoek" to NWO was honoured in 2001. The research covers a wide range of subjects on the boundary of Astronomy and Computational Science. As an example, in collaboration with Fellhauer, Spinnato and Portegies Zwart studied the efficiency with which black holes and dense star clusters spiral in to the Galactic centre using three different techniques with different numbers of simulated particles: a direct N-body method, a tree algorithm and a particle-mesh technique with up to two million plus one particles. The three different techniques are in excellent agreement. The result obtained appears to be independent of the number of particles.. Sipior is working to merge the “Kira integrator” with the GADGET tree code developed at MPI Garching. The end result will allow us to make use of the unique advantages of each numerical approach – the high precision of Kira for studying the dynamics of a large stellar cluster, and the computational speed of a tree code, used to simulate the galaxy in which the cluster is embedded. The first stage of this effort is now completed and undergoing testing.

Problem Solving Environments and Visualization

CrossGridPeople: A.G. Hoekstra, E.V. Zudilova, A. Tirado Ramos, R. Shulakov, D. Shamonin, P.M.A. Sloot, G.D. van Albada, M. ScarpaIn the CrossGrid project, we participate in a large European collaboration of 21 partners in the development of interactive applications in a Grid environment. These environments are characterized by the participation of multiple, geographically distributed organizations, sharing computational resources and data. This gives an improved access to these resources and data, at a cost in network and scheduling delays. In CrossGrid, we provide an application aiming to support vascular surgeons in pre-operative planning. 2003 saw the first consortium-wide integration of grid support tools and applications, resulting in a very successful demonstration in September at the European Datagrid conference.

Fig.1 CrossGrid

Token2000People: A.G. Hoekstra, P.M.A. Sloot, E.V. Zudilova, M. Scarpa, L. AbrahamyanToken2000 is a nationally funded project (NWO), where we collaborate closely with the Universities of Leiden and Twente on the development of an interactive medical application, somewhat similar to the work in CrossGrid. This application is intended for training of surgeons. In 2003 various important results were obtained. Two user groups have been interviewed (vascular surgeons and radiologists) and their daily activities have been observed to obtain good user profiles. A personal interactive 3D environment (a “personal space station”) has been set up and various applications have been ported to this environment.

ViSE-VLPeople: J.A. Kaandorp, R.G. Belleman, P.M.A. SlootIn the ViSE-VL project we have developed a Visualisation and Simulation Environment, specifically aimed at medical applications. The results of the ViSE project are being used in the CrossGrid and Token2000 projects.ViSE-VL was funded through the ICES/KIS 2 Min EZ project

DynamitePeople: K.A. Iskra, T. Gubala, B. Ö Nualláin, G.D. van Albada, P.M.A. SlootThe Dynamite project (now internally funded) is the continuation of work on the dynamic scheduling and migration of tasks in parallel programs started in the ESPRIT project Dynamite. We have collaborated with the IHPCIS in St. Petersburg to develop a more advanced version of the software. In 2003 a version of the basic checkpointer was realised that is compatible with the latest Linux releases. Work on developing support for MPI and grid environments is ongoing.

PDESInvolvement: K.A. Iskra, G.D. van Albada, P.M.A. SlootThis research on parallel discrete event simulation is a continuation of the work by Overeinder on the behaviour of optimistic PDES, extended to grid-like environments. In 2003 important results regarding the behaviour of PDES in a wide-area distributed environment were obtained. Important strategies like message aggregation and lazy cancellation were studied. Strategies to minimise the message latency were designed and tested.

2003 and beyond

The long-standing problem of information processing in evolving Cellular Automata will be further investigated, using elements from Information Theory and Complexity theory. Our approach will be based on the notion of "local entropy" as formulated in the concept of Fischer-Information. The research will be supplemented by simulations of specific instances of Cellular Automata and will form the theoretical embedding of our CA-based modelling and simulations of biomedical phenomena.

We are currently increasing our emphasis on (Interactive) Problem Solving Environments in distributed systems like the GRID. Based upon our previous experience using HLA and the Dynamite system, our focus will be on middleware, remote access and data integration, using the currently emerging Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) and component technology for scientific computing (the Common Component Architecture - CCA). Participate in the CrossGrid project, a large consortium of 22 laboratories from all over Europe, with the goal to develop a software architecture for a Grid based interactive problem solving environment, applied to a number of challenging CA-based applications from Biology, Medicine and flood-crisis management. The SCS group has the final responsibility for issues related to scientific computing on the grid and the applications within the Crossgrid project.We also strongly participate in the European HealthGrid initiative.

As to the applications, we will further strengthen our attention in the Biomedical field. The main topics will be interactive simulation and visualization on the grid. A prototypical application will be vascular reconstruction. This application is part of the CrossGrid project and of the NWO- TOKEN2000 project, and is carried out in collaboration with the Leiden University Medical Centre (for the medical datasets) and the University of Twente (with cognitive psychologists, working on man-machine interaction and learning in VR). Another domain is hierarchical modelling and data integration through CA's. For example, in collaboration with the University of Utrecht Medical Center and the AMC (Amsterdam) we work in the field of HIV infection modelling using CA, and a rule-based medical expert system for HIV medication. As reported, three new NWO-funded projects in the area of Computational Life sciences have been obtained in 2003; these will play an important role in shaping our research in the coming years.

We have intensified our international collaborations. Within the framework of a formal agreement between the University of Amsterdam and the Saint Petersburg State University, Russian Federation, a joined laboratory for computational science was established in Saint Petersburg. This lab works on problem solving environments and applications. We formally collaborate with CYFRONET, Krakow, Poland, through joined Ph.D. students in the field of monitoring and scheduling for scientific computing on the Grid. In the framework of a recently started NATO Science for Peace program we collaborate with institutes of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science in the field of biomedical diagnostic systems. Finally, a strong research cooperation is established with a number of USA based universities (Stanford University, Mississippi State University).

Relation to other programmes

We collaborate with the Parallel Systems Architecture and Programming Methods and Environments groups in the Computing, System architecture, and Programming Laboratory (CSP-Lab).Through the Virtual Lab project we strongly collaborate with the Parallel Systems Architecture group. The theoretical work on evolving CA is done in collaboration with the Algorithms and Complexity Theory group of the ILLC.

2. Advanced Computing Systems Engineering

General Information

Contact person : Prof Dr L.O. Hertzberger Telephone : +31 - 20 - 525 7464URL : http://www.science.uva.nl/research/arch/Fax : +31 - 20 - 525 7419E-mail : bob@science.uva.nl

Position within the Organisation

The Advanced Computing Systems Engineering programme is carried out by the Computer Architecture and Parallel Systems (CAPS) group, one of the three research groups of the Computing, System Architecture and Programming Laboratory at the Informatics Institute of the Faculty of Science.The CAPS group participates in the Dutch Graduate School `ASCI'.

Characterization

Computer architecture is driven by the interaction between technology-push from the development of sub-micron technology and demand-pull for efficient and portable implementations of applications. Research in this field is relatively broad as it expands from single processor systems to complex parallel and heterogeneous computer systems. More specifically, computer architecture research may vary from the study of large-scale distributed systems such as applied for traffic control towards the study of embedded systems-on-chip, as being used in modern digital multimedia consumer electronics. The research field further expands when the consequences and requirements set by the applications on the underlying software and hardware systems are also taken into consideration. For instance, modern multimedia networking applications may tolerate lossy communication when dealing with audio and video streaming, whereas modern database applications require lossless and often redundant communication. These databases themselves form the basis for many new application areas such as virtual enterprises and virtual laboratories, of which we can observe an impact on the system architecture. In other situations, computer systems are embedded in a larger environment that will put their own specific (real-time) demands on the overall computer system.

Keywords

Parallel, distributed and grid-based system architectures, computer systems modeling and simulation, (federated) database architecture, cooperative and inter-operable systems, optical networking, AAA architecture.

NOAG-I-Theme: Parallel and Distributed Computing

Main themes

The leading objective of the Advanced Computing Systems Engineering programme is to let its research be driven by problems that are of relevance to society. The methodology applied is to find relevant problems that can be translated into interesting research questions that are challenging to be solved. As the relevant

real-world applications will mainly be found in industry and the governmental agencies, collaboration with these actors is essential. In our research we restrict ourselves to methods and tools for complex, typically parallel/distributed, computing systems design and realization. This research activity comprises two major tracks:Methods and tools for (embedded) computing systems design

Advanced information management system support

The research on computing systems design (track 1) concentrates on modeling and simulation of complex computer based systems with the aim to predict performance. From two decades of modeling and simulation experience, we learned that the generalization of the models and the choice of abstraction levels is very dependent of the design questions posed, as well as of the system under study. We are currently applying this knowledge to the problem of embedded systems design. Modern embedded systems, like those for media processing, often have a heterogeneous system architecture with components in the range from fully programmable to dedicated hardware. These components are integrated as a system-on-chip that exploits task-level parallelism. The design complexity of such embedded systems makes it essential to have good tools available for exploring different design choices at an early design stage. Our research, which is performed in close collaboration with Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven and other Dutch universities, aims at developing modeling and simulation methods for the efficient design space exploration of heterogeneous embedded media systems. Key to this work is the definition of the abstraction levels at which these systems can be efficiently modeled.Another field of embedded system design we are studying is that of road transport telematics applications, like electronic fee collection. Contrary to the previous case where the emphasis is on modeling the architecture and application(s) separately, here the emphasis has been on modeling the computer system and application, including the sensory system, as a whole. In the computing systems design track, we also perform research on advanced Internet topics. The main emphasis of this work is to get the best Internet Quality of Service (QoS) for different applications and to design policy and security architectures for GRID applications and Middleware.

The information management research (track 2) focuses on the design and the prototypical development of database systems to support the classification and manipulation of the information handled within advanced and complex data-intensive applications. Considering the wide variety of both the information handling characteristics and the environment heterogeneity required by such complex applications, multi-faceted methodologies and mechanisms are to be considered in this research. Two main areas of research and development are considered. The first area is focused on the design and development of fundamental infrastructures and mechanisms to support the advanced and complex data-intensive application domains. The second area is focused on certain specific system engineering applications, and the design and development of tailored frameworks and tools to support their needs. The Virtual Laboratory (VL) framework (discussed later on) is an important initiative that integrates the research in both areas.

2003 Results

Track 1: Methods and tools for (embedded) computing systems design

Architectures and meThods for Embedded MedIa Systems (Artemis)

In the Artemis project, an architecture modeling and simulation workbench is developed which aims at the efficient design space exploration of heterogeneous embedded media systems. In 2003, we mainly addressed the

Fig.2Artemis

problem of architecture model refinement. More specifically, we have proposed a refinement method -- based on Integer-controlled Data-Flow (IDF) models -- that allows for runtime transformation of application-level events to architecture-level events. Using case studies, we have shown that our method allows for refining both architectural communication behavior and computational behavior. In addition, we continued the development of our modeling & simulation software framework, called Sesame. This mainly involves work on the graphical editor that allows the user to swiftly build/change application and architecture models as well as the intermediate mapping layer using a GUI. Moreover, an initial study has been performed on mathematically modeling the mapping of application models onto architecture models. For this work, we developed a multi-objective optimization tool to quickly explore different mappings under multiple criteria. Finally, an initial study was performed on scheduling, of which the results can be used when we add explicit scheduling mechanisms at Sesame's mapping layer.

Advanced Internet Research

The main emphasis is to get the best network Quality of Service for different applications and to design policy and security architectures for Grid applications and Middleware. To that extend competence was gained in three areas of research: Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) architectures and models, Optical networks and high bandwidth data transport protocols and test environments.

In 2003, a key demonstration was given at SuperComputing 2003 by showing the first working concept of software to provision dedicated optical paths (lambdas) in real time in a multi-domain scenario. Other demonstrations included the first trans-Europe 10 Gbps ethernet WAN PHY connection, in collaboration with CERN researchers.

Track 2: Advanced information management system support

Virtual Laboratory (VL)

In the virtual laboratory (VL) project, we are developing a hardware and software reference architecture and laboratory framework to enable scientists and engineers to work on their problems via experimentation, making optimal use of modern information technology. To that end, three virtual laboratory domains arebeing developed: for experimental physics, for bio-informatics and bio-medicine and for systems engineering. VLAM-G, the Grid-based Virtual Laboratory AMsterdam, provides a science portal for distributed analysis in applied scientific research. It offers scientists the possibility to carry out their experiments in a familiar environment, where content and data are clearly separated. The VLAM-G prototype developed in the pervious years (2000-2002) has been provided to some VLAM-G partners to be tested in real experiments. The feedback we have received from the VLAM-G users has allowed us to define the final features support by the VL proof of concept. A considerable amount of time has been devoted in the year 2003 to migrate from the VLAM-G prototype to a proof of

concept toolkit. In the near future, we are planning to investigate the following research topics: resource management in a Grid-based environment.

Fig.3NOW Flexworks – A Framework for Flexible Data Integration to Support System

Biology

The aim of the Flexworks project is to combine data generated using different biomolecular techniques on a genome-wide scale in a flexible manner for the Dutch scientific community. Our focus is on the two general areas of: (1) information management and (2) Grid support for genome analysis. Main results obtained in 2003 constitute the following: some existing (standard) data models (e.g. DAS) were evaluated and a database supporting these standards were developed, molecular biology databases were installed on the DAS2 proof-of-concept environment (Linux cluster) and distributed Blast tool running on these databases is made available through the Grid/Globus.

EC 5FP TeleCARE – Multi-Agent Tele-Supervision System for Elderly Care

TeleCARE project aims to design and develop a framework for tele-supervision employing a federated multi-agent approach, including both stationary and mobile agents, and applied to assist the independent living of the elderly people. Our task in this project is the design and development of necessary agent-based information management infrastructure for the TeleCARE platform. During 2003, the design of several key information management components were completed, including the federated database system, the schema management, the query processing agents, the catalogue and management of TeleCARE resources including the HW devices and the SW services, and the automatic generation of data structures from their ontological definitions provided by the EC 5FP software developers for TeleCARE. These components are prototyped, demonstrated, and evaluated, serving as proof of concepts.

EC 5FP ENBI – European Network for Biodiversity Information

The major objective of the ENBI project is to establish a strong network focused on biodiversity information priorities, to be managed at the European scale. Our role in this project is to address the management of large data sets located at remote nodes, and in specific the analysis and design of a co-operative federated information management system for inter-linking and integration of the varied biodiversity information types (e.g. on taxonomy, collections, observation, etc.) distributed among different databases. Moreover, the applicability of both the GRID technology and the Virtual Organizations to the biodiversity domain will be explored. In 2003, an analysis and characterization of requirements for distributed information management in the ENBI application domain was performed, and the results were also reported and shared with the global biodiversity community of GBIF.

National EcoGrid

EcoGrid aims at developing and applying the Grid and the VL-based information system to the identification, distribution, integration and analysis of the data and the models of the dynamics of flora and fauna. In 2003, a database for Taxa and Taxa observations has been designed, implemented, and documented.

National BAM/BAS

BAM/BAS (Bird Avoidance Model and System) aims to avoid the aircraft-bird strikes and to predict bird-density distributions in space and time. The BAM/BAS project challenges the integration of existing knowledge and data into the concept-driven and data-driven models, to obtain the best prediction of bird density dynamics in a reproducible and operator-independent way. In 2003, three databases have been designed and implemented, together with their corresponding interfaces, namely: the Species Observation Database (Taxa database); the Fly Catcher Radar database (radar data observations of birds); and the Local Weather Measurement database (Meteorological database).

National Bio-ASP

The Bio-ASP project targets at the creation of a center of excellence in bio-informatics, assuring the realization of high ambitions for genomics research in the Netherlands. Bio-ASP attempts to stimulate bio-informatics in the Netherlands by offering and developing a unique service package and offer the access possibility to international databases, tools, and applications. In 2003, the ArrayExpress database from EBI is installed at UvA together with the related MAGE-stk software. A full experiment is loaded into the database for testing and evaluation purposes. ArrayExpress is a relational implementation of the MAGE-OM, and it does not fully reflect the semantics of MAGE as defined in the object model. Therefore, MAGE-OM is implemented using an object-oriented DBMS (Matisse). Furthermore, a Java tool is developed to translate MAGE-ML data files to XML files that can be automatically loaded into the Matisse database.

EC 5FP Three Networks of Experts: THINKcreative, VOmap, and VOSTER

These are three Thematic Network Projects focused on Virtual Organizations. THINKcreative aims at establishing a working group of experts to act as a European advisory group in the area of virtual/networked organizations, to characterize and define scenarios of the emerging organizational forms and their required constituency for the next 5, 10, to 15 years, and to advise EC on its future RTD planning, within the framework of the "knowledge and skills economy". VOSTER aims to collect, analyze and synthesize the results from a number of leading European research projects on Virtual/Networked Organizations, in order to build a harmonized and effective consolidated baseline from the developments so far achieved in this area by the industry and academia in Europe. VOmap aims to generate a road-map for a multi-disciplinary RTD, e.g. to identify and characterize the key research areas of challenge, required constituency, and implementation models, to be able to develop systems supporting emerging dynamic collaborative networks of organizations.

3. Programming Research

General Information

Contact person : Prof Dr J.A. BergstraTelephone : +31 - 20 - 525 7462URL : http://www.science.uva.nl/research/prog/Fax : +31 - 20 - 525 7419E-mail : janb@science.uva.nl

Position within the Organisation

The Programming Methods and Environments programme is carried out by the Programming Research Group (PRG) at the Informatics Institute of the Faculty of Science, one of the three research groups of the Computing, System

Architecture and Programming Laboratory at the Informatics Institute of the Faculty of Science.The PRG participates in the Dutch Graduate School `IPA'

Characterization

Research in the Programming Research Group takes shape in two projects:Programming Methods and Programming Environments.In the first project, the design and systematic use of algebraic methods inspecification languages, modeling of processes and program transformations are point of departure. This project primarily aims at the transfer of results to the scientific literature and to the educational stream.The Programming Environments project concentrates on the generation of programming environments from a formal language definition, in particular generic user-interfaces and implementation and integration of distributed, interactive systems. This project has produced several systems that are being distributed to others.

Keywords

Algebraic Specification, Generic Language Technology, Term Rewriting,Interoperability of Software Components, System Renovation

NOAG-I-Themes: Software Engineering (SE), Algorithms and Formal Methods (AFM).

Main themes

The work in the Programming Methods and Environments programme during 2003 comprises two major projects:

Programming Methods. General subject is the design and systematic use of algebraic methods in specification languages, modeling of processes, and program transformations. This project is supervised by Bergstra.

Programming Environments. Generating programming environments given a formal language definition. In particular the construction of generic user-interfaces, and the development of methods for the implementation and integration of distributed, interactive, systems. Application of algebraic specifications and the generated programming environments in the field of system renovation. This project is supervised by Klint.

In the Programming Methods project, process algebra is one of the possible options to specify and analyze the semantics of programs and programmed systems. With process algebra, one fully abstracts from the textual, syntactic appearance of programs, and one reasons in terms of behavior. Process algebra exists within the paradigm of semantics as homomorphism on syntax (compositional semantics): behavior can be expressed in process expressions and is subject to forms of algebraic reasoning. In program algebra - contrary to process algebra - one considers aspects of the form of programs that are not preserved after abstraction to behavior. Examples of such aspects are software metrics or programs with jump instructions (go to's); here the semantics is no longer a homomorphic image of the syntax. Program algebra is meaningful in the study of program transformations that occur, for instance, in compilers. Although the study of programs as text has

a profound history in the setting of formal languages and grammars (concentrating on language recognition and parsing methodology), the path from program texts to program execution has not yet been a major subject in theoretical analysis. Module algebra is also part of program algebra; flattening a modularized specification is a manifest example of a program transformation with non-trivial semantics.

