Speakers' corner SIREN 2009

Mark Overmars (UU)
Biography	Mark Overmars is full professor at Utrecht University. He heads the research group on Games and Virtual Worlds. He is also director of the FES project GATE: Game Research for Training and Entertainment; see http://gate.gameresearch.nl. His research interests include game technology with an emphasis on path planning, crowd simulation, animation, and manipulation. His focus here lies both on fundamental algorithms research and on experimental research and practical applications. Mark is also the creator of Game Maker, a program with which everybody can create computer games and he is co-founder and co-owner of the company YoYo Games that offers a YouTube-like environment for computer games.
Title	Motion in games
Abstract	Computer games play an increasingly important role in our lives. They influence the way we entertain, learn, meet, communicate, work, and travel. And we are only at the beginning. Future game technology will enable new and exciting possibilities of (serious and entertainment) games. Computer games pose many challenging research questions in many different fields. Often such research questions are multi-disciplinary. For example, when we want to simulate crowds of pedestrians in a virtual city we need knowledge from psychology (what social patterns happen between people), traffic studies (how fast do pedestrians cross roads), human physiology (how do we move our body when e.g. carrying things), and from computer science (how do we efficiently compute and visualize such behaviour). And of course art also plays an important role too. In this presentation I will first give an overview of a number of different areas in computer science that play a crucial role in computer games, and indicate some of the current trends and developments. Next I will concentrate on the research done at Utrecht University on motion in games. Motion plays a crucial role in games. Virtual characters navigate through the game world, they manipulate objects, the camera moves around, and people nowadays use their body motion to steer game characters. I will indicate some of the challenges we face when trying to solve such problems and show some recent results on path planning, crowd simulation, and automatically generated animations.
Wil van der Aalst (TU/e)
Biography	Prof.dr.ir. Wil van der Aalst is a full professor of Information Systems at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e) and an adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). His research interests include workflow management, process mining, Petri nets, business process management, process modeling, and process analysis. Wil van der Aalst has published more than 110 journal papers, 15 books, 225 refereed conference/workshop publications, and 30 book chapters. Many of his papers are highly cited (he has an H-index of more than 62 according to Google Scholar, making him the Dutch computer scientist with the highest H-index) and his ideas have influenced researchers, software developers, and standardization committees working on process support.   More info: - Video on ICTregie Award Nomination - Article about one of the many start-ups of TU/e (in Dutch)
Title	REPLAYING HISTORY: conformance checking and model enhancement based on event logs
Abstract	The availability of process models and event logs is steadily increasing as more and more business processes are supported by IT. Although it is possible to extract event logs from today's systems, the relation between process models and event logs is seldom investigated. Yet, the availability of event logs on the one hand and models on the other hand enables conformance checking, i.e., investigating whether reality deviates from a priori defined models. This is useful for a variety of reasons, e.g., to show compliance or to improve process support. Moreover, the logs can be used to extend and repair process models. In particular, the process models may be automatically augmented with performance information showing, for example, bottlenecks. Process mining techniques that replay history can be used to check conformance and enhance models (cf. www.processmining.org).
Paul Havinga (UT)
Biography	Paul J.M. Havinga is professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and CTO of Ambient Systems B.V., in Enschede, the Netherlands. His research interests are in the area of large-scale, heterogeneous wireless systems, sensor networks, energy-efficient architectures and protocols, ubiquitous computing, and wireless communication networks. Research questions cover architectures, protocols, programming paradigms, algorithms, and applications. This research has resulted in over 200 scientific publications in journals and conferences. In May 2007 he received the “ICT Innovation Award” for the successful transfer of knowledge from university to industrial use. In June 2007 he received the “van den Kroonenberg award” for being a successful innovative entrepreneur.
