Information Engineering Research Unit blog

This week the 3rd edition of the International Conference on Internet Technologies and Applications (ITA 2009) is taking place in Wrexham, North Wales. ITA is a series of bianual conferences usually held in september, where the athmosphere and the good ambiance between all the participants make of it one of our favourite conferences around.

IE regularly contributes one or more papers reporting on the research being carried out during the last year. In ITA 2009 our presentation was about the integration of semantic web frameworks in SOA architectures (check out the full presentation here).

From left to right: Vic Grout and Rich Picking (conference chairs), Thomas Gottron, Stuart Cunningham and Salvador Sánchez-Alonso

This photo was taken during the mediaeval Welsh banquet celebrated in the Ruthin Castle as part of the social program of the conference. It shows IE member Salvador Sanchez-Alonso relaxing with our old friends and colleagues of the CAIR research group of the Glyndwr University lead by Prof. Vic Grout (first one from the left) .

Last week, IE member Leonardo Lezcano attended the SSFW09 workshop, held in Milan, where he presented an approach titled “Integrating Disease And Diagnosis Semantics In Clinical Archetypes”. This workshop was a follow up to the first workshop on Signs, Symptoms and Findings: Towards an Ontology for Clinical Phenotypes held in Dallas in 2008. The aim of both meetings was to achieve a better understanding of the pathogenesis of human disease in order to develop effective diagnostic, therapeutic and prevention strategies. This Milan edition was organized by the DISCo Bioinformatics Group at the University of Milano-Bicocca.
The workshop audience was pleased to watch the presentation of Nicola Guarino, one of the key names in the ontologies domain, as well as the one of Barry Smith, perhaps the most vociferous advocate of the philosophical approach to the study of ontologies in informatics.

SSFW09 participants

From left to right: Leonardo Lezcano, Gianluca Colombo, Daniele Merico

Last week Miguel-Angel was visiting Dublin City University as external examiner of Mark Melia Ph.D. dissertation on “constraint-based validation of e-learning courseware” (having Claus Pahl as supervisor).  As can be appreciated in the happiness Mark exhibits in the picture below, the evaluation was fairly successful for him.  

In the picture, left to right: Mark, Miguel-Angel and Claus Pahl.

This week Dr. Richard Messnarz, executive director of ISCN, visited Alcalá de Henares to attend to Eurospi 2009. IE group was contacted by some members of ISCN to explore paths for collaboration in the framework of the Knowledge Partnership program for Process Improvement that ISCN is carrying out, but also  to exchange ideas on future joint proposals for EU funded projects. Richard and the rest of the people we met were very nice and kind, and very keen to start a collaboration with our group, by the way. In the photo below, chairmen of EuroSPI and IE members Miguel Angel and Salvador sharing table and some friendly conversation in El pollo de Alcala, where we had lunch together.

From left to right: Miklos Biro, Kerstin Siakas, Miguel Angel Sicilia, Salvador Sanchez-Alonso and Richard Messnarz.