Information Engineering Research Unit blog

On 23rd June, we hold the Software Engineering for Large Scale Computing (SELSC) workshop at the International Conference in Computational Science (ICCS).

Also, Kraków, in the south of Poland, is a great city to visit.

Miguel-Angel and Elena attended the IPMU’08 conference. Concretely, we presented a paper on the “Soft approaches to information access on the Web” with our most recent word on fuzzy counterparts for betweenness measures.

As part of the dissemination activities of the Organic.Edunet project, IE members Salvador and Miguel Angel were interviewed yesterday for the program of Sergio García in SER Henares, a local radio station part of the biggest media group in Spain, to talk about the benefits of providing semantic searches for the organic agriculture domain.

The interview will be broadcasted next Monday 23rd June at about 13:00 to 13:30 and will be heard on 103.1 FM in the Corredor del Henares area in Madrid, Spain.

The audio for the full interview can be found [here]

– I (Miguel-Angel) served as committee member for the Ph.D. dissertation of Enric Mor (Open University of Catalonia, UOC). I have been in contact with Enric for years, especially in the context of the Spanish conferences on learning objects we organize (SPDECE). The thesis was successful and I have to say that I was positively surprised, since it dealt with mining navigation patterns inside the virtual campus of the UOC, the methodology was rigorous and the results really interesting. Mining educational data is gaining momentum (check the conferences on the topic), so the thesis was also timely in my view.

Daniel has served as external examiner of Elahe Kani-Zabihi’s thesis at Brunel University (West London, UK). She successfully defended her thesis entitled: “Implications of users’ involvement in the development of Digital Libraries”.

Congratulations to Elahe and her supervisor, Dr George Ghinea!

Below there is a picture of Stephen Gulliver (left, internal examiner) and Daniel with some paperwork before the thesis.

Last 2 days IE member Salvador Sanchez-Alonso visited the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB) in Aas, near Oslo, as part of the project Organic.Edunet. This meeting was essential to progress in the process of building an ontology of organic agriculture and agroecology, and the result was very good.

In the photo, hosts Geier and Aage, together with Salvador, outside the university buildings. These two researchers at UMB were so kind as to serve as Oslo city guides (thanks Aage!) and even organized a nice diner in the coastal city of Drøbak.

On monday, Salvador visited Valencia to meet SEAE (Spanish Association for Organic Farming) representatives to join hands in several efforts, and particularly in Organic.Edunet, a EU project aimed at facilitating access, usage and exploitation of digital educational content related to Organic Agriculture (OA) and Agroecology (AE).

In the picture, the City of the Arts and Science, part of the new developments which are transforming Valencia for the good.

Miguel-Angel is visiting for a few days the beautiful mexican city of Mérida to giva a talk at the Kaambal 2008 event. Kaambal (which means ”learning” in Maya) is a network of research groups around the topics of tele-learning and learning objects. 

Left to right, José Angel Olivas (Castilla La Mancha Univ.), Miguel-Angel and Manuel Prieto (Castilla La Mancha Univ., main organizer of the event.This is after the inaugural session at a conference hall of the Universidad Autónoma del Yucatán. Behind us the big poster of the event with our three names as speakers.

Wendsday night Miguel-Angel and José-Angel went for a walk to taste a delicious Mamey ice-cream at one of the terraces in Paseo de Montejo. We were careful with the trees, just to avoid a hair-raising experience with an alien creature like the one reported here (it is in Spanish but you can watch the chilling video ):

http://www.ikerjimenez.com/especiales/criatura_merida/index.htm

	Closing session at Kaambal. Left to right, Edgar (Universidad Autónoma del Yucatán), Manuel Prieto (Castilla La Mancha Univ.) and Luciano (Universidad del Mayab), featuring a lively discussion on the future of the event.
	A view of the Facultad de Matemáticas, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán. At the back, people preparing the closing dinner.