Title	Distributed wireless sensor networks beyond the hype
Abstract	Rapid advances in technology have enabled a new generation of tiny, inexpensive, networked sensors. Sensors are tiny devices capable of capturing physical information, such as heat, light or motion, about an environment. Embedding numerous of sensors into an environment creates a digital skin or wireless network of sensors, each sensor capable of capturing physical information about its immediate space. These massively distributed sensor networks communicate with one another and summarize the immense amounts of low-level information to produce data representative of the overall environment. Cooperative wireless sensor networks present information in a qualitative, human-interpretable form, which allows the system and the people to respond intelligently. The past several years of wireless sensor network research have resulted in advancements in many areas. This talk will highlight some of the challenges as we are advancing this technology from academic prototypes to broad commercial usage. Techniques and applications for event detection and activity detection in wireless sensor networks are presented. The approach is to provide a decentralized solution, where temporal and spatial fine-grained data obtained by the wireless sensor network is locally processed and interpreted, such that it facilitates a reliable and informed situation assessment.
Ton Koonen (TU/e)
Biography	Ton (A.M.J.) Koonen did applied research in fibre-optic telecommunication systems from 1979 to 2000, at Philips Telecommunication Industry, and at Bell Laboratories of Lucent Technologies as technical manager. From 1991 to 2000 he also was part-time professor at Twente University. Since 2001, he is full-time professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, and since 2004 chairman of the COBRA research group Electro-Optical Communication Systems. He initiated and has led many European and Dutch joint research projects, and frequently serves as reviewer of international research projects. His current research interests are in high-capacity short-range optical networks, radio-over-fibre systems, and optical packet-switched networks. Ton is a Bell Labs Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and elected member of the IEEE Photonic Society Board of Governors. In 2009, together with dr. Gerlas van den Hoven of Genexis he received the Dutch ICTRegie Award for the FlexPON concept, recognized as the best valorization of academic research.
Title	Enjoying broadband services – how can we get these to the users?
Abstract	With the exploding usage of the internet, the take-off of HDTV, the fast growth of peer-to-peer data exchange, etc. etc., today’s media for transporting communication services are falling short of capacity. Moreover, the growing energy consumption of ICT is becoming a headache. Some relief is being offered by the first generation of fibre-to-the-home networks which are coming in, and by increasingly powerful microwave radio technologies. However, future communication networks need to be more intelligent and versatile. In order to exploit the precious network resources as efficiently as possible, the broadband services delivery must be tailored to the actual needs of the user, by offering capacity-on-demand at the right place, at the right time, and in the right format, while keeping a close eye on energy consumption. Although fibre is reaching up to the doorstep, its ultra-broadband capacity still needs to be extended inside the home, up to the user himself. In this presentation, the latest research trends are discussed regarding optical technologies for power-lean operation of ultra-broadband intelligent routing and transmission of communication streams to and in the home, and the powerful marriage of fibre and radio technologies.
Eric Postma (UvT)
Biography	Eric Postma is full professor in Artificial Intelligence at the Tilburg centre for Creative Computing at Tilburg University. His research interest is in the domain of pattern recognition and computational models of visual perception. He published his work in various artificial-intelligence and cognitive-science journals. Eric Postma is co-coordinator of the international consortium for digital analysis of paintings and hosts the image repository containing digitized paintings of the Van Gogh museum and the Kröller-Müller museum.
Title	Towards identifying Van Gogh’s invariants
Abstract	The cultural heritage is one of the last domains that is not yet conquered by information and communication technology. In the coming decades, the availability of digital tools in the cultural-heritage domain will become comparable to availability of digital tools in, for instance, the medical domain. This presentation focuses on the development of algorithms to support art historians in their analysis of visual art. The combination of image-analysis and machine-learning algorithms yields new tools for the art-historian analysis of paintings. These tools try to detect the invariant visual characteristics of Van Gogh’s painting style. The presentation illustrates the successful application of our algorithms to the detection of Van Gogh forgeries. In addition, challenges for future work are identified. It is argued that the incorporation of our and other algorithms in dedicated software, will aid future art historians in their attempts to identify and quantify Van Gogh’s invariants.