News
Two FEW researchers receive the ERC Proof of Concept Grant
It is unique in the Netherlands that two researchers from the same University and the same faculty receive this ERC grant at the same time. Prof. dr. Andrew Tanenbaum and dr. Davide Iannuzzi have performed this for the first time for the VU University Amsterdam.
The Proof of Concept grant is only open to people who have already won an ERC Advanced Grant or an ERC Starting Grant, so the applicant pool is very strong. There were 78 proposals submitted. In 2008 Prof. Tanenbaum was rewarded an Advanced Grant of 2.5 million euro and dr. Iannuzzi a Starting Grant of 1.8 million euro. The purpose of the Proof-of-concept grant, 150.000 euro, is to allow winners to move the results of their research closer to the market.
Dr. Davide Iannuzzi from the department of Astronomy and Physics received this grant for his project proposal "Small, but many: scalability to volume production in fiber-top technology".
During his ERC Starting Independent Research Grant, Davide Iannuzzi came up with a new idea that allows the fabrication of micromachined structures on the tip of an optical fiber with a series of cost effective steps (patent filed). He has now asked for the support of ERC to demonstrate the scalability of that fabrication method. With this Proof-of-Concept grant, he will be able to show that, thanks to this invention, cost effective batch production of fiber-top cantilevers is indeed possible.
Prof. dr. Andrew Tanenbaum from the department of Informatics received this grant for his project proposal "Reliable Operating Systems for Embedded Systems".
Andy Tanenbaum: "In my case, the Advanced Grant is about making operating systems more dependable. Part of this acknowledges that software contains errors (bugs). No amount of effort can produce error-free software. We have 50 years of experience with this. What the research is trying to do is find ways to build fault-tolerant software, that is, software that continues to function in spite of errors. Aircraft, for example, contain a lot of redundant hardware so if one component fails, there is a backup that can be used. Operating systems don't have any kind of fault tolerance. If a fault is triggered, the system just crashes (e.g. a Windows blue screen). What we are doing in the research is making it possible to recover after a fault and continue execution.Read more.
