Aia Software commemorates its 20th anniversary with Information Technology Awards

Aia Software presents annual awards for Best Information Technology theses to Radboud University Nijmegen students

Nijmegen, January 16th, 2008 - On Friday 11 January, Aia Software presented the Aia Software Awards for the fifth year in succession. The awards were conferred to students from the Radboud University in Nijmegen for the best Information Technology theses. The award for the most outstanding master thesis was presented to Erik Schierboom, author of 'Verification of Fiasco's IPC implementation'. The best bachelor thesis was awarded to Martin van Goor, author of 'Genetic algorithms and parallelism'. The jury comprised of lecturers from the Computer Science faculty of the Radboud University Nijmegen and fellow professionals from Aia Software. The award ceremony took place during Aia Software's twentieth anniversary celebrations.

Paul Dirven, CEO of Aia Software: "Reliability is a crucial characteristic of an operating system. After all, a great deal of time and money is invested in the development process. In this context, Erik's study presents convincing results, both from a practical and a theoretical perspective. His thorough research deserved to receive the Aia Master Award. As software developers - the majority of whom are also Nijmegen University graduates- we deem it important to promote education and research in the field of information technology. The huge volumes of data that are accumulating on the Internet as well as within the average company constitutes a siginificant future challenge: to find what you are looking for."

Master Award

Erik Schierboom's master thesis centres on improving the reliability of operating systems. His paper 'Verification of Fiasco's IPC implementation' describes the investigation into the operationg system's reliability by means of the properties of a microkernel named 'Fiasco'. Utilizing formal demonstration techniques, Eric created an abstract test model for Fiasco and by deploying this model, he was able to successfully test and prove two kernel properties. The third property, which was caused by an error in the implementation of Fiasco, could not be proven. Through his study, Erik has demonstrated the potential of using an abstract test model to identify potential errors in the source code of operating system kernels.

Bachelor Award

Martin van de Goor´s bachelor thesis involves a study of genetic algorithms and parallelism. Genetic algorithms are a subclass of search algorithms that are especially suitable for particular types of search queries. Martin investigated the benefits that can be achieved by executing genetic algorithms in parallel. This approach makes it possible to solve search query issues by selecting the optimal result from a pool of search results. In the jury's opinion, Martin has described both the subject matter and its use and necessity in a highly transparent way.

About Aia Software

Aia Software is a leading global provider of document and forms solutions. The ITP Document Platform enables business users to compose high quality, personalized, business-critical documents. Over 800 organizations worldwide already use ITP as an integrated solution to automate the production of standard documents in high volume, compose sophisticated bespoke correspondence from pre-defined paragraphs, or to dynamically complete Web forms. ITP can be quickly and seamlessly integrated with customers' existing application and technical platforms. Aia Software has branch offices in North America, the UK, The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Australia.
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