From the perspective of the Programming Environments project, both programming languages and application-oriented languages (e.g., for accessing databases or specifying financial products) need interactive tools to support activities like program development, maintenance, and renovation. In this project, we generate dedicated interactive environments and tools for these activities from formal definitions of the desired languages. The tooling for Programming Environments is based on fundamental notions like algebraic specification, term rewriting, process algebra, and generalized LR parsing. The research aims at further development and application of these notions (e.g., efficient compilation of term rewriting, scannerless parsing) as well as applications (e.g., renovation factories for software transformations).

2003 Results

1. Programming Methods

In the field of process algebra, we concentrated on foundational research, extensions of the theory, and publication in the scientific literature. Furthermore, our external collaborations in this area of research were continued. The program algebra project emerged in 1998. This project primarily aims at the transfer of this work to the scientific literature and to our own students. Our foundational work in the theory of algebraic specification and module algebra was continued too.

We summarize our specific research themes:

Process algebra:A topic of research in process algebra is the integration of many-valued logic and process algebra via conditional composition constructs (this integration serves the specification and verification of error-prone processes). In this approach, the labels of transition systems - a common semantical notion in behavioral semantics - also carry a valuation, and associated variants of bisimulation equivalence were defined. Various non-standard logics were studied, and for their combination with process algebra, various completeness results on bisimulation equivalence were proved. (Ongoing work with van der Zwaag, KUN.)

Maintenance of the PSF-Toolkit (see http://carol.science.uva.nl/~psf/).

Program algebra:Further development and applications of program algebra, e.g., the definition of higher, special purpose dialects (for instance the enrichment with notions for compilers and networks), and appropriate projection functions.

Definition of an intermediate language suitable to interpret Object-Oriented languages such as Java and C#, and appropriate projection functions.

Design and implementation of the basic instruction sets MSP, MSPea, and LISP, and a bisimulator in C, for the PGA-Toolset. Completion of two papers (Diertens):A Toolset for PGA, and Molecular Scripting Primitives.

Maintenance of the PGA-Toolset (see http://www.science.uva.nl/research/prog/projects/pga).

Algebraic specification and module algebra:Book project:Foundations of algebraic specification. In the tradition of algebraic specification many-sorted algebras play an important part, but there are variants, and many alternative semantical have been proposed (Goguen and Burstall have described these in general as institutions). A model theory can be developed that embraces them all. (In particular it also subsumes the theory of categories.) Older ideas about reduction relations in algebras, a generalisation of term rewriting, will find their place here.

Module algebra: 1. With a view to publication, the plan has been entertained to extend Module algebra for initial algebra semantics, which appeared in report form in 1994 (PRG-Report P9407), with a discussion of the modularisation theory of Ehrig c.s. Unfortunately, finding this theory appears to be a project in itself. 2. Much energy has been spent on finding a purely categorical formulation of the theory of P9407. Such a formulation requires an abstract description of signatures.3. To motivate that abstraction, a formal specification of signatures has been developed that differs in details — relevant to initial algebra semantics — from the one Bergstra c.s. gave in 1990. However, a much more imoprtant motive for this work was the desire to present a more or less informal, illustrative application of the modularisation theory P9407.4. For the rest, the state of the book project (see previous item) suggests that signatures should be viewed as simple modules. The development of a single-sorted module algebra has been given some thought.

Equational interpolation: Van Oostrom (UU, CWI) found a simple proof by term rewriting methods for the equational interpolation theorem. A similar approach has resulted in an elementary proof of a theorem of Pigozzi (1974) on the recursion theoretic complexity of sums of equational theories.

Term rewriting. A paper on Thatte’s transformation with Luttik (TUE) and Verma SUNY) has been revised.

2. Programming Environments

The basic technological framework for our research is the Asf+Sdf Meta-Environment: both an interactive development environment for Asf+Sdf specifications and a generator for programming environments. The formalism Asf+Sdf is based on algebraic specifications and context-free grammars and is used to specify syntactic and semantic aspects of programming and application languages. Implementation techniques for the Meta-Environment include term rewriting, scannerless generalized LR parsing (SGLR) and coordination of software components. The main scientific results can be summarized as follows:

Component-based software engineering. Interconnection techniques for software components and coordination languages were developed. The main result is the ToolBus coordination architecture that uses a scripting language based on Process Algebra for describing (and executing) the cooperation between heterogeneous software components.

ATerms. One of the abstractions used in the ToolBus architecture is that the exchange of data between components is described by simple prefix terms that

can carry annotations for specific purposes. This idea has been perfected in ATerms: a very efficient library for the exchange of term-structured data. Main features are maximal subterm sharing, automatic garbage collection and binary term encoding.

Efficient implementation of Asf+Sdf. Using ATerms (and hence maximal subterm sharing) during term rewriting has two major implications: testing for term equality becomes a cheap, constant-time, operation that only uses pointer equality and the size of terms that can be manipulated increases orders of magnitude. Combining these two ideas with several optimization techniques we can compile specifications to highly efficient C code. The resulting code is very fast and can handle huge terms (more than 10^6 nodes).

Scannerless, generalized, LR parsing (SGLR). Generalized LR parsing (GLR) has always been used in the Meta-Environment. The primary reason is that GLR can be used to parse arbitrary context-free grammars. Since context-free grammars are closed under composition, they can be used for parsing modular grammars. This is a major advantage when dealing with large grammars for real languages (e.g., Cobol). SGLR takes this approach a step further by integrating lexical analysis and syntax analysis. As a result, the disambiguation mechanisms that are already present in GLR can also be applied at the lexical level.

This project has produced several systems that are being distributed to others:

1. The Asf+Sdf Meta-Environment: an interactive development environment for formal specifications that also acts as a generator for programming environments. In use at, for instance, universities in Aarhus, Amsterdam (UvA and Free University), La Coruna, Eindhoven, Glasgow, Groningen, Iowa, Leiden, Milano, Munich, Nijmegen, Rostock, Utrecht, York, and at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (Utrecht), CWI (Amsterdam), Compuware (Amsterdam), First ResultConsultants (Amsterdam), IBM Thomas Watson Research Center (New York), INRIA (Nancy), Fortis (Amsterdam), ING (Amsterdam), Postbank (Amsterdam), and Software Improvement Group (Amsterdam). Applications of this system have been developed for (and in cooperation with), for instance, ABN AMRO, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Dutch Navy, Dutch PTT, GCEI, Fortis, IBM, Nederland-Haarlem, and Dutch Railways (NS). For more information see http://www.cwi.nl/~projects/MetaEnv.html.

2. The ToolBus coordination architecture: a system for the interconnection of heterogeneous, distributed systems. In use at, for instance, universities in Eindhoven, Kent (USA), Utrecht, and at CWI (Amsterdam) and Nederland-Haarlem (Haarlem). In addition the ToolBus is in use at all sites where the Asf+Sdf Meta-Environment is being used. For more information see http://adam.wins.uva.nl/~olivierp/toolbus/index.html.

3. The Grammar Deployment Kit (GDK): a system for the semi-automatic recovery and transformation of legacy grammars. For more information see http://gdk.sourceforge.net/.

B. THE LABORATORY FOR MULTIMEDIA AND INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

4. Intelligent Sensory Information Systems

General information

Contact person : prof. dr. ir. A. W. M. SmeuldersTelephone : +31 - 20 - 525 7460URL : http://www.science.uva.nl/research/isisFax : +31 - 20 - 525 7490

E-mail : smeulders@science.uva.nl

Position within the Organisation

This program is carried out within the group Intelligent Sensory Information Systems at the Informatics Institute of the Faculty of Science. The Intelligent Sensory Information System Group participates in the Dutch Graduate School 'ASCI'.

Characterisation

The prime scientific target is to create access to the content of digital images and to learn from multimedia data repositories in general. New topics of research are picture-language combined information, tracking objects in video, learning object recognizers and image space delivery. We aim to bridge the semantic gap between pictorial data and the interpretation of the data. We do so from the image data driven interpretation by computer vision, as well as driven from knowledge about the image, designing algorithms of image analysis, experimenting on visual data, and learning from (very) large image data repositories. The research ranges from the theory of computer vision to innovative applications in multimedia. Implementations are in digital document structure analysis, video analysis, color image analysis and picture search engines. Application areas currently are in industrial vision, multimedia document analysis, biological image processing.

Key Words

Computer vision, image processing, multimedia information analysis, pattern recognition, multimedia databases, e-documents, image/video retrieval, performance evaluation of vision, mathematical morphology, color vision, shape, content-based image retrieval, query optimization, parallel processing, extensible databases.

Main themes

Content-based access of multi-media data

The goal of multimedia information access is to provide efficient content-based methods for indexing and retrieving multimodal information (images, video, sound, music). The success of a content-based multimedia retrieval engine depends on the generality, expressiveness and robustness of the multimedia features expressing the similarity between multimedia documents. We aim at new storage and retrieval technology to make large scale image/video assets manageable, searchable, targetable and reusable.

Colour in computer vision

Colour computer vision aims at defining a colour theory for vision and image sequences and to develop models for colour image processing methods. Colour vision is a very powerful component in image databases, image sequences as well as the processing of real world scenes. The purpose is to formulate computational methods, data structures and colour space representations to design proper colour image processing algorithms and to develop sets of colour invariant image features.

Theory of computer vision

Invariance in computer vision is a recurrent theme in the design of methods to describe shape and form analysis for the identification of equivalence classes with respect to particular shape descriptor. That is, the tools are designed to be invariant under the appearance changes that leave the interpretation constant. Shape and form analysis is based on linear theory encompassing linear scale-space theory and the differential structure of images as well as mathematical morphological based on complete lattice theory with a strong emphasis on the multi-local geometrical interpretation. To design long-term tracking of objects, we study on instant learning of appearances.

Segmentation, learning and tracking

Learning in computer vision is taken on as a new topic driven by the fact that so many and so large a variety of digital images is available these days. The aim is to learn rather model object class appearances and to do this interactively by active annotation.

Spatial and extensible databases

Spatial and pictorial databases are being researched for the purpose of providing consistency to spatial reasoning in an attempt to enhance spatial data-structure design. The formalization of spatial queries and the formalization of spatial data is pursued to guarantee consistency on a pictorial content-level to spatial databases. The purpose is to advance the insight in spatial and multi media data databases as they differ from standard databases. The long-term goal is integrating computer vision tools, OO-databases, and image query tools into complete image information systems.

Software and systems

The aim of vision systems is to define a framework to support software development. The aim is to get to a framework consisting of a number of software modules, workbenches for performance analysis and environments with databases, including appropriate interfaces. Performance evaluation to establish precisely what a computational method can or cannot achieve. In the computer vision community these engineering aspects are only recently taken into consideration. We design meta-systems to enable easy performance evaluation.

2003 Results

Content-based access of multi-media data

Content-based access to large stacks of images has been a topic of study for some time now. Based on the invariant colour features, to be described below, successful methods have been designed to achieve image retrieval robust against variations in illumination, viewpoint and occlusion.

For the retrieval of videos, we aim at integrating information from different multi-media sources: image, motion, sound and tele-text. This has lead to successful research and a demonstrator on television news. The work on understanding the structure of images and videos is continued with the segmentation of videos into shots, scenes and logical story units with state of the art success rates.

Large sets of documents are analysed for their page layout characteristics, the reading order, and their type of genre (e.g. scientific/news/commercial papers). These methods were successfully applied to classify office documents and scientific papers.

Due to the large semantic gap between the visual data and the verbal description given by a user, we view user interaction as an essential part of retrieval systems. To this end, we have defined a unifying framework for interactive retrieval of images. Further, we have developed methods for user-based filtering of image databases and interaction-driven video analysis.

A framework for multimedia pattern recognition has been developed that takes context and synchronization of the heterogeneous information sources into account. The applicability of the framework was demonstrated on soccer and news video, resulting in the Goalgle and News RePortal demonstrators, see figure 4.

Fig.4

Goalgle: a search engine for soccer video.

Our current research focus is the TRECVID benchmark, where we aim to index large archives of video material by semantic concepts. Experiments on the 2003 benchmark indicate that our approach is promising and for some concepts already state-of-the-art. We will continue this line of research with a further integration of multi-media sources, a further understanding of the structure of video documents and interactive access to the semantic content of large collections of multi-media information.

Colour in computer vision

Colour is an important cue in image analysis. Image processing of colour images requires special attention as well as new possibilities to see detail where grey value methods cannot.

In our approach, physical models are studied to arrive at invariant representations of colour, excluding selected accidental circumstances at the recording of the scene. In this way, one can discard in a scene geometry and/ illumination colour changes.

The combination of several invariant representations has lead to the classification of edges into either shadow edge, geometry fold, highlight or material edge; a classification not achievable in grey value images.

The other approach is based on a colour space obtained from decomposing the natural variation of colours in the world. This Gaussian colour scale space is a generalization of the common scale space, sampling the spatial and colour scales on equal foot and in a well-posed fashion. The colour scale space renders its complete set of colour and spatially invariant features. The new colour representations are suited for analysis of colour images and as such they have won their place in the long history of the many colour spaces already known for printing, television, physics of the eye, or for equal perception of colour.

A drawback of color invariance, i.e. invariance with respect to shadows, shading and specularities, is the inherent instability of the invariants. Recent publications of our group have focused on robustifying the invariants by way of 1. error propagation and 2. proposing a new set of invariant

features  for which the instability dissolve. These adaptations greatly increased the applicability of invariant color theory.

From the general theory, methods are derived for industrial colour vision, analysis of colour in documents, colour in microscopy, general images as appearing on the worldwide web. The topic on colour has led to many publications in journals (International Journal on Computer Vision) and conferences (International Conference on Computer Vision). We aim at expanding the analysis to take on the same invariant representation of texture next, as well as the semantic meaning of colour.

Theory of computer vision

Mathematical morphology is an important paradigm for low-level image processing. Our group has a long tradition on the topic at a theoretical as well as a practical level, with applications in industrial and machine vision. Research has been carried out on bringing two basic theories of low-level vision (i.e. linear theory and morphological theory) on par. To that end, the slope transform has been introduced as the morphological equivalent of the Fourier transform. Morphological scale-space has been founded on the same principles as linear scale-space. For practical mathematical morphology, we aim at developing efficient algorithms. This implies efficient decomposition schemes for structuring elements as well as the design of C++ patterns for morphological image processing.

One of the most fundamental tasks in computer vision is edge and line detection in images. The difficulty of edge and line detection is emphasized when the structures run close together or cross each other, as is the case in engineering drawings or two-dimensional projections of complex (3D) scenes. In these cases, one would often like to have a detection method which takes advantage of the anisotropic nature of lines and edges. We have shown the decomposition of the anisotropic Gaussian filter method in two Gaussian line filters in non orthogonal directions. The anisotropic Gaussian filtering method allows fast calculation of edge and ridge maps, with high spatial and angular accuracy, see Figure 5.

Fig.5

Smoothing of “Van Gogh’s Chair” (National Gallery London) in the direction of the cross-beams.

Segmentation and Learning

Image segmentation is the task of delineating the image of an object from the real world in the digital data array. It is one of the fundamental difficulties of computer vision, easily surpassed by man's superior capabilities. The difficulty resides in the fact that even man cannot rarely give a formal pictorial description why a boundary is positioned at a certain location and that is what a computer needs to perform the job. We contribute a variety of solutions.

The necklace approach offers a solution to inhomogeneous boundaries as seen in three-dimensional images of the spine. A boundary will be inhomogeneous when there are neighboring, touching or overlapping objects, or when the boundary is out of sight due to noise or occlusion. In our example,

individual vertebrae are delineated using an a priori geometrical model to be deformed for each vertebra.

A string is a variational deformable model that is learned from a collection of example objects rather than built from a priori analytical or geometrical knowledge. As opposed to existing approaches, an object boundary is represented by a one-dimensional multivariate curve in functional space, a feature function, rather than by a point in vector space. Strings have been compared with active shape models on 145 vertebra images, showing that strings produce better results when initialized close to the target boundary, and comparable results otherwise.

The watersnake approach has established a connection between the well-known watershed segmentation from mathematical morphology and energy-based segmentation methods. While the original watershed algorithm does not allow incorporation of a priori information regarding object shape, we succeeded doing so by formalizing and representing the watershed segmentation as a minimization problem. In particular the imposing of contour smoothness on the segmentation results, solves the problem with noisy boundaries that are often encountered with the original watershed, see Figure 6.

Fig.6

Segmentation by a) watershed and b) watersnake .

The topic on image segmentation have lead to two articles in IEEE trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (IEEE PAMI). This is the most prominent journal in the area of pattern recognition and is among the top ten journals in computer science in the world.

Spatial and extensible databases

Spatial and extensible databases are developed in the MAGNUM-project, which ended in 1999. Amongst the results obtained, the Monet database kernel and its modules for image and geo-spatial reasoning stands out. Research in the area of database kernels was focused on consolidation of the results obtained in recent years in journal papers. The activities were realized in close co-operation with the CWI-database group. In the area of database kernels, an innovative experimental analysis uncovered the lack of performance improvement in database technology over the last decade. The underlying reason is the relative progress in CPU- and RAM-technology, which shows a increasing performance bottleneck. As a result, traditional database solutions use less then a few percent of the available resources. This observation has led to novel techniques to measure the resource waste and new database algorithms to avoid resource stales.

The topic on spatial databases resulted in papers in several conferences including the VLDB conference.

Software and systems

The year 2003 has been a period of change for software engineering from the large complex and abstract Horus system which is now completed to smaller targets systems solving one computer vision task at the time but completely.

A separate seed topic is the study of parallelism in image processing tasks. The purpose of the research is to anticipate on future generation computer systems while constructing a parallel processing library compatible with Horus. A Ph. D. thesis on this topic has been completed by F. J. Seinstra entitled ``User transparent parallel image processing''.

Image processing as a design process

The research topic of developing image processing tools as a design process was concluded as a separate research topic. One sub-topic was the design of methods for evaluating the performance in terms of robustness of image processing methods. Formalization of the design of image processing tools results in the use of self-reliant detectors each carefully documented on its operational domain describing the complete picture set for which the detector will operate well. The method has been applied to engineering drawings as well as seeds. The topic on design process has lead to a paper in IEEE trans. on PAMI.

2003 and beyond

With first priority we will increase the effectiveness of our solutions in image retrieval and image search engines by expanding on our experience with learning from image databases.

Computational efficiency of image search engines will be increased by the joint development with spatial and extensible databases. This is important as it will open up domains of hundreds of thousands of images, a significant step towards data-mining the content.

At the same time, we aim to expand to create full access to multimedia documents. The integration of information from text and pictures is a very interesting topic both scientifically, as it reveals a lot about the nature of information, as well as practically as multimedia documents will be ubiquitous as is the need for their access. The MultimediaN project provides the opportunity to reach this goal with the intended delivery of a large-scale experimentation platform for multimedia information analysis.

To advance the understanding of the content of an image, we aim at characterizing semantic entities, objects, textures and motion patterns by semantic labels. We aim at recording objects from all viewpoints in a complete appearance sphere. Initial results show the feasibility of the approach in the discrimination. One such approach yields positive state of the art results in learning to detect objects in hours of video.

We will further concentrate our effort in theory of computer vision, especially on the foundations of low-level vision on the partial differential equations in mathematical morphology and the foundations of color vision.

