ICTP is sponsoring the Boltzmann Memorial Meeting. The meeting will take place on Monday 4 September at Congress Hall, Duino Castle, beginning at 10:30 a.m. Introductory remarks by ICTP Director K.R. Sreenivasan will be followed by three lectures given by Leo Kadanoff, president-elect, American Physical Society; Peter Laggner, Managing Director, Institute of Biophysics and Nanosystems Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz; and Giuseppe Mussardo, professor of physics, SISSA. Following the talks, participants will gather at the nearby former Hotel Ples to attend a ceremony unveiling a plaque honouring Boltzmann. Giorgio Ret, mayor of Duino, and Marc Abrioux, head of school of the United World College of the Adriatic, will offer remarks at the ceremony. Austrian-born Ludwig Boltzmann, father of statistical mechanics, is widely considered one of the greatest physicists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He took his life while on vacation with his wife and daughter in Duino on 5 September 1906.

Open Day at Miramare Science Campus will take place tomorrow Saturday 16 September. Festivities begin at 10:30 am. Following brief opening remarks by ICTP director, K.R. Sreenivasan, Italian astronaut Umberto Guidoni will speak about his experience on the Space Shuttle and international space station. Later that morning, Italy’s world champion skier and Olympic gold medal winner, Manuela Di Centa, will discuss her travels in the Himalayas and her successful ascent of Mount Everest. There will also be a roundtable discussion by local scientists illustrating research efforts in climate and weather, seismology, the Earth’s core, black holes and dark matter. Additional talks throughout the day will involve the role of science in criminal investigations, medicine and sport. Some 35 scientific stands will present research activities taking place at scientific institutions on the Miramare Science Campus. Guided tours of ICTP, SISSA (the International School for Advanced Studies), Immaginario Scientifico, Parco di Miramare, and Riserva naturale marina di Miramare will be held throughout the day. For additional information, including information on transportation to and from the Miramare campus, see http://openday.ictp.it.

Four ICTP scientists—Tobias Galla, Matteo Marsili, Mauro Sellitto and Riccardo Zecchina—have recently uncovered ways to use statistical mechanics to optimize the outcome of combinatorial auctions. Such auctions have been used to determine landing and takeoff priorities at airports and to distribute licenses for radio spectrums. Their findings have been published in the 22 September edition of Physical Review Letters.
When there is one item on the auction block, auctioneers have no trouble determining the winning bid: it simply goes to the highest bidder.
However, in so-called combinatorial auctions, in which multiple buyers bid ‘in combination’ on multiple objects, the winning bid, or should we say bids, is not so easy to determine. Moreover, when there is a large number of bidders and objects, which holds true, for example, in the case of airport takeoff and landing slot allocations, determining the optimal allocation can consume unrealistic amounts of time even when the information is being processed by the world’s fastest computers.
ICTP scientists turned to the statistical mechanics of disordered systems and, in particular, to the behaviour of granular particles to provide a mathematical approach to such a problem. Their approach relies on an algorithm previously devised as an analytical tool for spin-glass physics. They hope that their finding may vastly improve upon existing time-exhausting approaches and therefore more quickly solve the bedeviling winner-determination problem that to date has restricted the use of combinatorial auctions.

Vladimir Kravtsov, head of the ICTP condensed matter group, recently participated in the sixth edition of the Rencontres du Vietnam. More than 300 scientists from around the world attended the event, which was first launched in 1992. The purpose of the event, which focuses on advanced scientific research in astrophysics and condensed matter physics, is to provide an opportunity for the world’s most eminent researchers in these fields to meet and discuss their work. This year’s conference focused on fundamental research and applications in the burgeoning field of nanotechnology. While at the conference, Kravtsov was among a select group of participants who met Nguyen Minh Triet, president of Vietnam.

We are pleased to announce that the 2006 Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians from Developing Countries will be awarded to Professor Ramdorai Sujatha of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). Dr. Sujatha received all her university education in India and has been with TIFR since 1985, where she is currently Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics.
The Prize is in recognition of her work on the arithmetic of algebraic varieties and her substantial contributions to non-commutative Iwasawa theory. In particular, together with Coates, Fukaya, Kato and Venjakob, she formulated a non-commutative version of the main conjecture of Iwasawa theory, which now drives much of the work in this important subject.
The Prize is supported financially by the Norwegian Niels Henrik Abel Memorial Fund.

ICTP staff consultants Enrique Canessa, Carlo Fonda and Marco Zennaro are part of a team of information experts who have recently published How To Accelerate You Internet: A Practical Guide to Bandwidth Management and Optimization Using Open Source Software. The book, which includes an introduction by ICTP Director K.R. Sreenivasan, can be accessed free-of-charge on the internet. It is designed to help network specialists, especially network specialists working in the developing world, learn effective technical and management techniques for maximizing the use of the internet by, for example, reducing viruses and spam, prioritizing network traffic and providing local content caching. The book, released under a Creative Commons license, was written by the BMO Book Spring Team and sponsored by the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP). Other organizations contributing to the effort include Aidworld and Hacker Friendly LLC. The text is available in both PDF and HTML formats at http://bwmo.net.

ICTP will hold an international workshop, Science for Cultural Heritage, 23-27 October. More than 100 scientists from around the world will participate in discussions on the use of such tools as accelerators, carbon dating and synchrotron radiation for analyzing our heritage and culture. On 26 October, Chris Stringer, Department of Paleontology at the Natural History Museum, London, UK, and Mike Morwood, University of New England, Armidale, Australia, will present a pair of public lectures beginning at 14:00 in ICTP’s Main Building. Stringer will speak about early humans in Europe and Morwood will discuss his team’s recent discovery of homo floresiensiss, a new human species recently discovered in Indonesia.

ICTP Director K.R. Sreenivasan has proposed the creation of a centre in India designed to link universities. The centre, which would be created with assistance from the University of Hyderabad and the B.M. Birla Science Centre, would seek to improve teaching and research capabilities across the nation. Sreenivasan made his remarks in Hyderabad. He was there as part of a week-long visit to India designed to increase cooperation between ICTP and India’s universities and research institutes.