"Excellent in every aspect"

New advances

Five years have passed since the last time Simula was evaluated. At that time, an international committee of experts ascertained that the centre had made impressive advances and had established a dynamic research culture since its establishment in 2001. The new Committee of Experts has been even more enthusiastic, establishing already in the first sentence of the evaluation report that they are impressed by the high quality of the activities at Simula, as well as by its growth and Simula's extensive research-related breakthroughs since the last evaluation. 

Impressed Minister of Research

"The Committee points out that Simula is a unique institution with consistently high quality, and I am impressed by what Simula has managed to achieve. Simula has been achieving good results for quite some time both when it comes to combining research and education, and in terms of cooperating with business and industry", comments Minister of Research and Higher Education Tora Aasland.

Cabinet Minister Aasland took special note of the fact that women account for 25 per cent of Simula's PhD students, a high percentage in these fields of study. "It is positive that Simula has a relatively high percentage of women, given the subject areas, and I know that Simula is working actively for more gender equality and integration of the employees. Signals have been given previously to indicate that the ministry will reexamine the continuation and the level of the basic grant if the evaluation has a favourable outcome, but this is depending on the yearly budgeting procesess", adds Aasland.

Most interested in criticism

"Naturally, it is very gratifying to receive such a favourable evaluation, which both reaffirms that we are on the right track and challenges us on a couple of points. The Committee has made many good observations that we will address and follow up", states Managing Director Professor Aslak Tveito. 

Managing Director Aslak Tveito

Simula's management is even more interested in what there are of critical comments in the report, than in the many paragraphs of great praise. The evaluation five years ago contained some suggestions for improvements, which have largely been followed up. "This year's evaluation will also be used to make Simula an even better research community", promises Tveito.

Praise for the research

The most important purpose of a research centre is, naturally, to deliver good research, and Simula clearly does exactly that. The Committee awarded the top mark 'Excellent' to the Software Engineering (SE) research department. Among others, Professor Magne Jørgensen has contributed to this: In 2009, the scientific periodical Journal of Systems and Software named him the world's best researcher in systems development for the second consecutive year. Colleague Lionel Briand, who was headhunted to Simula in 2007, was number four in the ranking, which comprises roughly 4000 researchers. 

The Committee has even more praise for the Scientific Computing Department (SC), which earned the mark 'excellent in every aspect'. That is about as good as it gets. The SC Department has exceptionally high scientific production, and the committee noted, among other things, that researchers Joakim Sundnes and Anders Logg have made strong contributions after receiving a grant from the Research Council of Norway through the scheme for Outstanding Young Investigators (OYI). It was also very prudent to recruit the Netherlands researcher Kirsten ten Tusscher to strengthen Simula's expertise in computational biology and systems biology, observes the Committee.

Head of the Scientific Computing Department, Professor Hans Petter Langtangen

Hans Petter Langtangen, head of the department, is very pleased with the good results. "This is highly motivating, especially since we experienced a period of rapid expansion in staffing after being accorded status as a Centre of Excellence by the Research Council and because we entered into comprehensive long-term cooperation with StatoilHydro. We now face extremely demanding research tasks, and such a positive evaluation gives us additional confidence that we will be able to succeed even better in future", remarks Langtangen.

The third department, Networks and Distributed Systems (ND), must be satisfied this time round with a score of 'Very Good', but the Committee points out that the general level has improved over the past five years. One of the department's four projects earned the mark 'Excellent'.Over the past five years, Simula has evolved from a research centre into a whole little corporation with three subsidiaries. 

The largest subsidiary is Simula's own school for research, the Simula School, which was established after the preceding evaluation pointed out that Simula should intensify its focus on PhD programmes. Now the Simula School is referred to as an extraordinarily successful initiative. The report states, among other things, that the Simula School has the potential to exert significant influence on Norwegian researcher training and that it could possibly grow to become a national resource for researcher training.

Suggestions for improvements

The evaluation confirms that Simula has developed a unique team of researchers since its establishment in 2001, but it cautions that the model of having department heads who are also active researchers is being pushed to the breaking point. The report also describes a trend that could 'dilute' the original vision of engaging in long-term, targeted research focusing on problems of scale.

"The committee recommends that we should be more willing to make strategic changes and take greater chances. We appreciate such a suggestion, because they are right, we have been rather conservative up to now. We had to follow a conservative line because we were completely dependent on scoring well on classic parameters for measuring scientific production. Now, however, we are well established and we have scored very well on two evaluations, which allows us more latitude for flexibility. In future, we will be more willing to take risks, but we will continue to work in our three subject areas", promises Aslak Tveito.

By Bjarne Røsjø

FACTS ABOUT THE EVALUATION

Simula was established in 2001 with a contract for 5+5 years' allocations.  This entailed that the laboratory was evaluated after five years, with the promise of further allocations for five more years if the result was satisfactory. The results from the first evaluation were very good, and Simula received allocations for the period from 2006 to 2010. The Ministry of Education and Research wrote in the government budget for 2006 that Simula would be funded until 2015, if the evaluation from the second five-year period was also favourable. This is the evaluation that has now been made, and with an overwhelmingly positive result.

The professional evaluation was conducted by professors Torsten Braun (University of Berne, Switzerland), Jan S. Hesthaven (Brown University, USA), Håkan Håkansson (Norwegian School of Management BI) and Colette Rolland (Université de Paris). The evaluation presupposed extensive reporting and self-evaluation on the part of Simula. This work was conducted by a working group headed by Research Director Olav Lysne.