Over the years we have invested in a new, object-oriented software platform for vision. By the end of the year we hope to deliver a first complete system for internal use with an expected life time of 10 years.

5. Intelligent Autonomous Systems

General information

Contact person : prof. dr ir F.C.A. GroenTelephone : +31 - 20 - 525 7461

URL : http://www.science.uva.nl/research/ias/Fax : +31 - 20 - 525 7490E-mail : groen@science.uva.nl

Position within the Organisation

This program is carried out by the Intelligent Autonomous Systems group, one of the two research groups of the Multimedia and Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the Informatics Institute of the Faculty of Science. The Intelligent Autonomous Systems group participates in the Dutch Graduate School 'ASCI'.

Characterisation

We develop methodologies to create intelligent autonomous systems that perceive their environment through sensors and use that information to generate intelligent, goal-directed behaviour in a perception-action cycle. These intelligent systems may be single systems, or multiple systems working together. In particular, we study perception for autonomous systems based on vision; we develop a unified framework for geometric computations; we study decision making of single- and multi-agent systems under uncertainty; and we develop computational methods for learning systems and probabilistic reasoning.

Key Words

sensor-interpretation, robotics, self-learning systems, multi-agent systems, decision making under uncertainty, sensor data fusion, reactive behaviour, autonomous learning systems, Bayesian networks, neuro-computation, geometric programming

Main themes

We study the methodologies to create intelligent autonomous systems. Such systems obtain their information from sensors and use that information to generate intelligent, goal-directed actions. As these systems operate in a sense-think-act loop, they can inherently learn from perceiving the result of their actions. They may be single entities or cooperating multi-agent systems, and they must operate in a real dynamic world, inhabited by humans and other agents.

Characteristic for real-world problems is that the sensor data are noisy and hard to interpret since models are often unavailable, inaccurate, or incomplete. On the other hand, because of the real-world environment, data and models have geometrical coherence and are constrained by physics. Our research focuses on new methods which inherently incorporate this real-world structure, in order to produce data processing and modelling that is robust to noise and computationally efficient.

Decision making under uncertainty is an important issue for intelligent systems. We are developing single- and multi-agent planning algorithms for this problem. In particular, multi-agent systems are capable of sharing their perceptions, resulting in a distributed world model. Coordinating the actions of multiple agents is a real challenge, which we approach by Markov decision processes and multi-agent learning strategies. As case study we use Robot Soccer.

In the field of intelligent robots, specific applications we work on include service and personal robots and intelligent cars both in structured and unstructured terrain. In the area of surveillance and safety, we have projects in distributed surveillance systems and decision support agents.

2003 Results

Perception for autonomous systems

We develop methodologies for accurate motion estimation and interpretation from image sequences. Mobile vision platforms have their applications in traffic and driving in unstructured terrain. Applications of static platforms are in public safety, and intelligent care homes for the elderly. We cooperate with TNO-FEL on a number of projects, which are related to autonomous systems. A critical technology for autonomous vehicles such as people movers and the RoboJeep vehicle is obstacle detection. We have developed an obstacle detection system based on vision and FMCW radar. The system gives separate detection's of obstacles for stereo-vision and for radar. These separate detection's are fused in the sensor-fusion module that also performs the tracking of the obstacles. The system has been tested with good results in an autonomous test vehicle (RoboJeep).

In a different project, TNO-FEL and its European partners have built the LOTUS platform to demonstrate the capabilities of automated landmine detection. We have developed a method, based on stereo vision, for estimating the position and orientation of the LOTUS platform and its sensors. Techniques from camera calibration are used for sensor pose and position estimation. The platform motion is estimated from tracked features on the ground. A special estimator was developed to deal with problems related to estimating rotation from coplanar surface points. This estimator also uses weights in order to remove outlier points caused by tracking errors and other influences. Simulation experiments show that the weights can safeguard the estimator against a limited amount of outliers. Experiments with real stereo images from the LOTUS platform show that the relative pose and position of sensor can be estimated with high accuracy. When combined with the ego-motion of the cameras the position of the sensors can be related to fixed points to the ground. The results show that the vision based approach provides more useful position estimates when compared to an odometry based approach.

Also in cooperation with TNO-FEL methodologies for public safety are developed. Many surveillance algorithms use both background modeling to detect moving objects and object tracking to analyze the motion patterns of the objects detected. In this project we integrate background modeling using EM and object tracking using color histograms. Expectation Maximization (EM) is used to model the background and detect moving objects. Using EM we can calculate the probability that a pixel value belongs to the background. Simultaneously, from the color histogram of an object, the probability that the pixel belongs to the object is estimated. This enables a classification between background and objects based on probabilities. A problem for the technique described above and many other surveillance algorithms is that often cameras with automatic gain control have to be used. As part the scene changes, static parts of the scene may suddenly become brighter or darker. We developed a technique to automatically correct for these changes. This enables us to use affordable auto-gain cameras to do sophisticated image processing.

Fig.7Generation of human walking from radar signals

Radar can be used to observe humans through an obstacle such as a wall. A disadvantage of radar is that its measurements cannot be displayed visually like an electro-optical sensor. We developed detailed processing of radar data as a function of time to estimate the parameters of a walking human. These parameters are used to animate the scene in virtual reality. The model-based approach we presented minimizes the difference between simulated data and measured data. Two approaches are investigated a detailed one that calculates the simulated data each step of the minimization and one where the minimization is replaced by a search in a database with pre-calculated simulated data. The computation time of the last approach is within the measurement time and opens possibilities in real-time applications.

Principles of autonomous systems

In the project on geometric algebra, we have continued the development of the conformal model as a compact language for programming geometry. In the process,a new basic combination operator in Euclidean geometry was uncovered (it is an `orthogonal connection' product, adjoint to the non-metric `intersection' operator), enriching its direct specification capabilities. We are continually developing our geometric algebra software GAIGEN (still the fastest available),which now also supports an interactive GAViewer, with OpenGL visualization. It is used in our interactive tutorial on the conformal model, available at the website, and much downloaded. In cooperation with the VU, we are starting a PhD on extending C with geometric algebra.

Another software paradigm, which implements geometric algebra using its inherent recursive structure, was implemented as GAP (Geometric Algebra Package. Although it allows compact specification of geometric data structures such as n-D Voronoi diagrams, it is considerably slower than GAIGEN. We have stopped supporting our original Matlab geometric algebra extension GABLE, though its tutorials are still available on the website.

We are testing our methodology and software in practical applications such as our RoboJeep project (with FEL/TNO) and a desktop virtual 3D interactive station at CWI.

Learning, probabilistic and neural computing

Autonomous systems must be learning systems because the internal models on which their decisions or actions are based may be incomplete because of lack of knowledge or because of a changing environment. We develop learning and probabilistic reasoning methods for intelligent systems operating in a real world.

In a European (ITEA) project on Ambient Intelligence (`Ambience') we focussed on learning techniques for a `personal robot' (see figure 8). The project received the ITEA Achievement Award 2003. A parallel project, funded by NWO, focussed on learning conceptual models. These models allow for a more `natural' interaction between robots and humans. A proposal for a European 6th framework program on `Cognitive robots' was prepared and accepted by the commission, so research on mobile devices in ambient intelligence will continue in 2004.

Fig.8Itea Project: personal robot

We also studied methods for context awareness, in which the intelligent environment must be able to localize and track humans and analyze their behaviour. In particular we focussed on a surveillance application with many cameras which do not have overlapping field of views. Such a system is faced with the problem whether an object observed with a camera at some time is the same object as observed by some other camera some time ago. To deal with the uncertainty we use probabilistic networks. The methods we developed outperform conventional (multi-hypothesis) tracking methods. The project is funded by STW.

Another important line of research concerns the modelling of sensory data. Typical sensor data are high dimensional and noisy, while the underlying process generating this data may have a lower dimension. We developed methods that map high dimensional data to a low dimensional space that preserves the structure of the data. The approach in our research is a combination of several local linear mappings. A probabilistic framework allows us to find appropriate locations for the local linear maps and the regions for which they are responsible. Work was supported by STW. An alternative model-based approach was studied for the classification of radar data from airplanes, in collaboration with TNO-FEL.

In collaboration with the Department of Social Science Informatics at the UvA the DUMPERS project (Distributed user modelling for personalized exploring recommender systems, funded by NWO/ToKeN2000) aims at assisting human users by estimating their interests and predicting their future behaviour. We use an adaptive web site as test application. User models are formed and estimated based on the interactions with the site and a recommender system uses these models to guide users faster to the content of their interest.

Decision making under uncertainty in single- and multi-agent systems

We are interested in sequential decision making under uncertainty: what actions should an agent take to fulfill a certain task as good as possible. The agent does not know the true state of its environment, it only receives uncertain observations (e.g., through its sensors). Solving such planning problems in an exact fashion is intractable for all but the smallest problems, so we research algorithms for computing approximate solutions in reasonable time. We developed an algorithm for POMDP (partially observable Markov decision processes) which is very competitive to other algorithms both in terms of solution quality as well as speed; in several benchmark problems our algorithm is at least one order of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art algorithms.

We are also interested in real-world multi-agent (multi-robot) systems that are embedded in continuous and dynamic domains and are able to perceive their surroundings with sensors. In particular, we focus on cooperative multi-agent systems. In such systems, the agents share the same payoffs for each joint action. We use the framework of coordination graphs (CGs) to tackle these problems. A CG is a graph where only local coordination dependencies between the agents are modeled. We have extended the standard CG framework to continuous (robotic) domains. For this, we have proposed assigning roles to the agents, and then modify the CG inference algorithm in order to take the roles into account.

We incorporated this framework in our UvA Trilearn RoboCup simulation team, which won the RoboCup-2003 World Championships (out of 46 qualified teams) with a total goal difference of 177-6. A graphical representation of the soccer field together with the coordination dependencies between the different agents is shown in the figure.

Fig.9RoboCup

We are also doing research on Distributed Perception Networks (DPNs). DPNs are sensor-based observation networks that monitor the world in a distributed and cooperative fashion. Such networks have many advantages compared to just sensor networks including faster access to crucial information and limited bandwidth requirements for the data-communication network since part of the data-interpretation is already done at the sensor level. Only the extracted information is propagated to higher-levels of the system, relevant to situational awareness and decision making. This, however, requires world models based on appropriate ontologies and mechanisms for propagation and interpretation of very heterogeneous information within different levels of abstraction.

Currently, the main project related to DPNs is "Combined Systems", which started in October 2002 and lasts four years. This project was initiated within the DECIS institute in Delft. Other partners include TNO, Thales and the University of Delft. Within this project, principles are studies with respect to distributed world modeling using multi-agent systems. These principles are studied with a focus on crisis-management. The motivation to start such a large project was that typically during a crisis, the information flow is scarce and not uniform. Therefore, one of the main results of this project is a framework for dealing with large crises, involving service personnel and digital support systems of all kinds.

Hence, the project Combined Systems deals with problems that arise when a crisis occurs in the real world. As there is a need for quick information acquisition from the crisis area, DPNs can provide the information that is needed. To validate the concept, we intend to make (besides computer simulations) a prototype version of a real DPN. That is, we will create real sensor nodes. The sensor nodes will be composites of a number of different sensors. This could for example look like a kind of box filled with sensors for temperature, gas, distance, sound and visual images. Such a box is called "sensor suite". Hence, a sensor suite is a collection of sensors that is potentially available for information extraction. In a DPN there will be a number of such suites. They will be mounted on vehicles or humans (in smaller versions) and form a distributed (perception) network.

Intelligent vehicles

Joint research with TNO (TPD/FEL) addresses environment perception for intelligent vehicles. With recent hardware advances, real-time dense stereo vision has become feasible for general-purpose processors. It can alleviate object segmentation problems in complex, cluttered traffic scenes. A framework of dense stereo vision algorithms was developed, all based on a SIMD architecture. Several methodical components were identified and their performance-speed trade-offs were examined. The resulting algorithmic variations were evaluated on realistically looking simulated data as well as

real data from urban traffic (see figure below); they were shown to outperform existing public source dense stereo implementations.

More than 150.000/6000 pedestrians are injured/killed yearly in traffic EU-wide. A new collaboration with DaimlerChrysler Research (Germany) focuses on these vulnerable traffic participants, aiming to develop a system for video-based pedestrian recognition from a moving vehicle. From methodical point of view, this application is very challenging because it combines the difficulties of a moving camera, a wide range of possible (deformable) object appearances, cluttered backgrounds, stringent performance criteria and hard real-time constraints. The first phase of the research project produced a survey of existing approaches, a strength/weakness analysis, and identified a set of improvements with respect to the current state-of-the-art DaimlerChrysler pedestrian system.

Fig.10Various dense stereo results: Real stereo image (upper left), By DP (upper

right), By WTA MW5 lr (lower left), By OpenCV (lower right)

Interactive Collaborative Information Systems (BSIK-project)

In this project we want to search for techniques and methods that help to build information systems with intelligent behaviour. Among the requirements for these systems are capabilities to:Help the human agents to (pre)process ever increasing amounts of digital and digitized information and search for relevance, meaning and importance. Support a chain of activities (rather than a single function) that is focused on reaching a set of (determined) goals by changing the environment in which the system operates.Be able to auto-detect and cope with changes both in the environment and in the goals, because the environment is dynamic.Support reasoning with uncertainty, reasoning with risks and reasoning under a lack of knowledge, necessary because of the chaotic nature of the real world.

Chapter 3 Applied research and Education

1. Computational Informatics

The knowledge acquired through Computational Science is vital to solve many important problems in contemporary society, not only in the general sense, through the development of know-how, solution techniques and tools, but also through the development of specific applications and Grid middleware.

The Grid promises to become an important paradigm for business computing and our efforts in developing grid based environments is therefore very relevant. Many of our applications have a clear societal relevance. As an example, consider the work performed for the vascular reconstruction. The societal relevance of the flooding crisis management application in the CrossGrid project has been dramatically demonstrated recently, with and estimated damage of over 10 billion Euros due to flooding in Germany alone. Finally, the HIV infection related work clearly is of high societal relevance.

2. Advanced Computing Systems Engineering

The social and technological relevance of our research is illustrated by the impact this research has for companies like Philips, where the architectures of consumer electronics become increasingly heterogeneous and complex. Good tool support, to assist architects during all design stages, becomes more and more important for designing these systems. Another example is the introduction of road pricing along the Dutch roads, which has been a political issue for many years. In the CAPS group, we have concentrated on the technical issues of this subject. In both examples modelling and simulation of the systems play an important role in studying their behaviour before they are actually built. The industrial benefit of our Virtual Laboratory research is illustrated by the opportunities offered to, for example, commercial aviation companies: using virtual laboratory infrastructures, companies like Boeing have access to a Virtual Wind Tunnel to perform large simulations needed for the design of new wind turbines for aircrafts.

3. Programming Methods and Programming Environments

In the Programming Methods and Environments programme, the general aim is to support the development of better software in a systematic manner. Design and analysis on the conceptual level both are indispensable for a better understanding of programming, programming languages and programmed systems. The connection between our different projects has always been the transfer of concepts and models to the experimental stream and to the scientific community.

Sophisticated tools based on a firm foundation are crucial for the gradual improvement of software engineering practices. The results of the Programming Environments project may have a major impact on the longer term software development strategies in industry. In the software IT industry, most development is about enhancing existing systems, for instance, providing new front-ends to established back-ends, capitalizing on existing relational technology for data storage, and building new interfaces to existing software assets. Organizations are more and more trying to find effective ways to reuse their investments in existing packages, data bases, and legacy assets. Evidently, more and more people working in the software engineering area will be working on existing systems. This project perfectly fits these needs from the IT industry.

4. Intelligent Sensory Information Systems

ISIS has been awarded as one of three national centers in the IOP-program for industrial vision. Over the years, the IOP-project is performed in cooperation with Stork, Oce, Philips CFT, Philips Medical Systems, ENZA, TNO, DLO, Noldus, Nederlands Forensisch Instituut, SPC and a few other industries.

The AMIS project combines five computer science research schools of the Netherlands into one integrated project on image search. The emphasis towards multimedia is further developed through an ICES KIS II grant of MEuro 4 to the UvA and the CWI with additional support from Elsevier, Oce, TNO, Datadistilleries. The aim is to convert high level research in multi-media information analysis into demonstrators, half-products and other means of innovation in Dutch industry.

The European IMAT project is developed with support from a variety of industries in Europe.

We have set up a joint venture with TNO called MediaMill in the area of multi-media information analysis. And we commenced a cooperation with the Ducth Forensic Institute, Rijswijk.

In the context of the ICES KIS and IOP programs, we design and show demonstrators to a large variety of industries and institutions. Demonstrators are in the area of image search, the PictoSeek system as well as the Filter Image Browser, document image analysis, document genre classification and the MediaMill video indexer.

Based on our experience with SCIL-Image, an environment for image processing algorithms implemented for 10 years in a large number of scientific labs for image processing mostly within the Netherlands, we have concluded work on the object-oriented pattern-based Horus C++ package.

5. Intelligent Autonomous Systems

Our work on pedestrian surveillance can find application in public safety and intelligent care homes for the elderly. In parallel, our work on ambient intelligence can provide the ground for building a personal robot, which could allow for a more natural interaction between robots and humans. The research on decision making under uncertainty can provide algorithms and tools for solving a variety of real-world problems where uncertainty plays a role. This can range from robotic planning tasks, to multi-agent coordination, to rescue applications, to game playing, etc. Our work on intelligent vehicles can result in practical systems for video-based pedestrian recognition from a moving vehicle (in collaboration with Daimler-Chrysler).

