Venue Almere Venue Almere

Venue Almere

Here you can download a PDF with accommodation information and some maps

 

Almere - New Town
 
At an average of some 3 meters below sea-level you'll find the fastest growing big city of The Netherlands. Its first inhabitants arrived in 1976, now there are more than 190.000 living in Almere. Many regard Almere to be a suburb of Amsterdam, since it is only 20 minutes to the center of the Dutch capital with its canals, coffee shops and unrivaled leasure opportunities. But being the adolescent that it is, Almere has a mind of its own. You'll find ravishing modern architecure in an elevated city center, that architecture-lovers form all over the world come to gaze at. Almere City is the center one of five civil townships with with vast greens spaces in between. A network of three segregated mobility infrastructures connects them. Cars, busses and bikes all have their own infrastructure. And don't be surprised, when the bike is often the fastest route.
 
Almere is unique and uncompared. In many things the city is ahead of its time. And in others it is behind. Like in the incomparably low criminality figures or the high outbound commuting numbers. Almere is not what you'd expect of a city of 192.000 inhabitants. It's clean, green and easy to travel in. And with a direct train connection of 23 minutes to Amsterdam Schiphol Airport is also very easy to travel to. Have a look at the city web portal.
 
Students
Several institutions for higher education are housed in Almere. During the summer three of them cooperate in Summer School Almere. All of June and July a number of students will be studying, living and recreating in and around Almere. Favourate meeting places are 'Grote Markt' with its many cafés and bars, the spacious 'Esplanade' on the Waterfront and the oldish small harbour of 'Almere Haven', with a row of bars and restaurants surrounding the actual harbour. 
 
But of course, with Amsterdam only 20 minutes away with public transport, many choose to explore the laid-back atmosphere of Amsterdam.
 
Windesheim building
Primary venue for the courses will be the building of Windesheim university for applied sciences. It's a brand new high rise, right in the city center. A ten minute walk will take you either to the centrail train station. Five minutes bring you to the leisure center with restaurants, bars & cafes and the shopping mall. And within two minutes you're at the waterfront and the city theatre. But what's even more: it's only a couple of minutes between the venue and your accommodation: the Apollo Hotel Almere City Centre.
 
Accommodaton
Right, you can stay in a 'around the corner' futuristic Apollo Hotel with design rooms, a perfect lounge, a restaurant and - yes- free wireless internet. Especially for the summer school on of the conference rooms has been reserved as the 'students domicille'. Thanks to the support of the Almere municipality the cost of accommodation could be kept at a low level: 120 euro a person in a two-persons bedroom, breakfast included, for the whole course week.
 
Almere Smart City
The city of Almere aspires to be in the forefront of the ICT development. The Economic Development Board Almere recognizes this in two of their attention clusters: ICT & Media and Health, Wellness and Life Sciences. One of the most recent outcomes of which is the Dutch Health Hub within the Almere Data Capital initiative.
Almere also has its own HPC-location, which is actually an annex of the SARA in Amsterdam. http://www.sara.nl/mission-and-vision.
And what's even more exciting is that Almere has its own City Grid. The AlmereGrid consist of over 8.000 computers, stationed at companies and at private peoples homes throughout the city. Currently enormous amounts of genome studies are researched with help of Almere Grid. 
Part of the AlmereGrid is used as a test-bed for Contrail Cloud technology.