Simula Research Laboratory, Norway

Dedicated to tackling scientific challenges with long-term impactand of genuine importance to real life, Simula Research Laboratory (SRL) offers an environment that emphasises and promotes basic research. At the same time, SRL is deeply involved in research education and application-driven innovation and commercialisation. SRL was established as a non-profit, limited company in 2001, and is fully owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. At its outset, the laboratory was given the mandate of becoming an internationally leading research institution within selected fields in information and communications technology. These fields are (i) communication systems, including cyber-security and cloud computing; (ii) scientific computing, aiming at fast and reliable solutions of mathematical models in biomedicine and geoscience; and (iii) software engineering, focusing on testing and verification of mission-critical software systems, and on planning and cost estimation of large software development projects. Recent evaluations state that SRL has met its challenge and is an acknowledged contributor to top-level research in its focus areas. Specifically, in the 2012 national evaluation of ICT research organised by the Research Council of Norway and conducted by an international expert panel, SRL received the highest average score (4.67) on a 1-5 scale among all evaluated institutions. In comparison, the national average was 3.38. Only five of the 62 research groups evaluated were awarded the top grade (5), and two of these five groups are located at SRL. SRL is currently hosting one Norwegian Centre of Excellence, Center for Biomedical Computing (2007-2017), and one Norwegian Centre for Research-based Innovation, Certus (2011-2018). In addition, we participate as research partner in two other Centres for Research-based Innovation, Centre for Cardiological Innovation (2011-2018), hosted by Oslo University Hospital and Centre for Scalable Data Access (2015-2022), hosted by the University of Oslo. These two centre-oriented schemes are the most prestigious funding instruments offered by the Research Council of Norway. Furthermore, the Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications promoted one of our leading research activities to national status as the Centre for Resilient Networks and Applications, with a specific mandate to monitor the performance and state of the national telecommunication infrastructure. In addition, SRL has developed a comprehensive industrial R&D collaboration with companies like Statoil, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and Intel. These research activities are complemented by a significant number of research grants from the Research Council of Norway and the H2020 work programmes.