Chapter 4 Facts and Figures

Financial paragraph (x 1000 Euro)2003

Income Lump sum (university funding) 2425Income from research activities 3291Other income 107

Total 5823

ExpensesPersonnel 4266Other expenses 2080

Total 6346

Net result -523

Research input

Research effort in fte for 2002, 2003 and planned effort in 2004

1. Computational Informatics

Surname Initials Title Pos. Period 2002 2003 2004Funding

senior staffSloot P.M.A. prof.dr hl 0.4 0.4 0.4 1 Bogdanov A.V. prof.dr hl visiting 0.1 0.1 0.0 3 Bubak M. dr uhd visiting 0.1 0.1 0.0 3 Hoekstra A.G. dr ir uhd 0.4 0.4 0.4 1 Albada G.D.van dr ud 0.4 0.4 0.4 1 Kaandorp J.A. dr ud 0.4 0.4 0.4 1&3

post-docsPortegies Zwart S. dr pd 0.4 0.4 0.4 2 Sipior M. dr pd 0.0 0.2 0.2 2Zudilova E.V. dr pd 0.4 0.4 0.4 1

scientific system engineering/supportEngler S. dr obp from 01-06-02 0.6 0.4 0.0 3Gubała T. drs obp 0.0 0.25 1.0 3Kanter D. de drs obp 0.2 0.2 0.2 4Ó Nualláin B. dr obp 0.0 0.0 1.0 3Shamonin D. drs obp from 01-03-02 0.8 1.0 1.0 3 Shulakov R. drs obp from 01-03-02 0.8 1.0 1.0 3

PhD-studentsAbrahamyan L. M.Sc. aio 0.0 0.2 0.7 2Belleman R. drs aio 0.8 0.0 0.0 2&3 Cui J. M.Sc. aio 0.0 0.1 0.7 2Iskra K.A. drs aio 0.7 0.7 0.7 3 Merks R. drs aio 0.7 0.3 0.0 1 Hassan A.M.M.A.M. drs aio 0.7 0.9 0.0 3 Santoso J. drs oio 0.9 0.0 0.0 2Scarpa M. M.Sc. aio 0.0 0.4 0.7 1&2Spinnato P.F. drs aio 0.7 0.5 0.0 2

Zhao Z. M.Sc. aio until 01-11-020.7 0.0 0.0 2 Zhao Z. M.Sc. aio from 01-11-02 0.2 0.7 0.4 3 Krzhizhanorskaya V.K. drs aio 0.5 0.5 0.5 3 Tirado Ramos R. drs aio from 01-06-02 0.6 0.7 0.7 3 Gualandris A. drs aio from 01-09-02 0.3 0.5 0.7 2

2. Advanced Computing Systems Engineering

Surname Initials Title Pos. Period 2002 2003 2004 Fund.senior staffHertzberger L.O. prof.dr hgl 0.4 0.4 0.4 1Boasson M. prof.drs hgl 0.1 0.1 0.1 3Meijer R. prof.dr hgl 0.1 0.1 0.1 3Afsarmanesh H. dr uhd 0.4 0.4 0.4 3De Laat C. dr uhd 0.4 0.4 0.4 3Andree B. dr oz 0.5 0.5 0.5 3Belloum A.S.Z. dr ud 0.4 0.4 0.4 3Benabdelkader A. dr oz 0.7 0.7 0.7 3Gommans L. dr oz 0.8 0.8 0.8 3Inge A. van drs oz 0.1 0.1 0.1 1Pimentel A.D. dr ud 0.4 0.4 0.4 1Visser A. drs oz 0.4 0.4 0.4 3Visser A. drs oz 0.1 0.1 0.1 1Yakali H. dr oz 0.7 0.7 0.7 3

post-docsBeek R. van dr pd 0.2 0.2 0.2 3Belleman R. dr pd 0.8 0.8 0.8 3Garita C. dr oz has left 0.7 0.0 0.0 3

scientific system engineering/supportBlom J dr obp 0.3 0.3 0.3 3Demchenko Yu. M.Sc. obp 0.3 0.3 0.3 3Hendrikse Z. dr pd 0.4 0.4 0.4 1Oudenaarde S.M.C.M. drs obp 0.3 0.3 0.3 3Rauwerda J. drs oz 0.8 0.8 0.8 3Vassiounine D. M.Sc. oz 0.3 0.3 0.3 3

PhD-studentsCoffland J. B.Sc. aio has left 0.5 0.0 0.0 2Erbas C. M.Sc. aio 0.2 0.7 0.7 3Frenkel A. M.Sc. beurs has left 0.5 0.0 0.0 3Guevara Masis V. M.Sc. beurs 0.7 0.7 0.7 3Kaletas E.C. M.Sc. beurs 0.7 0.7 0.7 3Korkhov V. M.Sc. aio 0.7 0.7 0.7 3Polstra S. drs oz 0.5 0.5 0.5 2Terpstra F. drs aio 0.7 0.7 0.7 3Unal O. M.Sc. beurs 0.2 0.7 0.7 3Wibisono A. M.Sc. aio 0.0 0.2 0.7 3

3. Programming Methods and Programming Environments

Surname Initials Title Pos. Period 2002 2003 2004 Fund.senior staffBergstra J.A. prof.dr hgl 0.1 0.1 0.1 1Klint P. prof.dr hgl 0.1 0.1 0.1 1Ponse A. dr uhd 0.4 0.4 0.4 1Bethke I. dr ud 0.4 0.4 0.4 1Rodenburg P.H. dr ud 0.4 0.4 0.4 1

scientific system engineering/supportDiertens B. ir wso 0.3 0.3 0.3 1

PhD-studentsKort J. drs aio 0.7 0.3 0.0 1Vu T.D. drs aio 0.7 0.7 0.7 1

4. Intelligent Sensory Information Systems

Surname Initials Title Pos. Period 2002 2003 2004 Fund.senior staffSmeulders A.W.M. prof. dr ir hgl 0.5 0.5 0.5 1Kersten M. L. Prof. dr hgl 0.1 0.1 0.1 1Werkhoven P. Prof. dr hgl 0.1 0.1 0.1 3Boomgaard R. van den dr ir ud 0.5 0.5 0.5 1Gevers Th. dr uhd 0.5 0.5 0.5 1&3 Geusebroek J.M. dr ud 0.0 0.0 0.5 1 Koelma D. dr oz 0.7 0.7 0.0 3Worring M. dr uhd 0.5 0.5 0.5 1

post-docsGeusebroek J.M. dr ud 0.7 0.7 0.0 3Ghebreab S. dr ud 0.7 0.7 0.0 3Nguyen H.T. dr pd 0.7 0.7 0.3 3Patras I. dr pd 0.7 0.2 0.0 2Sebe N. dr pd 0.0 0.2 0.7 3Seinstra F.J. dr pd 0.0. 0.4 0.7 3Stokman H.M.G. dr pd 0.0 0.1 0.1 3Vendrig J. dr pd 0.7 0.3 0.0 2

scientific system engineering/supportBoer N.H.J. de drs wso 0.7 0.2 0.0 2Gemert J. van wso 0.2 0.2 0.0 3Koelma D. dr oz 0.0 0.0 0.7 3Navarro M. M.Sc. wso 0.5 0.0 0.0 3Seinstra F.J. drs aio 0.7 0.3 0.0 2Suarez R. E. drs wso 0.0 0.2 0.7 3 Verster F. ing. wso 0.8 0.8 0.0 1

PhD studentsAldershoff F. drs. oz 0.35 0.7 0.7 3Bagdanov A. M.Sc. aio 0.7 0.7 0.6 3Burghouts G.J. drs. aio 0.35 0.7 0.7 3Diplaros A. M.Sc. aio 0.7 0.7 0.7 3Gemert J. van drs ing. aio 0.0 0.0 0.5 3Hoang M.A. M.Sc. aio 0.7 0.6 0.0 3Mehra S. drs aio 0.7 0.7 0.7 1Nguyen G.P. M.Sc. aio 0.7 0.7 0.7 2Pham T.V. M.Sc. aio 0.7 0.7 0.7 3Snoek C.G.M. drs aio 0.7 0.7 0.7 3Todoran L. M.Sc. aio 0.6 0.0 0.0 2Weijer J. van de ir aio 0.7 0.7 0.35 2

5. Intelligent Autonomous Systems

Surname Initials Title Pos. Period 2002 2003 2004 Fund.

senior staffGroen F.C.A. prof.dr ir hgl 0.3 0.3 0.3 1Gavrila D. dr ir hgl 0.0 0.0 0.1 4Krose B.J.A. dr ir uhd 0.4 0.4 0.4 1Dorst L. dr ir ud 0.4 0.4 0.4 1Vlassis N. dr ud 0.0 0.5 0.5 1Maris M. dr ?? 0.0 0.2 0.2 1&3

Post-docsHagen S.H.G. ten dr pd 0.0 0.7 0.7 2Bakker B. dr pd 0.0 0.0 0.1 2Cemgil T. dr pd 0.0 0.0 0.8 3Pavlin G. dr pd 0.0 0.3 0.8 3Zaharia M. dr pd has left 0.8 0.3 0.0 2Porta J. dr pd has left 0.8 0.5 0.0 2

scientific system engineering/supportFontijne D. drs wso 0.4 0.4 0.4 2Terwijn B. ing. wso 0.2 0.2 0.2 1

PhD-studentsBouma T. B.Sc. aio has left 0.6 0.35 0.0 1Bunschoten R. drs aio graduated 0.7 0.7 0.0 3Gosliga S. van drs aio 0.0 0.1 0.2 4Kok J. drs aio 0.0 0.5 0.7 1Mark W. van der drs aio 0.0 0.35 0.35 3Nunnink J. drs aio 0.0 0.3 0.7 3Portegies Zwart J. drs aio graduated 0.7 0.4 0.0 3Spaan M.T.J. drs aio 0.0 0.5 0.7 2Sunyoto H. drs aio 0.1 0.2 0.2 4Verbeek J.J. drs aio 0.3 0.7 0.7 2Withagen P. ir aio 0.3 0.35 0.35 3Zajdel W. drs aio 0.2 0.7 0.7 2

Appendices

Appendix 1 Publications

1. Computational Informatics

Recent key publications

[1] K.A. Iskra, R.G. Belleman, G.D. van Albada, J. Santoso, P.M.A. Sloot, H.E. Bal, H.J.W. Spoelder, and M. Bubak. The polder computing environment, a system for interactive distributed simulation. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 14:1313-1335, 2002. Special Issue on Grid Computing Environments.

[2] B.D. Kandhai, D. Hlushkou, A.G. Hoekstra, P.M.A. Sloot, H. van As, and U. Tallarek. Influence of stagnant zones on transient and asymptotic dispersion in macroscopically homogeneous porous media. Physical Review letters, 88(23):234501:1-4, 2002.

[3] R.M.H. Merks; A.G. Hoekstra; J.A. Kaandorp and P.M.A. Sloot: Diffusion Limited Growth In Laminar Flows, International Journal of Modern Physics C, vol. 14, nr 9 pp. 1171-1182. 2003.

[4] E.V. Zudilova; P.M.A. Sloot and R.G. Belleman: A Multi-modal Interface for an Interactive Simulated Vascular Reconstruction System, in Fourth IEEE ACMI'02 International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 14-16 October 2002, pp. 313-318. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, California, USA, 2002.

[5] P.M.A. Sloot; C.A. Boucher; I. Kiryukhin; K. Saskov and A.V. Boukhanovsky: A grid-based problem-solving environment for biomedicine, in S. Nørager, editor, Proceedings of the First European HealthGrid Conference, January, 16th-17th, 2003, pp. 300 - 323. Commission of the European Communities, Information Society Directorate-General, Brussels, Belgium, 2003.

[6] P.F. Spinnato; G.D. van Albada and P.M.A. Sloot: Performance modelling of distributed hybrid architectures, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol. 15, nr 1 pp. 81-92. January 2004.

PhD theses

[1] A.M.M. Artoli: Mesoscopic Computational Haemodynamics, PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, (Promotor: Prof. Dr. P.M.A. Sloot, Co-promotor: Dr. Ir. A.G. Hoekstra) October 2003.

[2] R.G. Belleman: Interactive Exploration in Virtual Environments, PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, (Promotor: Prof. Dr. P.M.A. Sloot) April 2003.

[3] R.M.H. Merks: Branching Growth in Stony Corals - a Modelling Approach, PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, (Promotor: Prof. Dr. P.M.A. Sloot, Co-promotores: Dr. Ir. A.G. Hoekstra; Dr. J.A. Kaandorp) May 2003.

[4] P.F. Spinnato: Hybrid Systems for N-body Simulations, PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, (Promotor: Prof. Dr. P.M.A. Sloot, Co-promotor: Dr. G.D. van Albada) September 2003.

Books and conference proceedings

[1] P.M.A. Sloot; D. Abrahamson; A.V. Bogdanov; J.J. Dongarra; A.Y. Zomaya and Y.E. Gorbachev: Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Melbourne, Australia and St. Petersburg, Russia, Proceedings Part I, in series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2657, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, June 2003. ISBN 3-540-40194-6.

[2] P.M.A. Sloot; D. Abrahamson; A.V. Bogdanov; J.J. Dongarra; A.Y. Zomaya and Y.E. Gorbachev: Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Melbourne, Australia and St. Petersburg, Russia, Proceedings Part II, in series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2658, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, June 2003. ISBN 3-540-40195-4.

[3] P.M.A. Sloot; D. Abrahamson; A.V. Bogdanov; J.J. Dongarra; A.Y. Zomaya and Y.E. Gorbachev: Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Melbourne, Australia and St. Petersburg, Russia, Proceedings Part III, in series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2659, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, June 2003. ISBN 3-540-40196-2.

[4] P.M.A. Sloot; D. Abrahamson; A.V. Bogdanov; J.J. Dongarra; A.Y. Zomaya and Y.E. Gorbachev: Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Melbourne, Australia and St. Petersburg, Russia, Proceedings Part IV, in series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2660, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, June 2003. ISBN 3-540-40197-0.

Journal papers

[1] A.M.M. Artoli; A.G. Hoekstra and P.M.A. Sloot: Simulation of a Systolic Cycle in a Realistic Artery with the Lattice Boltzmann BGK Method, International Journal of Modern Physics B, vol. 17, nr 1&2 pp. 95-98. World Scientific Publishing Company, January 2003.

[2] A.M.M. Artoli; A.G. Hoekstra and P.M.A. Sloot: Accelerated Lattice BGK method for unsteady simulations through Mach number annealing, International Journal of Modern Physics C, vol. 14, nr 6 pp. 835-847. 2003.

[3] H. Baumgardt; P. Hut; J. Makino; S.L.W. McMillan and S.F. Portegies Zwart: On the Central Structure of M15, Astrophys. J. Let., vol. 582, pp. L21-L24. January 2003.

[4] H. Baumgardt; J. Makino; P. Hut; S.L.W. McMillan and S.F. Portegies Zwart: A Dynamical Model for the Globular Cluster G1, Astrophys. J. Let., vol. 589, pp. L25-L28. May 2003.

[5] J.A. Kaandorp; E.A. Koopman; P.M.A. Sloot; R.P.M. Bak; M.J.A. Vermeij and L.E.H. Lampmann: Simulation and analysis of flow patterns around the scleractinian coral Madracis mirabilis (Duchassaing and Michelotti), Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B, vol. 358 (1437), pp. 1551 - 1557. 2003.

[6] S.L.W. McMillan and S.F. Portegies Zwart: The Fate of Star Clusters near the Galactic Center. I. Analytic Considerations, Astrophys. J., vol. 596, pp. 314-322. October 2003.

[7] R.M.H. Merks; A.G. Hoekstra; J.A. Kaandorp and P.M.A. Sloot: Models of coral growth: Spontaneous branching, compactification and the Laplacian growth assumption, Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 224/2, pp. 153-166. September 2003.

[8] R.M.H. Merks; A.G. Hoekstra; J.A. Kaandorp and P.M.A. Sloot: Diffusion Limited Growth In Laminar Flows, International Journal of Modern Physics C, vol. 14, nr 9 pp. 1171-1182. 2003.

[9] D. Pooley; W.H.G. Lewin; S.F. Anderson; H. Baumgardt; A.V. Filippenko; B.M. Gaensler; L. Homer; P. Hut; V.M. Kaspi; J. Makino; B. Margon; S.L.W. McMillan; S.F. Portegies Zwart; M. van der Klis and F. Verbunt: Dynamical Formation of Close Binary Systems in Globular Clusters, Astrophys. J. Let., vol. 591, pp. L131-L134. July 2003.

[10] S.F. Portegies Zwart; S.L.W. McMillan and O. Gerhard: The Origin of IRS 16: Dynamically Driven In-Spiral of a Dense Star Cluster to the Galactic Center?, Astrophysical J., vol. 593, pp. 352-357. August 2003.

[11] C.P. Salzberg; A.T. Antony and H. Sayama: Genetic diversification and complex genealogy of self-replicators discovered in simple cellular automata: A preliminary report, Journal of Three-dimensional Images, vol. 17, nr 4 pp. 103-109. 2003.

[12] A. Sills; S. Deiters; P. Eggleton; M. Freitag; M. Giersz; D. Heggie; J. Hurley; P. Hut; N. Ivanova; R.S. Klessen; P. Kroupa; J.C. Lombardi; S.L.W. McMillan; S.F. Portegies Zwart and H. Zinnecker: "MODEST-2: a summary", New Astronomy, vol. 8, pp. 605-628. aug 2003.

[13] P.F. Spinnato; M. Fellhauer and S.F. Portegies Zwart: The efficiency of the spiral-in of a black hole to the Galactic centre, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 344, pp. 22-33. September 2003.

Conference papers

[1] A.M.M. Artoli; B.D. Kandhai; H.C.J. Hoefsloot; A.G. Hoekstra and P.M.A. Sloot: Lattice Boltzmann, a Robust and Accurate Solver for Interactive Computational Hemodynamics, in P.M.A. Sloot; D. Abrahamson; A.V. Bogdanov; J.J. Dongarra; A.Y. Zomaya and Y.E. Gorbachev, editors, Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Melbourne, Australia and St. Petersburg, Russia, Proceedings Part I, in series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2657, pp. 1034-1043. Springer Verlag, June 2003. ISBN 3-540-40194-6.

[2] C.M. Boily; P. Pastsis; S.F. Portegies Zwart; R. Spurzem and C. Theis: Galactic and Stellar Dynamics, Proceedings of JENAM 2002, held in Porto, Portugal, 3-6 September, 2002, in series EAS Publications Series, vol. 10, 2003.

[3] G.E. Brown; C.-H. Lee; S.F. Portegies Zwart and H.A. Bethe: Evolution of Neutron Star, Carbon-Oxygen White Dwarf Binaries, in H.A. Bethe; G.E. Brown and C.-H. Lee, editors, Formation and evolution of black holes in the Galaxy: selected papers with commentary, in series World Scientific series in 20th century physics, vol. 33, pp. 345-354. World Scientific, Singapore, 2003.

[4] A.G. Hoekstra; J. van 't Hoff; A.M.M. Artoli and P.M.A. Sloot: Lattice BGK Simulations of Unsteady Flow in a 2D Elastic Tube, in P.M.A. Sloot; D. Abrahamson; A.V. Bogdanov; J.J. Dongarra; A.Y. Zomaya and Y.E. Gorbachev, editors, Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Melbourne, Australia and St. Petersburg, Russia, Proceedings Part I, in series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2657, pp. 997-1006. Springer Verlag, June 2003. ISBN 3-540-40194-6.

[5] A.G. Hoekstra and V.A. Babenko: Accuracy of internal fields inside spheroids in DDA-simulations of light scattering, in T. Wriedt, editor, Electromagnetic and Light Scattering Theory and Applications VII, pp. 123-126. Bremen, 2003. ISBN 3-88722-579-1.

[6] K.A. Iskra; G.D. van Albada and P.M.A. Sloot: Time Warp Cancellation Optimisations on High Latency Networks, in S.J. Turner and S.J.E. Taylor,

editors, Proceedings Seventh IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT 2003), pp. 128-135. IEEE Computer Society, Delft, The Netherlands, October 2003.

[7] J.A. Kaandorp: Modelling growth and form of stony corals and the influence of hydrodynamics on suspension feeding, in Proceedings 9th International Coral Reef Symposium, pp. 541-547. Bali, Indonesia, 2003.

[8] I. Kiryukhin; K. Saskov; A.V. Boukhanovsky; W. Keulen; C.A. Boucher and P.M.A. Sloot: Stochastic Modeling of Temporal Variability of HIV-1 Population, in P.M.A. Sloot; D. Abrahamson; A.V. Bogdanov; J.J. Dongarra; A.Y. Zomaya and Y.E. Gorbachev, editors, Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Melbourne, Australia and St. Petersburg, Russia, Proceedings Part I, in series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2657, pp. 125-135. Springer Verlag, June 2003. ISBN 3-540-40194-6.

[9] M.L.A. Kouwenhoven; A. Brown; A. Gualandris; L. Kaper; S.F. Portegies Zwart and A. Zinnecker: The Primordial Binary Population in OB Associations, in IAU Symposium 221, (Abstract ) 2003.

[10] M.L.A. Kouwenhoven; A. Brown; A. Zinnecker; L. Kaper; S.F. Portegies Zwart and A. Gualandris: A search for close companions in Sco OB2, in Proceedings of the ESO Workshop on 'Science with Adaptive Optics, 2003.

