Professor John Krogstie has been appointed Chair for Working Group 8.1 of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) from 2010 to 2012. Working Group 8.1 are committed to research in the fields of Design and Evaluation of Information Systems.

John has been a representative and member of IFIP's Technical Committee 8 and Working Group 8.1 since 2000, and he has also been involved in arranging more than 10 of IFIP's conferences and workshops since 1995. His efforts did not go unnoticed, as in 2009 John received the IFIP's award for outstanding service.

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Associate Professor Magnus Lie Hetland was interviewed by Newton last weekend. The interview was about how search engines like Google work. Newton is a Norwegian popular science TV program for young people, and it is aired on Sundays by NRK1. The interview with Hetland is available on internet at NRK Nett-TV.

Magnus also briefly appeared on Tekno (NRK2) in November of 2009, when Tekno filmed in one of his lectures. Tekno is an NRK TV show about the technology of the future.

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Friday 11th of December, Rector Torbjørn Digernes from NTNU, and CEO of IBM Norway, Morten Thorkildsen, signed a co-operation agreement to ensure continued strategic research collaboration between the two institutions.

Both IBM and NTNU are committed to research within the fields of information and communication technology, electronics, and mathematics, and the application of these sciences. Examples of applications are; language technology, supercomputing, the use of ICT in public domain, as well as smart solutions for transportation and health care.

The co-operation agreement include; master's thesis, doctoral thesis, development and updating of course material, and technological research projects. Students will hopefully gain a better understanding of what the industry demand of them through this co-operation. IBM will continue to award outstanding student work at NTNU.

Rector Torbjørn Digernes hopes the co-operation with IBM will help recruit both prominent researchers and good students for NTNU. NTNU researchers who collaborate with IBM at joint research projects will gain access to IBM's laboratories around the world. Joint research efforts within shared fields will benefit both partners.

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Monday 30th of November, Vice-Dean John Krogstie officially opened the expansion of the Njord supercomputer. With the expansion of 25 tons of IBM hardware, Njord can now deliver 23,5 TeraFLOPS of computational power, and it weights a total of 41 metric tons.

The Njord national supercomputing facility was opened by NTNU's Rector, Torbjørn Digernes, on 30th of November in 2006. Back then the IBM p575+ computer delivered a peak performance of 7,5 TeraFLOPS, which was calculated to be sufficient for the next 3 - 4 years. The new expansion increases the computational power almost three times, and extends the lifespan of Njord by 18 months.

In the Norse mythology Njord is the God of the wind, sea and the trade at sea. He can calm storms, and extinguish fire. NTNU's Njord is the Norwegian supercomputer which computes the weather forecasts for the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (in Norwegian). With Njord's boost in computational powers the accuracy of weather forecasts will improve. Njord is also used by the research institutions participating in the Notur project .

The excess heat from the supercomputer is used to heat the Realfagsbygget building at the NTNU campus. The mainframe is both water and air cooled, and the excess heat from the supercomputer is transferred to Realfagsbygget to help heat the building. The expansion of Njord has cost NTNU around NOK 13 million in infrastructure development. The new infrastructure was prepared both for Njord and the new supercomputer scheduled for 2011.

The Njord supercomputer is a tightly coupled cluster consisting of 192 IBM p575+ interconnected nodes. Each node has 16 processors which are coupled using IBM's high performance switches. The system is run by IBM's Unix-operating system, AIX version 5.3.

Photos of Vice-Dean John Krogstie at the Njord supercomputer (Flickr).

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From 23rd to 25th of November this year's NIK, NOKOBIT, and NISK conferences took place at the Britannia Hotel in Trondheim. A total of 138 participants registered for the conferences and the co-located meetings and workshops.

Tuesday 24th of November, NTNU Rector Torbjørn Digernes opened the conferences. Professor Eric Monteiro (in photo) from the Department of Computer and Information Science held the opening keynote, "Innføring av IKT i store virksomheter - Norske og internasjonale erfaringer" (Introduction of ICT in large enterprises - Norwegian and international experiences). Several of our scientific staff were speakers at the conferences.

This year, Associate Professor Trond Aalberg was the General Chair for the NIK conference, Professor John Krogstie was the General Chair for the NOKOBIT conference, and Professor Stig F. Mjølsnes was the General Chair for the NISK conference.

Relevant links:

Photos from the NIK NOKOBIT NISK conferences (Flickr).
The NIK NOKOBIT NISK 2009 web pages (in Norwegian).

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Tuesday 27th of October, ITovation was held at NTNU. The event was opened by Dean Geir Øien. ITovation is a seminar series for PhD candidates, researchers, students, and the industry in the region.

ITovation aims to be an arena where the industry and the university can meet to exchange and share ideas. The seminar series focuses on innovation, creativity, and improvisation. This seminar was held in cooperation with the Norwegian Center for Expertise (NCEI).

Our department was represented at ITovation by Professor Letizia Jaccheri and her ArTe project, and Axel Tidemann who gave a talk about artificial intelligence and learning through imitation.

Photos from the ITovation event (Flickr).

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A competition to map the NTNU campus in OpenStreetMap (OSM) has been launched by the Faculty of Information Technology, Mathematics, and Electrical Engineering (IME) and the Information Division at NTNU. Both students and staff are encouraged to participate in the competition.

Three gift certificates ("Midtbysjekk"), worth NOK 3 000.- each, will be awarded in the competition.

The three gift certificates will be awarded to:

1. The best contributor who has mapped the NTNU campus.
2. A random participant who has mapped the NTNU campus.
3. A random participant who has mapped "Midtbyen" (city center).

The rules and complete competition information is available at the IME competition web pages (in Norwegian).

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Professor John Krogstie has been appointed Vice-Dean with responsibility for the strategic area ICT by Dean of IME, Geir Egil Øien.

1st of August 2009, John embarked on his four years as Vice-Dean. John will still retain his office at our department and fulfill the research duties of his professorship.

We wish to congratulate John on his new position!

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