2018-annual-report

any scientific discipline, it is more so in an area where,
except in certain subareas, the cost of experimentation
facilities is not as high as in other sciences. In line with
the observation that people are key, the Institute has
continued to attract to Madrid top talent worldwide, and
during 2018 it included 17 faculty (one half-time), 2 visiting
and associate faculty, 16 postdoctoral researchers, 3
research programmers, 26 research assistants, 29 interns,
12 project staff, and 10 staff members, from over 20
different nationalities. Our researchers have joined the
Institute after working at or obtaining their Ph.D. degrees
from prestigious centers, including Stanford U., Carnegie
Mellon U., U. California at San Diego, or Microsoft
Research in the US, INRIA in France, U. of Cambridge in
the UK, the Max Planck Software Institute in Germany,
ETH in Switzerland, U. Manchester, or U. Brussels in
Europe, to name just a few. In addition, 246 international
researchers have visited and given talks at the Institute
to date.
During 2018, Institute researchers have published In 2018, the Institute also reinforced its collaboration
73 refereed publications in some of the top venues in with industry in security and distributed computing, two
the field, such as OOPSLA, ACM IMC, ACM CCS, ICLP, fields of high interest for many companies these days.
POPL, ESOP, CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT, IEEE S&P, CAV, Contracts and agreements were signed to work on secure
ICFP, LICS, PPoPP, and ICALP, given 8 invited talks in cloud storage and privacy in blockchain computations.
international conferences, 45 invited seminars and lectures,
chaired 6 program committees, and participated that can, through the interaction with our researchers,
These included hosting personnel of these companies
as members in 48 program committees and 24 boards channel the transfer of knowledge from academia to the
of journals and conferences, in addition to being conference
or program chairs of 6 conferences. The Institute
productive fabric.
has received 22 best paper awards or mentions in the I would like to thank once more to all who have contributed
to all these achievements, including of course
last 5 years.
the Madrid Regional Government and Assembly for their
The Institute has also participated during 2018 in 31 continuing vision and support, and very specially all the
funded research projects and contracts and its researchers researchers and members of the Institute at all levels.
were awarded 8 fellowships. Thirteen of these projects It is their enthusiasm, dedication, and passion for their
come from international agencies and companies, six have work what has allowed the Institute go this far in a so
direct industrial funding, and eleven of them involve colla-
short amount of time.
foreword
boration with companies of all sizes, both Spanish and
international. These companies include, among others,
ATOS, Groupalia, Intel, Merlinux, NEC, Nextel, Protocol
Labs, RedBorder, Relational, Scytl, Telecom Italia, and
Zemsania.
This year, the Institute adapted its role within EIT
Digital due to the creation of the EIT Digital Spain foundation
that took over the coordination of the Co-Location
Center and its activities. Within this new framework, the
Institute, besides being a partner of EIT Digital itself,
provides hosting to the Co-Location Center. This did not
change the activity of the local node, which continues
with its task of building an ecosystem of innovation and
entrepreneurship, with the addition of new local partners,
new startups hosted at the CLC, the Master and PhD
lectures on entrepreneurship that are delivered at the
CLC, and the training actions on innovation, business
development, and coaching.