[11] T. Krul; J.A. Kaandorp and J.G. Blom: Modelling Developmental Regulatory Networks, in P.M.A. Sloot; D. Abrahamson; A.V. Bogdanov; J.J. Dongarra; A.Y. Zomaya and Y.E. Gorbachev, editors, Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Melbourne, Australia and St. Petersburg, Russia, Proceedings Part I, in series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2660, pp. 688-697. Springer Verlag, June 2003. ISBN 3-540-40194-6.

[12] G. de Marchi; F. Paresce and S.F. Portegies Zwart: The Mass Function of Galactic Clusters and its Evolution, in Dynamics and Evolution of Dense Stellar Systems, 25th meeting of the IAU, Joint Discussion 11, (Abstract ) Sydney, Australia, July 2003.

[13] S.L.W. McMillan and S.F. Portegies Zwart: Evolution of Dense Star Clusters Near the Galactic Center, in Dynamics and Evolution of Dense Stellar Systems, 25th meeting of the IAU, Joint Discussion 11, (Abstract ) Sydney, Australia, July 2003.

[14] R.M.H. Merks; A.G. Hoekstra; J.A. Kaandorp and P.M.A. Sloot: Problem Solving Environment for Modelling Stony Coral Morphogenesis, in P.M.A. Sloot; D. Abrahamson; A.V. Bogdanov; J.J. Dongarra; A.Y. Zomaya and Y.E. Gorbachev, editors, Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Melbourne, Australia and St. Petersburg, Russia, Proceedings Part I, in series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2657, pp. 639-648. Springer Verlag, June 2003. ISBN 3-540-40194-6.

[15] R.M.H. Merks; A.G. Hoekstra; J.A. Kaandorp and P.M.A. Sloot: Branching and compactification in a model of coral growth: a critical reinvestigation of the effect of hydrodynamics, in V. Capasso, editor, Mathematical modelling & Computing in Biology and Medicine; 5th ESMTB Conference 2002, pp. 539-544. MIRIAM (Milan Research Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), 2003.

[16] C.P. Salzberg; A.T. Antony and H. Sayama: Visualizing evolutionary dynamics of self-replicators using graph-based genealogy, in W. Banzhaf; T. Christaller; P. Dittrich; J. T. Kim and J. Ziegler, editors, Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2003), pp. 387-394. Springer-Verlag , Dortmund, Germany, 2003.

[17] C.P. Salzberg; A.T. Antony and H. Sayama: Genetic diversification and adaptation of self-replicators discovered in simple cellular automata, in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Humans and Computers (HC-2003), pp. 194-199. University of Aizu, Japan , 2003.

[18] D. Kranzmueller; M. Scarpa and J. Volkert: DeWiz - A Modular tool Architecture for Parallel Program Analysis, in Harald Kosch; Lászl Böszörményi and Hermann Hellwagner, editors, Euro-Par 2003. Parallel Processing, 9th International Euro-Par Conference, Klagenfurt, Austria, August 26-29, 2003. Proceedings, in series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2790, pp. 74-80. Springer, 2003. ISBN 3-540-40788-X.

[19] P.M.A. Sloot; C.A. Boucher; I. Kiryukhin; K. Saskov and A.V. Boukhanovsky: A grid-based problem-solving environment for biomedicine, in S. Nørager, editor, Proceedings of the First European HealthGrid Conference, January, 16th-17th, 2003, pp. 300 - 323. Commission of the European Communities, Information Society Directorate-General, Brussels, Belgium, 2003.

[20] P.F. Spinnato; S.F. Portegies Zwart; M. Fellhauer; G.D. van Albada and P.M.A. Sloot: Tools and Techniques for N-body Simulations, in R. Capuzzo Dolcetta, editor, Proceedings of the 1st workshop on Computational Astrophysics in Italy: Methods and Tools, MemSAIt Suppl. Series, pp. 54-65. SAIt, 2003.

[21] A.Tirado-Ramos; K. Zajac; Z. Zhao; P.M.A. Sloot; G.D. van Albada and M. Bubak: Experimental Grid Access for Dynamic Discovery and Data Transfer in Distributed Interactive Simulation Systems, in P.M.A. Sloot; D. Abrahamson; A.V. Bogdanov; J.J. Dongarra; A.Y. Zomaya and Y.E. Gorbachev, editors, Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Melbourne, Australia and St. Petersburg, Russia, Proceedings Part I, in series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2657, pp. 284-292. Springer Verlag, June 2003. ISBN 3-540-40194-6.

[22] K. Zajac; A. Tirado-Ramos; Z. Zhao; P.M.A. Sloot and M. Bubak: Grid Services for HLA-based Distributed Simulation Frameworks, in First European Across Grids Conference, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, February 2003.

[23] K. Zajac; M. Bubak; M. Malawski and P.M.A. Sloot: Towards a Grid Management System for HLA-Based Interactive Simulations, in S.J. Turner and S.J.E. Taylor, editors, Proceedings Seventh IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT 2003), pp. 4-11. IEEE Computer Society, Delft, The Netherlands, October 2003.

[24] Z. Zhao; G.D. van Albada; A. Tirado-Ramos; K. Zajac and P.M.A. Sloot: ISS-Studio: a prototype for a user-friendly tool for designing interactive experiments in Problem Solving Environments, in P.M.A. Sloot; D. Abrahamson; A.V. Bogdanov; J.J. Dongarra; A.Y. Zomaya and Y.E. Gorbachev, editors, Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Melbourne, Australia and St. Petersburg, Russia, Proceedings Part I, in series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2657, pp. 679-688. Springer Verlag, June 2003. ISBN 3-540-40194-6.

[25] Z. Zhao; G.D. van Albada and P.M.A. Sloot: Interaction Scenario: Orchestrating Agents in a multi-agent System, in J.-P. Muller and M.-M. Seidel, editors, Proceedings of the 4th workshop on Agent-Based Simulation, pp. 155-160. Montpellier, France, April 2003. ISBN 3-936-150-25-7.

[26] E.V. Zudilova and P.M.A. Sloot: Virtual Reality and Desktop as a Combined Interaction-Visualisation Medium for a Problem-Solving Environment, in P.M.A. Sloot; D. Abrahamson; A.V. Bogdanov; J.J. Dongarra; A.Y. Zomaya and Y.E. Gorbachev, editors, Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Melbourne,

Australia and St. Petersburg, Russia, Proceedings Part III, in series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2659, pp. 1025-1034. Springer Verlag, June 2003. ISBN 3-540-40196-2.

Other products

The Dynamite software package for the checkpointing of PVM programs is available through http://www.science.uva.nl/research/scs/Software

Development of "Roche" binary evolution web interface:http://carol.wins.uva.nl/~spz/act/roche/roche.htmlDevelopment of "McScatter" hybrid software package for Monte-Carlo dynamics with binary evolutionhttp://manybody.org/McScatter.html

Inclusion in the documentary series "A hundred famous universities over the world"The series is aired in prime time on CCTV1 in China, and attracts over two million viewers

The movie was shown in the series of introductory programs, called "hundred famous universities over the world". The target audiences are students and the people from the educational system. Every issue in the series covers a single university and takes about one hour. The program on the UvA was broadcast two or three times in the Chinese Central TV, channel one. Broadcasts took place during the Chinese New Year, (February 1, 2003) a public holiday for all students, and on January 27, 2003. The series to date only includes five or six universities; apart from UvA, Cambridge, Leiden, and Tokyo were also included. We were shown in the fourth day.

TV: 28 Maart: "De Ontdekking" Vara: 'De Droommachine': ProgrammaTV: 31 July: Teleac: InterviewTime Magazine: Interview

2. Advanced Computing Systems Engineering

Recent key publications

[1] A.D. Pimentel, L.O. Hertzberger, P. Lieverse, P. van der Wolf, and E.F. Deprettere, Exploring Embedded-systems Architectures with Artemis, IEEE Computer, 34(11):57-63, Nov. 2001.

[2] A.S.Z Belloum, D.Groep, L.O. Hertzberger, V. Korkhov, Cees T.A.M de laat, D. Vasunin “VLAM-G: a Grid-based Virtual Laboratory” Future Generation Computer, System, 19 (2003), No 2, 209-217

[3] C. de Laat, E. Radius, S. Wallace, "The Rationale of the Current Optical Networking Initiatives", iGrid2002 special issue, Future Generation Computer Systems, volume 19 issue 6 (2003).

[4] Visser, H.H. Yakali, A.J. van der Wees, M. Oud, G.A. van der Spek, and L.O. Hertzberger. “An hierarchical view on modelling the reliability of a dsrc-link for etc applications”, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 3(2), June 2002.

[5] H. Afsarmanesh, E.C. Kaletas, A. Benabdelkader, C. Garita, and L. O. Hertzberger. “A reference architecture for scientific virtual laboratories”, Future Generation Computer Systems}, 17(8):999--1008, 2001.

Articles

[1] Tom DeFanti, Cees de Laat, Joe Mambretti, Kees Neggers, Bill St. Arnaud: "TransLight: a global-scale LambdaGrid for e-science", Communications of the ACM, Volume 46 , Issue 11 (November 2003), Pages: 34 - 41.

[2] Thomas A. DeFanti, Maxine D. Brown, Cees de Laat, "editorial: Grid 2002: The International Virtual Laboratory", iGrid2002 special issue, Future Generation Computer Systems, volume 19 issue 6 (2003)

[3] Cees de Laat, Erik Radius, Steven Wallace, "The Rationale of the Current Optical Networking Initiatives", iGrid2002 special issue, Future Generation Computer Systems, volume 19 issue 6 (2003).

[4] Antony Antony, Johan Blom, Cees de Laat, Jason Lee, Wim Sjouw, "Microscopic Examination of TCP flows over transatlantic Links", iGrid2002 special issue, Future Generation Computer Systems, volume 19 issue 6 (2003).

[5] Leon Gommans, Cees de Laat, Bas van Oudenaarde, Arie Taal, "Authorization of a QoS Path based on Generic AAA", iGrid2002 special issue, Future Generation Computer Systems, volume 19 issue 6 (2003).

[6] Zeger W. Hendrikse, Adam S. Z. Belloum, Philip M.R. Jonkergouw, Gert B. Eijkel, Bob L.O. Hertzberger, Vladimir Korkhov, Cees T.A.M. de Laat, Dmitry Vasunin, "Evaluating the VLAM-G toolkit on the DAS-2", iGrid2002 special issue, Future Generation Computer Systems, volume 19 issue 6 (2003).

[7] S. Z. Belloum, D. L. Groep, Z. W. Hendrikse, L. O. Hertzberger, V. Korkhov, C.T.A.M. de Laat, D. Vasunin, "VLAM-G: A Grid-Based Virtual Laboratory", Future Generation Computer Systems 19 (2003) 209-217

[8] L.M. Camarinha-Matos, H. Afsarmanesh, R. Rabelo, Infrastructure developments for agile virtual enterprises, Int. Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, ISSN 0951-192X, Vol. 16, N. 4-5, Jun-Aug 2003, pp 235-254.

[9] L.M. Camarinha-Matos, H. Afsarmanesh, Elements of a base VE infrastructure, J. Computers in Industry, Vol. 51, Issue 2, Jun 2003, pp. 139-163.

Proceedings

[1] C. Erbas, S.C. Erbas and A. D. Pimentel, ``A Multiobjective Optimization Model for Exploring Multiprocessor Mappings of Process Networks'', in the Proc. of the ACM/IEEE/IFIP Int. Conference on HW/SW Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES-ISSS '03), Newport Beach, USA, Oct. 2003.

[2] C. Erbas and A. D. Pimentel, ``Utilizing Synthesis Methods in Accurate System-level Exploration of Heterogeneous Embedded Systems'', in the Proc. of the IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SiPS '03), pp. 310-315, Seoul, Korea, Aug. 2003.

[3] S. Polstra, C. Erbas and A. D. Pimentel, ``IDF Models for Trace Transformations: A Case Study in Computational Refinement'', in the Proc. of the 3rd Int. Workshop on Systems, Architectures, MOdeling, and Simulation (SAMOS 2003), pp. 167-172, Samos, Greece, July, 2003.

[4] S. Polstra, C. Erbas and A. D. Pimentel, ``IDF Models for Trace Transformations: A Case Study in Computational Refinement'', in the Proc. of the Progress workshop on Embedded Systems, Oct., Nieuwegein, Netherlands, 2003.

[5] A. D. Pimentel and C. Erbas, ``An IDF-based Trace Transformation Method for Communication Refinement'', in the Proc. of the 40th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC 2003), pp. 402-407, Anaheim, USA, June 2003.

[6] J. E. Coffland and A. D. Pimentel, ``A Software Framework for Efficient System-level Performance Evaluation of Embedded Systems'', in the Proc. of the 18th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Embedded Systems track, pp. 666-671, Melbourne, Florida, USA, March 2003.

[7] Cees de Laat, Erik Radius, "High Performance Networking for Grid Applications", Proceedings of the ninth annual conference of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging, Heijen, The Netherlands, June 4-6, 2003.

[8] M.L. Fassaert, S.B.M. Post, A. Visser "The common knowledge model of a team of rescue agents", 1th International Workshop on Synthetic Simulation and Robotics to Mitigate Earthquake Disaster, Padova, Italy, 6 July 2003.

[9] S.B.M. Post, M.L. Fassaert, A. Visser "Reducing the communication for multiagent coordination in the RoboCupRescue Simulator", 7th RoboCup International Symposium, Padua, Italy, 10-11 July 2003.

[10] A. Visser, A. van Inge, F.A.Groen "Experiences with the innovation of an Autonomous Systems Course", 9th International Conference of European University Information Systems, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2-4, July 2003.

[11] E. C. Kaletas, H. Afsarmanesh and L. O. Hertzberger, Modelling Multi-Disciplinary Scientific Experiments and Information, in Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS03), pp. 75—82, 2003.

[12] C. Garita, H. Afsarmanesh, O. Unal and L. O. Hertzberger, Building A Virtual Laboratory For Scientific Experimentation In Molecular Biology, in Proceedings of the 4th IFIP Working Conference on Infrastructures For Virtual Enterprises (PRO-VE'03), pp. 181—190, 2003.

[13] H. Afsarmanesh, V. Guevara Masis, L.O. Hertzberger Virtual Community support in TeleCARE, in Proceedings of the 4th IFIP Working Conference on Infrastructures For Virtual Enterprises (PRO-VE'03), 2003.

[14] L. M. Camarinha-Matos, H. Afsarmanesh, A roadmap for strategic research on virtual organizations, Proceedings of the 4th IFIP Working Conference on Infrastructures For Virtual Enterprises (PRO-VE'03), 2003.

Book chapters

[1] A. D. Pimentel, F. P. Terpstra, S. Polstra and J. E. Coffland, ``On the Modeling of Intra-task Parallelism in Task-level Parallel Embedded Systems'', in S. Bhattacharyya, E. Deprettere, and J. Teich (eds), Domain Specific Processors: Systems, Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation, pp. 85-105, Marcel Dekker, Inc., Nov. 2003.

[2] L.M. Camarinha-Matos, H. Afsarmanesh, Designing the information technology subsystem, invited chapter, in Handbook on Enterprise Architecture, P. Bernus, L. Nemes, G. Schmidt (Eds.), Springer, 2003, pp. 617-680, ISBN 3-540-00343-6.

Reports

[1] H. Bal, C. de Laat, S. Haridi, K. Jeffery, J. Labarta, D. Laforenza , P. Maccallum, J. Masso, L. Matyska, T. Priol, A. Reinefeld, A. Reuter, M. Riguidel, D. Snelling, M. van Steen, "Next Generation Grid(s), European Grid Research 2005-2010", Expert Group Report for the EU, Brussels, Belgium, june 16, 2003.

[2] Antony, J. Blom, F. Dijkstra, C. de Laat, "A new look at Ethernet: Experiences from 10 Gigabit Ethernet End-to-End network between Amsterdam and Geneva", internal report, nov 11, 2003.

Other products

* As part of Artemis, we developed a prototype modeling and simulation environment called Sesame (Simulation of Embedded System Architectures for Multi-level Exploration). See http://sesamesim.sourceforge.net/ for the software.* The VL proof of concept is now ready for usage by the VL partners. The VL software and documentation can be downloaded from WWW.vl-e.nl. * TeleCARE. Development of an agent-based federated database system is achieved. Three main components were developed to support both the management of all information related to TeleCARE network facilitating its extension, and the development of new vertical services, namely: i) Federated Information MAnagement - FIMA, ii) Resource CAtalogue Management - RCAM, and iii) Dynamic Ontology-based Schema Generation - DOSG.* Flexworks. An object-oriented database and a Web-based application on top of this database have been developed for storing sequence annotation information, following the DAS standard. The Blast sequence analysis tool has been ported to the DAS2 Linux cluster and is made available to users through Grid.* An alpha (proof-of-concept) version of the AAA toolkit (software) was developed in 2003

3. Programming Methods and Programming Environments

Recent key publications

[1] J.A. Bergstra, A. Ponse and M.B. van der Zwaag. Branching Time and Orthogonal Bisimulation Equivalence. Theoretical Computer Science, 309 (1-3):313-355, 2003.

[2] J.A. Bergstra and A. Ponse. Register-machine based processes. Journal of the ACM, 48(6):1207-1241, 2001.

[3] Brand, Heering, Klint, Olivier, Compiling language M.G.J. van den Brand, J. Heering, P. Klint and P.A. Olivier. Compiling language definitions: The ASF+SDF compiler. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, Volume 24(4):334-368, 2002.

[4] Terese (editors), Term Rewriting Systems (among the authors I. Bethke and P. Klint). Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science 55, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Dissertations

[1] Hendriks, D. (31-10-2003). Metamathematics in Coq, Department of Philosophy, Utrecht University. Promotores: prof.dr. J.A. Bergstra and prof.dr. M.A. Bezem.

[2] Jonge, M. de (06-03-2003). To reuse or to be reused. Techniques for component composition and construction. Informatica Instituut, University of Amsterdam. Promotor: prof.dr. P. Klint.

[3] Visser, J.M.W. (14-02-2003). Generic traversal over typed source code representations. Informatica Instituut, University of Amsterdam. Promotor: prof.dr. P. Klint.

Articles

[1] J.A. Bergstra and H.R. Walters. Operator programs and operator processes. Information and Software Technology, 45:681-689, 2003.

[2] J.A. Bergstra, A. Ponse and M.B. van der Zwaag. Branching Time and Orthogonal Bisimulation Equivalence. Theoretical Computer Science, 309 (1-3):313-355, 2003.

[3] M.G.J. van den Brand, P. Klint, and J.J. Vinju. Term Rewriting with Traversal Functions, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methodology, 12 (2):152-190, 2003.

Proceedings

[1] J.A. Bergstra and I. Bethke. Polarized Process Algebra and Program Equivalence. In J.C.M. Baeten, J.K. Lenstra, J. Parrow, and G.J. Woeginger (editors), Automata, Languages and Programming, 30th International Colloquium, ICALP 2003, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, June 30-July 4, Volume 2719 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 1-21. Springer-Verlag, 2003.

[2] H.A. de Jong and P. Klint. ToolBus: the Next Generation. In F.S. de Boer, M.M. Bonsangue, S. Graf, and W.P. de Roever (eds.), Formal Methods for Components and Objects, LNCS 2852, pages 220-241, 2003.

[3] P. Klint. How Understanding and Restructuring differ from Compiling - a Rewriting Perspective. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Program Comprehension (IWPC03), IEEE Computer Society, pages 1-12, 2003.

