27/05/2004

Three young researchers from Mexico and Greece were the winners of the international competition "Michael Dertouzos", organized within the framework of the 14th World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT 2004) that took place in Athens, on 19-24 May 2004. The first winner is Marco Escobedo from Mexico, followed by the Greek researchers Christos Doulkeridis and Michalis Anastasopoulos.

The awards ceremony, organized on the last day of the Congress, was attended by distinguished representatives of the global market for new technologies. The competition entitled "IT with a Human Face" was proclaimed as a tribute to Michael Dertouzos, the great Greek scientist and humanist in the field of technology. The participants were students and young researchers from all over the world who presented remarkable projects in the field of new technologies.

Marco Escobedo, researcher at the Telmex Cener for Digital Culture, won the first prize for the project "Convivo communicator: an interface-adaptive VoIP system for poor quality networks". Convivo is a pioneering system, designed to provide voice communication for poor quality networks, especially those found in rural areas of the developing world. It is based on an adaptation mechanism used to improve the user interface.

The system has been successfully tested in a rural community in the Dominician Republic. The award, followed by 15.000 euro, was delivered to the winner by Mr A. Alamanis, representative of the sponsor "Athens College".

The second prize was awarded to Christos Doulkeridis, PhD student in the Athens University of Economics and Business. His project "Querying and updating a context-aware service directory in mobile environments" concerns a system enabling mobile devices to act not only as requestors but as providers of data as well. The award, worth 9.000 euros, was delivered by Mrs C. Liddell, widow of Michael Dertouzos. The sponsor of the second prize was WCIT 2004.

Michalis Anastasopoulos, researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (ΙESE), was the third prize winner for the project "Software product lines for pervasive computing", related to Product Line Software Engineering. The award, along with 6.000 euros, was delivered by Mrs G. Paparidou, representing the sponsor SyNET.

The 27 finalists had the opportunity to present their projects on a poster in a special exhibition area of the Congress, while the abstracts have been published and distributed to all participants of the Congress.

Source: WCIT 2004, SEPE