Information Engineering Research Unit blog

Today, Nikos Manouselis from Agroknow (Greece) and Cristian Cechinel from Universidade Federal do Pampa – Campus de Bagé (Brazil) are the keynote speakers in a working session organized by the Computing School of the University of Alcala. Both speakers have a strong background relationship with Information Engineering Research Unit of the University and have therefore been invited by us to participate in this knowledge-sharing event.

Nikos’ talk, entitled “Opening Up Digital Collections: a case study on the connection of cultural collections with educational activities”, introduced how digital collections of cultural and scientific institutions may be organized and exposed to Web portals and online services in order to support various user information needs and tasks. It has particularly presented the case of Natural Europe, a research project that connects museum collections with educational activities, allowing the design of digital educational pathways over digitized cultural items from Natural History Museums. After this talk, a discussion on relevant research directions and potential technology challenges took place.

Partial view of room E-101 during Nikos Manouselis presentation

Cristian Cechinel, a representative of the IGUAL project (which stands for “Innovación para la Igualdad en la Universidad de America Latina”) gave a talk about the project objectives and achievements, which basically are to improve the quality, relevance and accessibility of Higher Education in Latin America, particularly for the most vulnerable groups.

Cristian Cechinel during his talk

IGUAL project assumes that if more low-income students successfully finish their studies despite the deficiencies in their basic education, the project will have a direct, positive impact in the accessibility of higher education for a segment of the population (public schooled students) that is usually in a disadvantaged position compared with students that could afford private schools. The role that University of Pampa plays in the project was specially highlighted and detailed by Cristian.

Yesterday we had the first review meeting of our Organic.Lingua project at the EC premises in Luxembourg. The overall trip included two day working sessions as the day previous to the review meeting, representatives of most project partners -mainly the WP leaders- worked on the presentation as a pre-review rehearsal that lasted almost the full Wednesday.

Panorama of the review meeting taken from the coordinator’s position

University of Alcala’ IE group is the project coordinator, and is also leading WP5 on the re-engineering of the Organic.Edunet portal. Therefore, IE members Miguel Angel and Salvador attended the meeting as well as Giannis Stoitsis who arrived from Athens. It was a fruitful meeting, because we received many interesting comments and feedback from the reviewers and of course from our Project Officer, who took the opportunity to let us know that she will be handing over her responsibility to another colleague because of her maternity leave.

IE members Giannis and Miguel Angel with Agroknow’s Nikos Manouselis having a fast dinner before the loooong night previous to the review meeting

After all the presentations and the hard work carried out from the project start in March 2011, the reviewers raised the green flag for everybody’s happiness.