Book chapters

[1] I. Bethke. Lambda calculus. In Terese, editors, Term Rewriting Systems, Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science 55, pages 548-588, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

[2] I. Bethke. Completion of equational specifications. In Terese, editors, Term Rewriting Systems, Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science 55, pages 260-300, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

[3] J. Heering and P. Klint. Rewriting-based languages and systems. In Terese, editors, Term Rewriting Systems, Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science 55, pages 776-789, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Reports

[1] J. Heering and P. Klint, Rewriting-based languages and systems Technical Report, CWI SEN-E0310, ISSN 1386-369X, 2003.

[2] M.G.J. van den Brand, H.A. de Jong, P. Klint, and A.T. Kooiker, A Language Development Environment for Eclipse Technical Report, CWI SEN-R0307, ISSN 1386-369X, 2003.

Dutch publications

[1] I. Bethke and A. Ponse. Programma-Algebra, een Inleiding tot de Programmatuur, Vossius-Pers, Amsterdam University Press, 2003.

[2] A. van Deursen and P. Klint. Henri Ford in Software Engineering: Op weg naar systematische softwarevariatie (in Dutch), Informatie 45 (april) 2003, 50-53.

[3] Nederland onderschat belang softwareontwikkeling (in Dutch, manifest signed by 15 software engineers, among which P. Klint), Automatisering Gids, november 14, 2003.

Other products

Toolkit for program algebra:http://www.science.uva.nl/research/prog/projects/pga

The Asf+Sdf Meta-Environment:http://www.cwi.nl/~projects/MetaEnv.html

The ToolBus coordination architecture:http://adam.wins.uva.nl/~olivierp/toolbus/index.html The Grammar Deployment Kit (GDK):http://gdk.sourceforge.net

4. Intelligent Sensory Information Systems

Recent key publications

[1] E. A. Engbers and A. W. M. Smeulders. Design considerations for generic grouping in vision. IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 25(4):445 -- 457, 2003.

[2] J. M. Geusebroek, A. W. M. Smeulders, and J. van de Weijer. Fast anisotropic gauss filtering. IEEE Trans. Image Processing, 13(8):938--943, 2003.

[3] Th. Gevers and H. M. G. Stokman. Robust photometric invariant segmentation of multispectral images. International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 53(2):135--151, 2003.

[4] S. Ghebreab and A. W. M. Smeulders. Strings: variational deformable models of multivariate continuous boundary features. IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 25(11):1399--1410, 2003.

[5] H.T. Nguyen, M. Worring, and R. van den Boomgaard. Watersnakes: energy-driven watershed segmentation. IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 25(3):330--342, 2003.

Dissertations

[1] F. Seinstra User transparent parallel image processing. Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2003.

[2] M. Windhouwer Feature Grammar Systems, Incremental Maintenance of Indices to Digital Media Warehouses. Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2003.

Scientific publications

Articles

[1] A. D. Bagdanov and M. Worring. First order gaussian graphs for efficient structure classification. Pattern Recognition, 36:1311-1324, 2003.

[2] A. D. Bagdanov and M. Worring. Multiscale document description using rectangular granulometries. International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition, 2003 (on line).

[3] I. Cohen, N. Sebe, L. Chen, A. Garg, and T. S. Huang. Facial expression recognition from video sequences: Temporal and static modeling. Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 91(1-2):160-187, 2003.

[4] M.C. d'Ornellas and R. van den Boomgaard. The state of art and future development of morphological software, towards generic algorithms. International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, 17(2):231-255, 2003.

[5] E. A. Engbers and A. W. M. Smeulders. Design considerations for generic grouping in vision. IEEE Trans. on PAMI, 25(4):445 - 457, 2003.

[6] J. M. Geusebroek, A. W. M. Smeulders, and J. van de Weijer. Fast anisotropic gauss filtering. IEEE Trans. Image Processing, 13(8):938-943, 2003.

[7] J. M. Geusebroek, R. van den Boomgaard, A. W. M. Smeulders, and T. Gevers. Color constancy from physical principles. Pattern Recognition Letter, 24(11):1653-1662, 2003.

[8] Th. Gevers and H. M. G. Stokman. Classification of color edges in video into shadow-geometry, highlight, or material transitions. IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, 5(2), 2003.

[9] Th. Gevers and H. M. G. Stokman. Robust photometric invariant segmentation of multispectral images. International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 53(2):135-151, 2003.

[10] S. Ghebreab and A. W. M. Smeulders. Strings: variational deformable models of multivariate continuous boundary features. IEEE Trans. on PAMI, 25(11):1399-1410, 2003.

[11] H.T. Nguyen, M. Worring, and R. van den Boomgaard. Watersnakes: energy-driven watershed segmentation. IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 25(3):330-342, 2003.

[12] N. Sebe, M. Lew, and A. W. M. Smeulders. Video retrieval and summarization. Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 92(2-3):141-145, 2003.

[13] N. Sebe, Q. Tian, E. Loupias, M. S. Lew, and T. S. Huang. Image retrieval using wavelet-based salient points. Image and Vision Computing, 91(13-14):1087-1095, 2003.

[14] F. J. Seinstra and D. Koelma. Incorporating memory layout in the modeling of message passing programs. Journal of Systems Architecture, 49(3):109-121, 2003.

[15] J. Vendrig and M. Worring. Interactive adaptive movie annotation. IEEE Multimedia, 10(3): 30-37, 2003.

Proceedings

[1] M. Aiello and A. W. M. Smeulders. Bidimensional relations for reading order detection. In Proc. of 7th Joint Conference on Information Sciences, 2003.

[2] I. Cohen, N. Sebe, F. G. Cozman, and T. S. Huang. Semi-supervised learning for facial expression recognition. In 5th ACM SIGMM International Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval, pages 17-22, 2003.

[3] I. Cohen, N. Sebe, F. G. Cozmen, and T. S. Huang. Learning bayesian network classifiers for facial expression recognition using both labeled and unlabeled data. In Proc. IEEE Conf. on Comp. Vision and Pattern Recogn., volume 1, pages 595-601, IEEE press, 2003.

[4] A. Diplaros, Th. Gevers, and I. Patras. Color-shape context for object recognition. In Proc. IEEE Workshop on Color and Photometric Methods in Computer Vision (associated with ICCV), IEEE press, 2003.

[5] J. M. Geusebroek. Color differential structure. In B. M. ter Haar Romeny, editor, Front-End Vision and Multi-Scale Image Analysis, pages 323-339. Kluwer, 2003.

[6] J. M. Geusebroek. A scale-space analysis of multiplicative texture processes. In M. Chantler, editor, Proc. 3rd Int. Workshop on Texture Anal. and Synthesis (Texture 2003), pages 37-40. Heriot-Watt University, 2003.

[7] J. M. Geusebroek and A. W. M. Smeulders. Fragmentation in the vision of scenes. In Proc. 9th Int. Conf. Comput. Vision, volume 1, pages 130-135. IEEE Press, 2003.

[8] J. M. Geusebroek and A. W. M. Smeulders. The influence of resolution on natural image statistics. In Perception, volume 32s, page 54, 2003.

[9] J. M. Geusebroek and A. W. M. Smeulders. What we see is what we compute. ERCIM News, (55):17-18, 2003.

[10] Th. Gevers. Reflectance-based classification of color edges. In Proc. IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision, pages 235-341, IEEE press, 2003.

[11] Th. Gevers and F. Aldershoff. Classifying multimedia documents by merging textual and pictorial information. In Proc. Int. Conf. on Image Processing, IEEE press, 2003.

[12] S. Ghebreab, C. C. Jaffe, and A. W.M. Smeulders. Concept-based retrieval of biomedical images. In H.K. Huang and O.S. Ratib, editors, Proc. of SPIE Medical Imaging: PACS and Integrated Medical Information Systems: Design and Evaluation. SPIE-press, 2003.

[13] A. Hauptmann, R.V. Baron, M.-Y. Chen, M. Christel, P. Duygulu, C. Huang, R. Jin, W.-H.Lin, T. Ng, N. Moraveji, N. Papernick, C.G.M. Snoek, G. Tzanetakis, J. Yang, R. Yang, and H.D. Wactlar. Informedia at TRECVID 2003: Analyzing and searching broadcast news video. In Proceedings of the 12th Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), November 2003.

[14] D. P. Huijsmans and N. Sebe. Content-based indexing performance: A class size normalized precision, recall, generality evaluation. In Proc. Int. Conf. on Image Processing, volume 3, pages 733-736, IEEE press, 2003.

[15] G. P. Nguyen and M. Worring. Query definition using interactive saliency. In 5th ACM SIGMM International Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval, Berkeley, 2003.

[16] A. R. Schmidt, S. Manegold, and M. L. Kersten. Integrated querying of XML data in RDBMSs. In Proc. of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), pages 509-514, March 2003.

[17] A. R. Schmidt, F. Waas, S. Manegold, and M. L. Kersten. A look back on the XML benchmark project. In H. M. Blanken, T. Grabs, H.-J. Schek, R. Schenkel, and G. Weikum, editors, Intelligent Search on XML, volume 2818 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science/Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNCS/LNAI), pages 263-278. Springer-Verlag, 2003.

[18] N. Sebe, I. Cohen, M. S. Lew, and T. S. Huang. Evaluation of expression recognition techniques. In International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval, number 2728 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 184-195. Springer Verlag, 2003.

[19] N. Sebe, M. S. Lew, X. Zhou, T. S. Huang, and E. Bakker. The state of the art in image and video retrieval. In International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval, number 2728 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 1-8. Springer Verlag, 2003.

[20] F. J. Seinstra and D. Koelma. Lazy parallelization: A finite state machine based optimization approach for data parallel image processing applications. In Proc. of the 17th International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2003), Nice, France, 2003.

[21] C. G. M. Snoek and M. Worring. Goalgle: A soccer video search engine. In Proc. International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, Baltimore, 2003, IEEE Press.

[22] C. G. M. Snoek and M. Worring. Time interval based modeling and classification of events in soccer video. In Proc. 9th Annual Conference of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI), Heijen, The Netherlands, 2003.

[23] C. G. M. Snoek and M. Worring. Time interval maximum entropy based event indexing in soccer video. In International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, Baltimore, 2003, IEEE Press.

[24] J. van de Weijer, Th. Gevers, and J. M. Geusebroek. Color edge detection by photometric quasi-invariants. In Proc. 9th Int. Conf. Comput. Vision, volume 2, pages 1520-1525, 2003, IEEE Press.

[25] R. v.d. Boomgaard and J. v.d. Weijer. Linear and robust estimation of local image structure. In L.D. Griffin and M. Lillholm, editors, Scale-Space Methods in Computer Vision, 4th International Conference Scale-Space 2003, volume 2695, Lecture Notes in Computer Science,. Springer Verlag, 2003.

[26] J. Vendrig, M. Worring, and A.W.M. Smeulders. Components and systems for interactive video indexing. In International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, Baltimore, 2003, IEEE Press.

[27] M. Worring, G.P. Nguyen, L. Hollink, J.C. van Gemert, and D.C. Koelma. Interactive search using indexing, filtering, browsing and ranking. In Proceedings of TRECVID, 2003.

Other products

J.M. Geusebroek, M.A. Hoang, J. van Gemert, M. Worring: IRBS: Image Retrieval in Biomedical Science. A prototype system has been built for accessing a large archive of images in a biomedical journal based on genre classification of image content and on concepts derived from the caption of the image.

Mediamill: News Indexing. A fully automatic system has been built which analyzes news broadcasts and makes it accessible by names of persons, topics derived from teletekst, and specific events e.g. interviews.

M. Navarro, J. Baan, D. Koelma, J. Vendrig, T.V. Pham, M. Worring: Video Browser. A tool for browsing videos based on shots, scenes, faces, and camera operations.

L. Todoran, M. Worring: Document Ground Truthing and evaluation tool. A tool has been built for assisting users in ground truthing scanned color documents based on layout and logical information. It has been used to create the UvA color document dataset. Tools for evaluating algorithms with respect to the ground truth have been developed as well. Documents and tools will be made available to the research community.

A. Anjewierden, R. de Hoog, S. Kabel, F. Verster, B. Wielinga, M. Worring: IMAT: Integrating Manuals and Training. A system has been built (in conjunction with Social Informatics) that decomposes a technical manual in paper or pdf format consisting of text and graphics into a set of components with structured annotations allowing for repurposing of the content.

Th. Gevers, A.W.M. Smeulders: ZOMAX, A General Purpose Image Processing and Retrieval System for the World Wide Web. The system provides an interactive image processing module and an image search engine, called PicToSeek, for searching images on the web. http://www.science.uva.nl/research/isis/zomax.html

J. Vendrig, M. Worring and A.W.M. Smeulders, Filter image browsing on the World Wide Web, An implementation of Filter Image Browsing, a method for interactive image retrieval in large image databases. The demo contains a database of 10,000 images from the World Wide Web. http://carol.science.uva.nl/~vendrig/imageretro

D. Koelma and E. Poll: Horus: a vision library based on patterns.http://www.science.uva.nl/ ~ koelma/isis/projects/horus.html

C.G.M. Snoek and M. Worring, Goalgle: A Soccer Video Search Engine, Goalgle is a prototype search engine for soccer video. A fully automatic soccer video analysis system has been developed which analyzes soccer broadcasts and makes them accessible by names of players, teams, and highlight events.  http://www.goalgle.com

J. Vendrig and M. Worring, Video feature visualization tool Viddex. An implementation of integrated visualization by way of video streams, key frames and dual slice summaries, with an option for visual feature value

back-projection. Demos have been presented for TV series Friends and feature film Witness.

5. Intelligent Autonomous Systems

Five key publications

[1] J. Verbeek, N. Vlassis, and B. Kröse. Efficient greedy learning of Gaussian mixture models. Neural Computation, 15(2):469-485, 2003.

[2] R. Bunschoten and B. Kröse. Robust scene reconstruction from an omnidirectional vision system. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 19(2):351-357, 2003.

[3] J. Verbeek, S. Roweis, and N. Vlassis. Non-linear CCA and PCA by Alignment of Local Models. In S. Thrun and L. Saul, editors, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16. MIT Press, 2003. In print.

[4] D. Fontijne and L. Dorst. Modelling 3d Euclidean geometry. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 23(2):68-78, March/April 2003.

[5] S. ten Hagen and B. Kröse. Neural Q-learning. Neural Computing & Applications, 12(2):81- 88, Nov. 2003. ISSN: 0941-0643 (Paper) 1433-3058 (Online).

Dissertations

[1] J. Portegies Zwart. Aircraft Recognition from Features Extracted from Measured and Simulated Radar Range Profiles. PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, October 2003.

[2] R. Bunschoten. Mapping and Localization from a Panoramic Vision Sensor. PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, November 2003.

Scientific publications [1] B. Bakker, V. Zhumatiy, G. Gruener, and J. Schmidhuber. A robot that reinforcement-learns to identify and memorize important previous observations. In C. Lee and J. Yuh, editors, Proc.IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pages 430-435, Las Vegas, USA, Oct. 2003. IEEE Press.

[2] R. Bunschoten and B. Kröse. Robust scene reconstruction from an omnidirectional vision system. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 19(2):351-357, 2003.

[3] R. Bunschoten and B. Kröse. Visual odometry from an omnidirectional vision system. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation ICRA'03, pages 577-583, Taipei, Taiwan, 2003. ISBN 0-7803-7737-0.

[4] L. Dorst and N. Ahmed. Reduction of placement problems using Minkowski decomposition. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics B, 33(1):133-137, 2003.

[5] D. Fontijne and L. Dorst. Modelling 3d Euclidean geometry. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 23(2):68-78, March/April 2003.

[6] J. R. Kok, M. T. Spaan, and N. Vlassis. Multi-robot decision making using coordination graphs. In A. de Almeida and U. Nunes, editors, Proceedings of the 11th International Con- ference on Advanced Robotics, ICAR'03, pages 1124-1129, Coimbra, Portugal, June 30-July 3 2003. IEEE Press. ISBN 972-96889-9-0.

[7] J. R. Kok and N. Vlassis. Distributed decision making of robotic agents. In S. Vassiliadis, L. Florack, J. Heijnsdijk, and A. van der Steen, editors, Proc. 8th Ann. Conf. of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI), pages 318-325, Heijen, The Netherlands, June 2003. ASCI.

[8] J. R. Kok, N. Vlassis, and F. C. Groen. UvA Trilearn 2003 team description. In D. Polani, B. Browning, A. Bonarini, and K. Yoshida, editors, Proceedings CD RoboCup 2003, Padua, Italy, July 2003. Springer-Verlag. Proceeedings on CD-ROM.

[9] B. Kröse, J. Porta, K. Crucq, A. van Breemen, M. Nuttin, and E. Demeester. Lino, the user- interface robot. In E. Aarts, R. Collier, E. van Loenen, and B. Ruyter, editors, Proceedings of the First European Symposium on Ambience Intelligence (EUSAI), pages 264-274, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Nov. 2003. Springer. ISBN 3-540-20418-0.

[10] A. Likas, N. Vlassis, and J. Verbeek. The global k-means clustering algorithm. Pattern Recognition, 36(2):451-461, 2003.

[11] J. Porta and B. Kröse. Vision-based localization for mobile platforms. In E. Aarts, R. Collier, E. van Loenen, and B. Ruyter, editors, Proceedings of the First European Symposium on Ambience Intelligence (EUSAI), pages 208-219, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Nov. 2003. Springer. ISBN 3-540-20418-0.

[12] J. Porta, J. Verbeek, and B. Kröse. Enhancing appearance-based robot localization using sparse disparity maps. In C. Lee and J. Yuh, editors, Proc.IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pages 980-985, Las Vegas, USA, Oct. 2003. IEEE Press. ISBN 0-7803-7861-X.

[13] J. M. Porta and B. Kröse. On the use of disparity maps for robust robot localization under different illumination conditions. In A. de Almeida and U. Nunes, editors, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Advanced Robotics, ICAR'03, pages 124-129, Coimbra, Portugal, June 30-July 3 2003. IEEE Press. ISBN 972-96889-9-0.

[14] J. M. Porta, B. Terwijn, and B. Kröse. Efficient entropy-based action selection for appearance-based robot localization. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation ICRA'03, pages 2842-2847, Taipei, Taiwan, 2003. ISBN 0-7803-7737-0.

[15] J. M. Porta, F. Thomas, L. Ros, and C. Torras. A branch-and-prune algorithm for solving systems of distance constraints. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA'03, pages 342-348, Taipei, Taiwan, 2003. ISBN 0-7803-7737-0.

[16] S. ten Hagen. Concepts and navigation targets. In T. Heskes, P. Lucas, L. Vuurpijl, and W. Wiegerinck, editors, Proceedings of the 15th Dutch-Belgian Artificial Intelligence Conference, BNAIC'03, pages 147-154, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Oct. 2003. Elsevier.

[17] S. ten Hagen and B. Kröse. Learning to navigate using a lazy map. In A. de Almeida and U. Nunes, editors, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Advanced Robotics, ICAR'03, pages 299-304, Coimbra, Portugal, June 30-July 3 2003. IEEE Press. ISBN 972- 96889-9-0.

[18] S. ten Hagen and B. Kröse. Neural Q-learning. Neural Computing & Applications, 12(2):81- 88, Nov. 2003. ISSN: 0941-0643 (Paper) 1433-3058 (Online).

[19] S. ten Hagen, M. van Someren, and V. Hollink. Exploration/exploitation in adaptive rec- ommender systems. In A. B"urnberger and B. Gabrys, editors, Proceedings of the European Symposium on Intelligent Technologies, Hybrid Systems and their implementation on Smart Adaptive Systems, pages 189-196, Oulu, Finland, 2003. EUNITE. ISBN 3-86130-194-6.

