The 5th Pirelli Internetional Award winners
TO AN ITALIAN PROFESSOR THE V EDITION
OF THE PIRELLI INTERNETIONAL AWARD
More than 700 works evaluated. The US space agency NASA wins the special section prize for scientific information
Rome, Italy, April 3rd 2001 - Professor Roberto Fieschi of the University of Parma (Italy) is the winner of the V edition of the Pirelli Internetional Award, the first international multimedia competition launched by Pirelli in 1996 and carried out entirely on the Internet (www.pirelliaward.com). The awards have been assigned today in Rome, Italy, during a ceremony which was attended by Marco Tronchetti Provera, Chairman and CEO of the Pirelli Group, the Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, the President of the Award's Jury Umberto Colombo and Carlo Massarini, a journalist specialized in new technologies and anchorman of Italian TV.
" The Pirelli Internetional Award" , underlined Marco Tronchetti Provera, " aims at being a concrete contribution of the Group to the "on-line" diffusion of scientific and technological culture, and it is one of the elements of the great e-Pirelli Project which is transforming the company into a real e-company, capable of making use of new technologies to manage internal processes, develop innovative businesses and reap all the opportunities offered by the Net" .
After having evaluated the more than 700 works of the fifth edition, the Award's International Jury has awarded first prize of the value of 25,000 Euros to Professor Fieschi for the work " From Silicon to Computer" (maccw.sns.it/technet/), created in collaboration with the National Institute for the Physics of Matter (INFM). The Jury awarded it " for an outstanding presentation of a journey through the Science of Materials, one of the cutting-edge branches of the on-going scientific and technological progress."
Second prize went to the American Internet-company Brainpop.com, for the homonymous Website (www.brainpop.com), which consists of an on-line multimedia encyclopedia, with over 150 movies on science, technology and health. The prize has been assigned for " the clarity of language, the richness of animations, the wide variety of subjects illustrated, which make of "BrainPop" a product that will be much appreciated by the youth throughout the world."
A young Hungarian programmer from Budapest, Jozsef Tellr, has gained third prize, of the value of 10,000 Euros, with the multimedia project " Audiology" (web.interware.hu/banan/audio/), which " makes an excellent use of multimedia technology in explaining the functioning of the human ear and the field of audiology."
The other prizes awarded today went to " Virtual Cell" (USA) and " Mini-Beasts" (UK) for the School Section, and to " The adventures of Piera" (Italy) for the Environment Section, whilst the American space agency NASA has won the Scientific Information Section Prize.
The Pirelli Internetional Award, open to all Internet users world-wide, assigns prizes for over 60,000 Euros to the best works on the diffusion of scientific and technological culture created with multimedia tools, and primarily on the Internet. All entries are examined by an International Jury, chaired by Professor Colombo, which includes amongst others Nobel Prizewinner Ilya Prigogine, EU's General Director George Metakides and the Editor-in-Chief of " New Scientist" magazine Alun Anderson.
The complete list of winners, regulations and on-line registration form are available on the Website www.pirelliaward.com.