[20] S. H. ten Hagen. Good features to map. In C. Lee and J. Yuh, editors, Proc.IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pages 1512-1517, Las Vegas, USA, Oct. 2003. IEEE Press. ISBN 0-7803-7861-X.

[21] A. van Breemen, K. Crucq, B. Kröse, M. Nuttin, J. Porta, and E. Demeester. A user-interface robot for ambient intelligent environments. In P. Fiorini, editor, Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Advances in Service Robotics, ASER'03, pages 132-139, Bardolino, Italy, 2003. Fraunhofer IRB Verlag.

[22] J. van den Heuvel, J. Kleijweg, W. van der Mark, C. Lievers, and L. Kester. Obstacle detection for people movers using vision and radar. In Proceedings 10th World Conference on Intelligent Transport Systems and Services, Madrid, Spain, 16-20 November 2003. ERTICO ITS Europe. Proceeedings on CD-ROM: 7345 Madrid 2003.

[23] W. van der Mark, J. van den Heuvel, E. den Breejen, and F. Groen. Camera based motion tracking for data fusion in a landmine detection system. In R. Zhoughi, editor, Proceedings of IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference, IMTC 2003, pages 817-822, Vail, Colorado, USA, 20-22 May 2003. IEEE Press. ISBN: 0-7803-7705-2.

[24] W. van der Mark, J. van den Heuvel, E. den Breejen, and F. Groen. Camera-based platform and sensor motion tracking for data fusion in a landmine detection system. In G. Gerhart, C. Shoemaker, and D. Gace, editors, Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology V, Proceedings of SPIE, pages 380-389, Orlando, Florida, USA, 22-23 April 2003. SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering. ISSN: 0277-786X, ISBN: 0-8194-4942-3.

[25] M. van Someren, V. Hollink, and S. ten Hagen. Greedy recommending is not always optimal. In B. Berendt, A. Hotho, D. Mladenic, M. van Someren, M. Spiliopoulou, and G. Stumme, editors, Proc. of the 1st European Web Mining Forum (EWMF), pages 93-101, Rudiger Boskovic Institute, Cavtat-Dubrovnik, Croatia, Sept. 2003. ISBN 953-6690-31-4.

[26] J. Verbeek, S. Roweis, and N. Vlassis. Non-linear CCA and PCA by Alignment of Local Models. In S. Thrun and L. Saul, editors, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16. MIT Press, 2003. In print.

[27] J. Verbeek, N. Vlassis, and B. Kröse. Efficient greedy learning of Gaussian mixture models. Neural Computation, 15(2):469-485, 2003.

[28] J. Verbeek, N. Vlassis, and B. Kröse. Non-linear feature extraction by the coordination of mixture models. In S. Vassiliadis, L. Florack, J. Heijnsdijk, and A. van der Steen, editors, Proc. 8th Ann. Conf. of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI), pages 287-293, Heijen, The Netherlands, June 2003. ASCI.

[29] J. Verbeek, N. Vlassis, and B. Kröse. Self-organization by optimizing free-energy. In M. Ver- leysen, editor, Proc. of European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, pages 125-130. D-side, Evere, Belgium, 2003.

[30] J. Verbeek, N. Vlassis, and J. Nunnink. A variational EM algorithm for large-scale mixture modeling. In S. Vassiliadis, L. Florack, J. Heijnsdijk, and A. van der Steen, editors, Proc. 8th Ann. Conf. of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI), pages 136-143, Heijen, The Netherlands, June 2003. ASCI.

[31] A. Versluis, B. Driessen, J. van Woerden, and B. Kröse. Enhancing the usability of the MANUS manipulator by using visual servoing. In Z. Bien and P. Chang, editors, Proceedings of International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics, ICORR 2003, pages 43-46, KAIST, Daejon, South Korea, 22-25 April 2003. IEEE Press.

[32] P. J. Withagen, F. C. Groen, and K. Schutte. EMswitch: a multi-hypothesis approach to EM background modelling. In W. Philips, editor, Proceedings of the Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems conference (ACIVS 2003), pages 199-206, Ghent, Belgium, Sept. 2003. Ghent University.

[33] W. Zajdel and B. Kröse. Approximate learning and inference for tracking with non- overlapping cameras. In M. Hamza, editor, Proc. of the IASTED Int. Conf. on Artificial Intelligence and Applications, pages 70-75. ACTA Press, Calgary, Canada, 2003.

[34] W. Zajdel and B. Kröse. Gaussian mixture model for multi-sensor tracking. In T. Heskes, P. Lucas, L. Vuurpijl, and W. Wiegerinck, editors, Proceedings of the 15th Dutch-Belgian Artificial Intelligence Conference, BNAIC'03, pages 371-378, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Oct. 2003. Elsevier. 3

Technical reports

[1] J. Portegies Zwart, R. van der Heiden, S. Gelsema, and F. Groen. Fast translation invariant classification of HRR range profiles in a zero phase representation. Technical Report IAS-UVA-03-01, Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Jan. 2003.

[2] J. Portegies Zwart, B. Kr"ose, and S. Gelsema. Aircraft classification from estimated models of radar scattering. Technical Report IAS-UVA-03-02, Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Jan. 2003.

[3] J. R. Kok and N. Vlassis. The pursuit domain package. Technical Report IAS-UVA-03-03, Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Aug. 2003.

Other products

Leo Dorst and D. Fontijne. 3D Euclidean Geometry through Conformal Geometric Algebra, at www.science.uva.nl/ga/tutorials/

Appendix 2 Cooperations and Supporting Institutions

1. Computational Informatics

We have intensified our international collaborations. Within the framework of a formal agreement between the University of Amsterdam and the Saint Petersburg State University, Russian Federation, a joint laboratory for computational science was established in Saint Petersburg. This lab works on problem solving environments and applications. We formally collaborate with CYFRONET, Cracow, Poland, through joint Ph.D. students in the field of monitoring and scheduling for scientific computing on the Grid. In the framework of a recently started NATO Science for Peace program we collaborate with institutes of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science in the field of biomedical diagnostic systems. Finally, a strong research cooperation is established with a number of USA based universities (Stanford University, Mississippi State University).Through the Virtual Lab project we strongly collaborate with the Computer Architecture and Parallel Systems group. The theoretical work on evolving CA is done in collaboration with the Algorithms and Complexity Theory group of the ILLC.

International:

Prof. A.V. Bogdanov, Dr. Y.E. Gorbachev and others, Institute for High Performance Computing and Information Systems, St.Petersburg, Russia;Prof M. Livny, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, USA;Prof J. Makino, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan;Dr. O. Santoso, Institute of Technology Bandung, Bandung, Indonesia;Dr. C. Bassarudin and Dr. B. Nazief, Computer Science, University of Indonesia, Depok - Jakarta, Indonesia;Prof P. Hut, Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, USA;Dr. P. Teuben, University of Maryland, USA;Dr. H. Zinnecker, AIP, Germany;Prof. S. McMillan, Drexel University, USA;Dr. R. Klessen, AIP, Germany;Dr. D. Pooley, MIT, Boston, USA;Dr. J. E. Kuebler, Department of Biology, California State University;Prof. Dr. D.J. Miller, Comparative Genomics Centre, James Cook University, Australia;Dr. M.J.H. van Oppen, Australian Institute of Marine Science, Townsville, Australia;Prof. Dr. W.E.G. Mueller, Abt. Angewandte Molekularbiologie, Universität Mainz, Germany;Dr. M.J.A. Vermeij, Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS); Rosenstiel School for Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) at the University of Miami/ NOAA Southeast Science Fisheries Center;Prof. R. van Woesik, Department Biological Sciences, Florida Institute of TechnologyDr. M. Bubak, Institute of Computer Science, AgH, Krakow, POLAND;Prof Dr. L.Hluchy, Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislawa, Slovakia;Dr. G. Videen, US Army Research Laboratory, Washington DC, USA;Dr. V. Maltsev, Siberian Branch of Academy of Science, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation; Dr. G. Kochneva, VECTOR institute, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation;Prof. Dr. A. Gruzdev, Insitute for Cytology and Genetics, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation;Prof. Dr. V. Loiko, Dr. V. Babenko, Stepanov Institute of Physics, Minsk, Belarus;

Prof. Dr. D. van Bockstaele, Antwerpen University Hospital and University of Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium;Prof. Dr. B. Chopard, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland; Prof. J. Bernsdorf, NEC Europe, C&C Research Laboratories, St. Augustin, Germany;Prof. Dr. M. Krafzyk, Institut fur Computeranwendungen im bauingenieurwesen, TUB, Braunschweig, Germany;Prof Dr. C. Taylor, Stanford, USA;Prof. Dr. D. Abramson, Monash University, Australia;Prof. Dr. A. Zomaya, University of Sydney, Australia;Prof. Dr. T. Adriaansen, Telecommunications & Industrial Physics, CSIRO, Australia;

National: Prof. Dr. Ir. H.E. Bal, Department of Computer Science, Free University, Amsterdam;Prof D. Frenkel, Dr. H. Volten, AMOLF, Amsterdam;Prof P. Iedema, Chemical Technology, University of Amsterdam;Dr. Bouten, Earth Sciences, University of Amsterdam;Prof E.P.J. van den Heuvel, Prof. Dr L.B.F.M. Waters, Prof. Dr. J. Hovenier, Astronomy Department, University of Amsterdam;Prof. Dr. J. van Leeuwen, Department of Animal Sciences & Wageningen Institute of Animal Sciences, Wageningen University;Dr. M. Muller, Institute of Animal Sciences, Wageningen University;Prof. Dr. H. van As, Laboratory of Biophysics, Wageningen University;Dr. R. van der Sman, Agricultural University Wageningen;Prof. Dr. R.P.M. Bak, NIOZ, Den Burg (Texel);Dr. G. Streekstra, Dr H. Venema, AMC-UvA, Amsterdam;Prof. R van Driel, SILS-UvA;Prof H.V. Westerhoff Microbial Physiology, Free University of Amsterdam;Dr. A.H. van Kampen AMC-UvA, Amsterdam;Prof P. Hemker, Drs J.G Blom, Prof. Dr. J. Verwer, Dr. M. Peletier (CWI Amsterdam)Dr. C. Boucher, AZU, University of Utrecht, Utrecht;Prof. Dr. H. Reiber, University of Leiden, Leiden; Prof. Dr. W. van der Zande, AMOLF, Amsterdam en KUN Nijmegen; Dr. D. Kandhai, TUD, Delft;

The Computational Informatics Group is supported by:Nato Science for Peace Program; European Union, 6th Framework Program; KNAW; NWO (NCF, FOM, NOVA, MPR); Hogeschool van Amsterdam; Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs ; Dutch Foundation for HPCN.

2. Advanced Computing Systems Engineering

Biology Department of UvA (NL); LogicaCMG Den Haag B.V. (NL); CSIN (Portugal); KPN research (NL); Ministry of Transportation (NL); FOM (NL); AMOLF (NL); CWI (NL); Nikhef (NL); SARA (NL); AMC (NL); Philips Nederlandse Bedrijven BV (NL); Sylogic BV (NL); Free University (NL); Technical University Delft (NL); Leiden University (NL); NBIC; TNO (NL); WCSF; Unilever Netherlands (NL); ATO (NL); Friesland Coberco Diary Foods (NL); IBM Netherlands (NL); FEI Electron Optics; Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences (UvA, NL); University of Nijmegen, Wageningen University, Zoological Museum (UvA, NL); ETI biodiversity Center (NL); Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (UvA, NL); Dutch Centre for Field Ornithology (NL); Association for Research on Flora and Fauna (NL); Dutch Butterfly Conservation (NL); Royal Netherlands Air force (NL); IBM Life Sciences (NL); Instituto de Desenvolvimiento de Novas Tecnologías, (Portugal); Roundrose Associates, Ltd (UK); Synkronix Incorporation, Ltd. (UK); SKILL Consejeros de Gestión, SL. (Spain); Cámara de

Comercio e Industria - Unidad de Promoción y Desarrollo de Navarra, SL.(Spain); CSIC (Spain); Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania (Greece); Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (UK); University of Reading (UK); The Natural History Museum (UK); University of Turku (Finland); OOEL (Austria); University of Kiel (Germany); VIM (Germany); University of Copenhagen (Denmark); IBM Life Sciences Solutions - La Gaude (France); IBM (USA), CERN (Swiss), University of Illinois at Chigago (USA), HP, Apple, Force10, Calient, GlimmerGlass.

The CAPS group is supported by:European Union; HPCN Foundation; Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat; NWO; STW/Progress; ICES/KIS (Bsik); IFIP; Philips Nederlandse Bedrijven BV; Senter

3. Programming Methods and Programming Environments

Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica; University of Utrecht; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Vanenburg Group; SERC; PinkRoccade; AtosOrigin; Software Improvement Group; Microsoft Research (GB)The group is supported by the Dutch National Science Council NWO.

4. Intelligent Sensory Information Systems

M.L. Kersten, Token 2000 research program committee, NWO, Member M.L. Kersten, Amsterdam New Media Association, Member of board M.L. Kersten, Executive board Data Distilleries B.V., Amsterdam, Co-founder and memberA. W. M. Smeulders, IOP Beeldverwerken, 1995 - 2004, member of the board A. W. M. Smeulders, Kenniscentrum MediaMil UvA-TNO, member of the non-executive board A. W. M. Smeulders, MultimediaN, Scientific Director A. W. M. Smeulders, Scientific advisory board of the Dutch Forensic Institute, Member A. W. M. Smeulders, Scientific advisory board of CWI, PNa4 on computer visionA .W. M. Smeulders, TODS cooperation Dutch Forensic Lab - UvA, AdvisorC. G. M. Snoek, visiting researcher at Informedia group, Carnegie Mellon University, April 23, 2003-October, 23, 2003.P. Werkhoven, the Steering Group of the research consortium MultimediaN, Member P. Werkhoven, the Research & Innovation Board of the Dutch Police, Member P. Werkhoven, the V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media, Board member P. Werkhoven, SURF Foundation, the higher education and research partnership organisation for network services and ICT, Board memberM. Worring, TODS cooperation Dutch Forensic Lab - UvA, responsible M. Worring, MediaMill, co-director

The ISIS group is supported by:ICES-KIS, IOP-BV, IOP-MMI, EU, NWO-GBE, NWO-STW, Dutch forensic Institute, TNO-TPD, TNO-FEL, TNO-LIFT, Océ, Philips CFT, Elsevier.

5. Intelligent Autonomous Systems

Scientific institutions:VU, Computer Science ASCI onderzoeksschool, especially Pattern Recognition, TUDelft; Stichting Neurale Netwerken (SNN); Science and Technology (AIST), Japan; Pattern Recognition Group, Imaging Science and Technology, Applied Sciences, TUDelft; SWI, University of Amsterdam KTH, Stockholm, Sweden; LAAS, Toulouse, France Frauenhofer Insitute IPA, Stuttgart, Germany EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland ITS, TUDelft; Caltech, USA; Korteweg de Vries Institute for

Mathematics (UvA); University of Waterloo, Canada; Arizona State University, USA; Cambridge University Engineering, GBR; CWI, Amsterdam; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; University of Maastricht (Institute for Knowledge and Agent Technology IKAT); University of Nijmegen (Institute for Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Information Technology NICI, Max Planck Institute and Department of Linguistics); University of Twente (Center for Telematics and Information Technology,CTIT).

Industry:TNO/FEL; TNO/TPD; Philips CFT; Philips Research: Sentient Machines Research (SMR); Shell; Unilever; KiQ; Noldus BV; Eagle Vision; Epictoid; Thales Nederland B.V.; 4Tec B.V.

The Intelligent Autonomous Systems group is supported by:Stichting Technische Wetenschappen (STW); NWO (ToKeN 2000); FEL-TNO; Ministry of Economic Affairs; Ministry of Education; DECIS lab.

Appendix 3 Other contributions

1. Computational Informatics

The group takes the lead in the organisation of several important international symposia and conferences. Foremost among these is the series of International Conferences on Computational Science. ICCS 2003 was simultaneously held in St. Petersburg and Melbourne; ICCS 2004 will be held in Cracow.

Editorial positions:

P.M.A. Sloot, FGCS International Journal of Computational Science , Editor in ChiefP.M.A. Sloot, Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2329 - 2331, 2003, Co-editorJaap A. Kaandorp, Virtual Medical Worlds, Member of the advisory board

International functions:

P.M.A. Sloot,Informatica Kamer Nederland, MemberNWO, Member working group on Biomolecular InformaticsNWO, Member working group on Computational ScienceFoundation of Beta Companies, Amsterdam, AdvisorNIP: Nederlands Instituut in St. Peterburg, Russia, Scientific advisorRussian Academy of Sciences, AdvisorAgH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland, Scientific advisorScientific Board Lorentz Center, Univ. LeidenScientific advisor European HealthGrid SocietyJ.A. Kaandorp:NWO, Member BCI (“open competitie informatica”) committeeMember Scientific committee ACRI 2004, Sixth International conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, October 25th-28, 2004, University of Amsterdam, Science Park AmsterdamChair Symposium 1st Internationaal symposium on networks in bio-informatics, March 22 - 23, 2004, University of Amsterdam, Science Park AmsterdamChair workshop on Modelling morphogenesis and pattern formation in biology in the International Conference on Computational Science June 2003 (ICCS 2003), Melbourne, Australia External examiner PhD thesis Dr. R. Pattisina Thesis Title: Modèles stochastiques de croissance surfacique: application à la simulation des stromatolithes, Universite Neufchatel, Switzerland, March 2003.E.V. Zudilova,Chair workshop on “Scientific Visualization and Human-Machine Interaction in a Problem Solving Environment” in the International Conference on Computational Science June 2003 (ICCS 2003), Melbourne, Australia A.G. Hoekstra,Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI), Member of the Scientific Advisory Board

Scientific events organised:

P.M.A. SlootOverall Chair of the International Conference on Computational Science ICCS 2003, Saint Petersburg and Melbourne, 2003

Overall Chair of the International Conference on Computational Science ICCS 2004, Krakow, 2004A.G. HoekstraChair Workshop on Computational Science of Lattice Boltzmann Modelling, held during the International Conference on Computational Science ICCS 2003, Saint Petersburg, 2003G.D. van AlbadaWorkshop Chair of the International Conference on Computational Science ICCS 2004, Krakow, 2004

Invited Lectures:

P.M.A. Sloot:15-18 Jan 2003 Lyon; HealthGrid Conference : "A distributed medical support system for drug therapy of HIV infection"20 jan Amsterdam AMC lezing: "Computational Heamodynamics"29-30 jan: Brussels; Workshop "GRIDS for Complex Problem Solving" Brussels, 29-30 January 2003 "Complex Problems on Complex Grids"09-15 Feb: Santiago de Compostella; Across Grid conference: "Grid Problem Solving Environments for Bio-Medicine"05-09 Mrt: Rome; SSA Meeting Virtual Cell: "Spatio-temporal patterns dynamic in Cells" 04-04 Apr: Krakow University AgH: Guest Lectures on Modelling and Simulation21 May: University of Geneve: Special Interest Meeting on Cellular Automata: "Propagation of Information in 1D Automata"16-19 June: Albufera Portugal: ESF Conference on Problem Solving Environments: "An interactive biomedical PSE"15 August: Dresden Germany: Zentrum fuer Hochleistungsrechnen; "High performance on low power grids"29 Sept: Heidelberg Germany: Datagrid Conference: "BioGrid: Virtual Vascular Reconstruction"03- November: St. Petersburg University: Smolny Lecture on Computing: "Architectures for Interactive Grids"12- November: St. Petersburg State University: Health and Biophysics centre: "Interactive Bloodflow Simulation"15- November: Amsterdam Alumni Lezing: "Opereren in Virtual Reality: Van koude voeten to Ludwig Boltzmann: een oefening in multidisciplinair onderzoek."11 December: Amsterdam; Symposium Inauguratie Nederlands Gridforum: "Interactive Problem Solving on the Grid: A Biomedical Experiment"A.G. Hoekstra:Mesoscopic Simulations of Blood Flow, Workshop Evaluation of coronary stenosis severity in the cahterisation room, theory and practice”, VII EFOMP Congress, medical physics and engineering 2003, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.A.G. Hoekstra, Computational Hemodynamics with the Lattice Boltzmann Method, 12th international conference on Discrete Simulation of Fluid Dynamics, 25-29 August, Beirut, Lebanon, 2003.J.A. Kaandorp:June 2003 meeting on modelling the genetic regulation of growth and form of scleractinians at the James Cook University, Townsville, Australia

Program committee member:

P.M.A. Sloot:PACT 2003ParCo 2003PPAM 2003G.D. van AlbadaInternational Conference on Computational Science 2003

A.G. Hoekstra,International Conference on Computational Science 2003J.A. Kaandorp,IASTED International Conference Biomedical Engineering BioMED 2003 June 25-27, 2003 Salzburg, Austria BioMED 2004, 2004 Salzburg, AustriaE.V. ZudilovaInternational Conference on Computational Science 2003

2. Advanced Computing Systems Engineering

L.O. Hertzberger is a scientific adviser at Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven

L.O. Hertzberger is a member of the management team of the ASCI school

Editorial position: L.O. Hertzberger, Future Generation Computer Systems, Editor in Chief

Program Committee member: L.O. Hertzberger, ICT Kennniscongres, Sept.

International function: L.O. Hertzberger, member of advisory committee, IPDPS conference.

Invited talk: L.O. Hertzberger, “e-Science in a Virtual Laboratory”, keynote, German Grid day, Oct.

Invited talk: L.O. Hertzberger, “Virtual laboratories”, PharmaGRID Retreat, UK

Steering Committee Member: H. Afsarmanesh, 4th IFIP Working Conference on Infrastructures for Industrial Virtual Enterprises (PRO-VE’03), Lugano, Switzerland, 29-31 Oct 2003.

Program Committee Member: H. Afsarmanesh, 4th IFIP Working Conference on Infrastructures for Industrial Virtual Enterprises (PRO-VE’03), Lugano, Switzerland, 29-31 Oct 2003.

Session Chair: H. Afsarmanesh , 4th IFIP Working Conference on Infrastructures for Industrial Virtual Enterprises (PRO-VE’03), Lugano, Switzerland, 29-31 Oct 2003.

Program Committee Member: H. Afsarmanesh, DEXA 2003 - 14th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, Prague, Czech Republic, 1-5 Sep 2003.

Program Committee Member: H. Afsarmanesh, DEXA 2003 - Third International Workshop on Web Based Collaboration, Prague, Czech Republic, 1-5 Sep 2003.

Program Committee Member: H. Afsarmanesh, 1st International Conference on Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems, Prague, Czech Republic, 1-5 Sep 2003.

Editorial Position: H. Afsarmanesh, International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organizations (IJNVO), ISSN 1470-9503.

Editorial Position: H. Afsarmanesh, International Journal of Information Technology and Management (IJITM), ISSN 1461-4111.

Editorial Position: H. Afsarmanesh, Journal of Evolutionary Computation, currently published in Italian (Computazione Evolutiva).

Editorial Position: H. Afsarmanesh, in L.M. Camarinha-Matos and H. Afsarmanesh (Editors). Processes and foundations for virtual organizations. Kluwer Academic Publishers, ISBN 1-4020-7638-X, Oct 2003.

Editorial Position: H. Afsarmanesh, in L. M. Camarinha-Matos and H. Afsarmanesh (Editors). International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organizations (Inderscience), Special issue on Brokerage and contract negotiation, Vol. 2, No. 1, Aug 2003

International function: C. de Laat is Grid Forum Steering Group member.

International function: C. de Laat is chairing the gridforum.nl consortium

Scientific event: C. de Laat, inaugural meeting of the gridforum.nl consortium, Dec., Amsterdam

Invited talk: C. de Laat, “GridForum.nl”, GridForum.nl inaugural symposium, Amsterdam, Dec. Amsterdam

Invited talk: C. de Laat, UKLight Open Meeting, Manchester (UK): "International Perspective: Facilities supporting research and development with LightPaths", Nov.

Invited talk: C. de Laat, University of Michigan & MERIT, Ann Arbor (MI): "The Lambda Grid",. Oct.

Invited talk: C. de Laat, ICT-Kenniscongres, Den Haag (NL): “Lambda Networking for Grid Applications", Sept.

Invited talk: C. de Laat, Lambda Workshop, Reijkjavik (IS): "3th Lambda Workshop", Aug.

Invited talk: C. de Laat, e-Science briefing event, Amsterdam: "Optical Networking", July

Invited talk: C. de Laat, Panel on IGrid2002 at GGF8 plenary, Seattle (USA): "Optical Networking & Experiences at iGRID2002", June

Invited talk: C. de Laat, SURFnet expertise seminar, Amsterdam (NL): "High speed networking for Grid Applications", June

Invited talk: C. de Laat, ISOC, ledenvergadering, Amsterdam (NL): "High speed networking for Grid Applications", June

Invited talk: C. de Laat, ASCI conference, Heijen (NL): "High speed networking for Grid Applications", June

Invited talk: C. de Laat, eVLBI Workshop, JIVE/ASTRON, Dwingeloo (NL): "High speed networking for Grid Applications", May

Invited talk: C. de Laat, SLAC, Ca: "The Rationale of the Current Optical Networking Initiatives", March

Invited talk: C. de Laat, Global Grid Forum 7 meeting, Tokyo, Jp: "GGF NOMCOM process", March

Invited talk: C. de Laat, Global Grid Forum 7 meeting, Tokyo, Jp: "Working and research group chairs training", March

Invited talk: C. de Laat, NTT, Tokyo, Jp: "Optical Networking / Experiences @ iGrid2002", March

Invited talk: C. de Laat, OptIPuter-workshop, San Diego, Ca: "IRTF-AAAARCH research group", Feb

Invited talk: C. de Laat, ON-Vector Photonics workshop, San Diego, Ca: "Optical Networking / Experiences @ iGrid2002", Feb

A. Visser is core member of the DECIS Lab, which is a collaboration to combine the knowledge, insight and capabilities of the partners in the area of distributed and intelligent decision support systems and related technologies.

Scientific event: A. Visser, German Open RoboCupRescue Simulation, Paderborn, Germany.

Invited speaker: A. Belloum, ICT2003, ICT kennis-congress, Den Haag, sept. 2003 Scientific event: A.D. Pimentel, Int. workshop on Systems, Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation, Samos, Greece, July

Scientific event: A.D. Pimentel, one-day workshop on system-level design tools at Synopsys, Aachen, Germany

International function: A.D. Pimentel, Advanced School for Computing and Imaging, member of the Educational Advisory Board.

Program committee member: A. D. Pimentel, Int. workshop on Systems, Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation, Program Committee Member, July, Samos, Greece

Invited speaker: A.D. Pimentel, “Sesame: Opening Perspectives for Efficient Design Space Exploration of Embedded System Architectures”, ACE Compiler Experts, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

3. Programming Methods and Programming Environments

Managing editor: J.A. Bergstra, Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming.

Managing editor: J.A. Bergstra, Science of Computer Programming.

Advisory editor: J.A. Bergstra, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic.

Editorial assistent: I. Bethke, Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming.

Editor: P. Klint, IEE Proceedings- Software.

Editor: P. Klint, Science of Computer Programming.

Editor: A. Ponse, Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming.

Program committee member: P. Klint, Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD 2003), PC member, March 17-21, 2003, Boston, USA

Program committee member: P. Klint, IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM03), September 22--26, 2003, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Program committee member: P. Klint, ACM SIGPLAN 2003 Workshop on Interpreters, Virtual Machines and Emulators (IVME03), June 12, 2003, San Diego, California, USA

Program committee member: P. Klint, Eclipse Technology Exchange (eTX03), Octobre 27, 2003, Anaheim, California, USA

Program committee member: P. Klint, Workshop on Model Driven Architecture (MDA03) June 26-27, 2003, Twente, The Netherlands

Program committee member: P. Klint, Workshop on Language Definitions, Tools and Applications (LDTA03), April 6, 2003, Warsaw, Poland

International function: P. Klint, President European Association for Programming Languages and Systems (EAPLS).

International function: P. Klint, Member Steering Committee European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Programming (ETAPS).

International function: P. Klint, Member Conseil Scientifique INRIA.

International function: P. Klint, Member Scientific Directorate Schloss Dagstuhl.

National function: P. Klint, Member Adviescommissie Informatica ACI (NWO).

National function: P. Klint, Member Program Committee Jacquard (6 year NWO programme for stimulating software engineering research).

National function: P. Klint, Member IPN (Informatica Platform Nederland).

National function: P. Klint, Member Program Board Lorentz Center, Leiden.

Award: P. Klint, Eclipse Innovation Award, IBM, January 2003.

4. Intelligent Sensory Information Systems

Editorships

M.L. Kersten: The VLDB Journal

A.W.M. Smeulders: IEEE Transactions on Multimedia A.W.M. Smeulders: Int. Journ. Computer VisionA.W.M. Smeulders, T. Huang, Th. Gevers: Int Journ Computer Vision, special issue on Content-based image retrieval, 2004

N. Sebe, M. S. Lew, A.W.M. Smeulders: Computer Vision and Image Understanding, special issue on Video Retrieval and Summarization, 2003

Invited speaker

R. van den Boomgaard: The local structure of images, scale-space research in Amsterdam, ASCI 2003, Heijen

Th. Gevers: Content-based Image Retrieval in Perspective, Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval in Business Applications, 2003, Darmstadt, Germany

M.L. Kersten: Managing your personal data and informative query answers, The Lowell Database Research Self-assessment meeting, May 4-6, 2003 Lowell, USA M.L. Kersten: Organic Database Systems to support an Ambient World, The Lowell Database Research Self-assessment meeting, May 4-6, 2003 Lowell, USA

A. W. M. Smeulders: Multimedia everywhere, Media Plaza, 2003, Utrecht A. W. M. Smeulders: Content based image retrieval, Spanish Association on Multimedia, 2003 , Barcelona A. W. M. Smeulders: Content based image retrieval, Nat Lab, 2003, Eindhoven A. W. M. Smeulders: Video analysis, Spanish Association on Multimedia, 2003, Barcelona A. W. M. Smeulders: MultimediaN, ICT Kenniscongres, 2003, Den Haag A. W. M. Smeulders with S. Ghebreab and J.M Geusebroek: Segmentation at ISIS, Yale University, 2003, USA A. W. M. Smeulders with S. Ghebreab and J.M Geusebroek: Content based image retrieval, Carnegie Mellon University, 2003, USA

P. Werkhoven: Multimedia door een sleutelgat, Workshop "Toepassing door Toegang", 30 Jan., 2003, Utrecht P. Werkhoven: Experience Machines, DECIS colloquium serie, 22 March, 2003, Delft P. Werkhoven: Navigation in Virtual Reality, Seminar Microgravity, 23 June, 2003, Rotterdam P. Werkhoven: Van Cyborgs tot kunst, ICT Kenniscongres, 4 Sept., 2003, Den Haag P. Werkhoven: Cooperation with Industry and Science, E-culture Fair, 24 Oct., 2003, Amsterdam

M. Worring: From Image to Video: possibilities and Challenges., Vision Solutions 2003, Nijmegen, The Netherlands M. Worring: Personalized Multimedia Information., ICT-Kenniscongres 2003, The Hague, The Netherlands M. Worring: Goalgle: a search engine for soccer games., Day of the Document 2003, Ede, The Netherlands

Program committees

A. Bagdanov: 3rd Int. Workshop on Document Layout Interpretation and its applications, 2003, Edinburgh, UK, chair

R. van den Boomgaard: Scale Space, 2003, Isle of Skye, Scotland, UK, member

Th. Gevers: ICCV, 2003, Nice, France, member Th. Gevers: ICIP, 2003, Barcelona, Spain, member Th. Gevers: IEEE Workshop on CPMCV (associated with ICCV), 2003, Nice, France, member Th. Gevers: SPIE Electronic Imaging, Conference on Internet Imaging, 2003, Santa Clara, USA, member Th. Gevers: International Conference on Visual Information, Visual03 , 2003, Florida, USA, member Th. Gevers: ACM SIGMM International Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval , 2003, Berkeley, USA, member

J. M. Geusebroek: ICCV, 2003, Nice, France, member J. M. Geusebroek: Scale Space, 2003, Isle of Skye, Scotland, UK, member J. M. Geusebroek: Workshop on Texture Analysis and Synthesis, Texture'03, 2003, Nice, France, member

M.L. Kersten: ACM SIGMOD, 2003, San Diego, member M.L. Kersten: ICDE, 2003, Bangalore, India, member

M.L. Kersten: CIDR, 2003, Asilomar, USA, member M.L. Kersten: IDEAS, 2003, Hong Kong, member M.L. Kersten: WISE, 2003, Rome, member M.L. Kersten: VLDB, 2003, Berlin, European coordinator M.L. Kersten: invitational panel on "Organic Databases", ICDE, Bangalore, India, organizer, M.L. Kersten: invitational panel on "A Database Striptease; or how to manage your personal data", VLDB, Berlin, organizer.

N. Sebe: CIVR, Urbana-Champaign, USA, 2003, co-program chair N. Sebe: 5th ACM SIGMM Inter. Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR'03), in conjunction with ACM Multimedia, 2003, Berkeley, USA, chair N. Sebe: ICME, 2003, Baltimore, USA, member N. Sebe: Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns Conference, CAIP, Groningen, The Netherlands, 2003, member

A. W. M. Smeulders: CIVR, 2003, Urbana-Champaign, USA, member A. W. M. Smeulders: RIOA, 2003, Paris, member A. W. M. Smeulders: CBMI, 2003, Rennes, member A. W. M. Smeulders: ICIP, 2003, Barcelona, member A. W. M. Smeulders: MLDM, 2003, Leipzig, member A. W. M. Smeulders: ibPRIA, 2003, Barcelona, member A. W. M. Smeulders: ICME, 2003, Baltimore, USA, member A. W. M. Smeulders: ICCV, 2003, Nice, France, member A. W. M. Smeulders: Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns Conference, CAIP, Groningen, The Netherlands, 2003, member

P. Werkhoven: ICT Kenniscongres, 2003, The Hague, member

M. Worring: ICME, 2003, Baltimore, USA, member M. Worring: SPIE: Document Recognition and Retrieval X, 2003, Santa Clara, USA, member M. Worring: Second International Workshop on Web Document Analysis, 2003, Edinburgh, UK, member M. Worring: Document Layout Interpretation and its Applications, 2003, Edinburgh, UK, member

Awards

J. M. Geusebroek: VENI innovational research grant, NWO, 2003

Official function in International Organization

A. Bagdanov, IAPR Meetings and Conferences Committee, Member

R. van den Boomgaard, program board of Scale-Space conference, Member

J. M. Geusebroek, Kascommissie NVPHBV, Member

M.L. Kersten, Scientific Advisory Board Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Member M.L. Kersten, Scientific Advisory Board GMD/IPSI, Darmstadt, Germany, Member M.L. Kersten, FET-OPEN, EU FP-6, Member M.L. Kersten, VLDB Endowment, board of trustees, Member

N. Sebe, the Multimedia Information Retrieval research area section of the ACM SIGMM, Editor

A. W. M. Smeulders: Hong Kong science review board, member.

A. W. M. Smeulders: IAPR board, member.A. W. M. Smeulders: ICME program board, member.A. W. M. Smeulders, European Networks of Excellence: DELOS for digital libraries (with a special assignment in the EU - NSF task force on cultural heritage), Member A. W. M. Smeulders, European Networks of Excellence: ECVISION for computer vision; Muscle for Multimedia understanding, Member A. W. M. Smeulders, European Networks of Excellence: Muscle for Multimedia understanding, Member A. W. M. Smeulders, Select committee: S. K. Fu distinguished career award, IAPR, 2001 - 2007, Member

P. Werkhoven, the European IST Prize evaluation committee, 2002 and 2003, Member

5. Intelligent Autonomous Systems

IAS is one of the partners of the Centre of Excellence "Intelligent Autonomous Systems" a collaboration between the University of Amsterdam and TNO.

IAS is one of the partners of the DECIS lab, a Dutch collaboration om intelligent Systems between Thales, TUD, UvA en TNO.

IAS actively participates in EURON, the European Network of Excellence in robotics. Two staff members of the group are directly involved in EURON activities related to publications and the electronic newsletter.

In cooperation with Utrecht University, an ASCI course on Computational Geometry was given by L. Dorst.

In collaboration with the Foundation for Neural Networks we organized a course on advanced issues in Neurocomputing.

Editorial position: F.C.A. Groen, Book series: Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR)

Editorial position: N. Vlassis, EURON newsletter, European Robotics Network of Excellence.

International function: F.C.A. Groen, International Robocup Federation, trustee

International function: F.C.A. Groen, EURON Adcom, key-area co-chair publications

International function: F.C.A. Groen, technical committee TC-20 Instrumentation and measurement society, chair

International function: B.J.A. Kröse, IEEE TC on Service Robots.

Program committee: F.C.A.Groen, ICRA 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003 (ICRA'03), Sept. 14-19, Taipei, Taiwan.

Program committee: F.C.A.Groen, ICAR’03, Organizer special session on "Multi-Robots in Dynamic Environments", June30- July 3 2003, Coimbra, Portugal.

Program committee: B.J.A. Kröse, BNAIC’03, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 2003.

Program committee: B.J.A. Kröse, IROS’03, Las Vegas, 2003.

Program committee: B.J.A. Kröse, 4th International Conference on Field an Service Robotics (FSR), 2003.

Program committee: B.J.A. Kröse, 3rd International Conference on Computer Vision Systems ICVS'03, 2003.

Program committee: N. Vlassis, BNAIC’03, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 2003.

Program committee: A. Visser, GermanOpen Rescue Simulation, Paderborn, Germany, 2003

Scientific event: B. Kappen, R. Duin, B. Kröse, Lerende Oplossingen, Nijmegen NL, 22 October, 2003.

Scientific event: J. Lasenby, C. Doran, L. Dorst, IMA conference on Geometric Algebra, Cambridge UK, September 5-6, 2002

Invited speaker: F.C.A.Groen : Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Informatica Colloquium Philips Nat.Lab., 25 September 2002

Invited speaker: F.C.A.Groen : Robot Soccer : Game or Science, Confenrinta Nationala de Robotica ,Craiova, Romania, 18 october 2002

Invited speaker: F.C.A. Groen: Van RoboCop naar RoboCup, Studium Generale University of Twente.

Invited speaker: L. Dorst, Tutorials in geometric algebra: Philips NatLab (March 2003), Eidnhoven, NL, Game Developers Conference (March 2003), San Diego, USA, and ITMga (November 2003), Kyoto, Japan.

Invited speaker: L.Dorst, Exploring the Conformal Model of 3D Euclidean Geometry, November 2003, ITMga 2003, Kyoto, Japan.