Herbal.Mednet kick-off meeting in Alcala

Today and tomorrow the kick-off meeting of the Leonardo DaVinci Transfer of innovation project is taking place in Alcala. This project will transfer training content that has been tested in Spain and Romania into Italy and Greece, as well as in new geographical region users’ group in Spain.

During the next 2 years, Herbal.Mednet participants will select and adapt existing training contents in organic farming of herbal, medicinal and aromatic plants that is publicly available worldwide to the countries of the participating user groups. At the same time, the project will transfer the innovative training techniques that have been developed for the agricultural advisors and trainers in organic Agriculture through previous initiatives like Organic.Mednet and Organic.Balkanet into agricultural advisors in a new thematic area: organic farming in herbal, medicinal and aromatic plants. In the picture above these lines, representatives of all partner institutions and other external experts pose in the rectorate building of the University of Alcala, where the sessions of the meeting are taking place.

IE member Salvador is representing UAH in the project, in which we are leading WP3 dealing with the design and deployment of the e-learning platform where the courses will be delivered.

 

SOCIRES Final Meeting in Graz

During the last 2 days IE member Salvador Sanchez attended the final meeting of the Leonardo DaVinci TOI SOCIRES project.The meeting took place in Graz, and was hosted by ISCN Austria.

The project aim was to define a set of skills needed to analyze and define social influences and responsibilities of an organization, as well as skills needed to define procedures that would ensure the optimal ratio between social responsibilities and economic interests of the organization. In this meeting, as the final after 2 years of activities, the sessions held focused on the results of the different national training events in Spain, Slovenia and Greece, on the dissemination results and finally on the final report that will be submitted at the beginning of the next year to the Leonardo Agency.

On the social side, even if Graz is listed as a UNESCO Human Heritage centre due to the “harmonious blend of the architectural styles and artistic movements that have succeeded each other from the Middle Ages until the 18th century”, the rainy weather and the packed working sessions did not leave much time for walking around and visit. The most remarkable event was the joint dinner at a typical Styrian restaurant, certainly a must for all visiting this beautiful region in the south east of Austria.

 

agINFRA – Short technical meeting @ Athens

On June 21st, a technical meeting took place at AgroKnow headquarters in Athens. The agINFRA greek partner team recieved their colleagues from IPB, SZTAKI, INFN, ESPOL… and of course IE member Jaakko Lappalainen. The day started with a very warm welcome (along with the hot Athens’ weather) by AgroKnow memebers Nikos Manouselis, Laura Gravilut, Giannis Stoitsis and other 2 or 3 Nikos-s

The point of the meeting was to plan the development and deploy of a nice agINFRA prototype to show at the review in October.

AgroKnow workers are very lucky. A very nice place with terrace surrounded by trees. An agricultural environment for an agricultural company.

Everything is clear now. Everybody knows what to do. Good luck, agINFRA partners!

 

Working session on European projects with Nikos Manouselis and Cristian Cechinel

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.

 

Organic.Lingua first year review

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.

 

Open Discovery Space project kick-off in Athens

51 organizations from 23 countries gather from monday in Athens, Greece, for the kick off of Open Discovery Space – an innovative European Commission funded project (CIP PSP program) that aims to create a socially-powered, multilingual open learning infrastructure to boost the adaptation of eLearning Resources.

Panoramic view of Athens from the 11th floor of the President Hotel

According to Antonis Ramfos, Project Coordinator, “We are eager to rethink the current model of education [...] Open Discovery Space aims to turn the world of learning upside down by creating an entirely new model that will become the most powerful engine of change and innovation that the world of education has ever seen.” Open Discovery Space will achieve its ambitious goals by engaging teachers and pupils in the co-creation of innovative, new educational practices, it will advance the modernization of school education and, ultimately, it will engage stakeholders in the production of new user-generated educational activities in a socially-empowered, multilingual environment and empower them with integrated access to unique eLearning resources from educational repositories around the world.

Information Engineering team has a relevant role in Work Packages 7, 8 and 9 (mostly devoted to software design and development) but also some effort in WP6 and WP10, and this is the reason why Salvador is from last sunday in Athens working but also meeting old friends from previous and running projects such as Mathias Palmer, Hannes Ebner or Juanma Dodero just to name a few.

Plenary session with more than 90 representatives from the more than 50 partners of the consortium

 

Final Organic.Balkanet meeting and European workshop in Bucharest

This week the Organic.Balkanet project officially comes to an end. The final meeting is taking place in the University of Agronomical and Veterinary Sciences of Bucharest, Romania, where representatives of all project partners are joining forces to present the results of all work packages and establish the final tasks to achieve before the final report.

Panorama of our last joint dinner... we are all going to miss these good moments :')

As part of the activities, a European workshop called “Training challenges for Agricultural Professionals: the Organic.Balkanet experience” has been organized to disseminate project results and receive feedback from stakeholders and policy makers.

Panorama of the main conference room - European workshop

IE members Salvador Sanchez and Miguel Refusta are in Bucharest these days to present the results of work package 3 which was lead by our group, and also to contribute to the workshop with several presentations about the work of the group in e-courses administration, sustainability and other related efforts such as the VOA3R project.

 

MTSR 2011 at Izmir, Turkey

Last week, several IE members (in fact almost a full delegation including 2 senior members and 2 PhD students) were in Izmir, Turkey, to attend the Fifth Metadata and Semantics Research Conference (MTSR 2011), an event for researchers in the area of metadata and semantics with an inter-disciplinary focus. This year’s edition was hosted by the YasarUniversity and IE was, as usual, involved in the Organization committee, Scientific committee and Proceedings edition (as in previous editions, MTSR2011 proceedings have been published in the Springer’s CCIS Series).

Below, two videos from from the opening ceremony…

1) Canzonetta sull’aria from Mozart’s Le Nozze de Figaro to end the short opening concert by 2 Arts School students:

2) Miguel Angel Sicilia introducing keynote tutorial speaker Nikos Korfiatis:

Also, some pictures taken during the event:

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The event could be followed in twitter (#mtsr2011) and continously updated via the MTSR group in Facebook.

 

4th VOA3R project meeting in Izmir, Turkey

Monday to Wednesday this week the VOA3R project consortium representatives gathered together in Izmir for the project 4th plenary meeting. This fourth VOA3R Project Meeting, hosted by Yasar University, formally discussed the next steps to be taken and planned for the project particularly surrounding systems integration, as well as metadata profile definition.

IE members Miguel Angel and Salvador attended the sessions as the University of Alcala is the coordinator partner. Below some pictures taken during these 3 fruitful days of  intensive work.

Different moments of the meeting

 

Autumn School in Mesta

Salvador just outside the city fortress

Last week, IE member Salvador Sanchez-Alonso was in Chios island attending to the Joint School on IT-Enhanced Organic & Sustainable Education for Teachers. This training course is approved by the European Commission and supported by four European projects: CerOrganic, Organic.Mednet, Organic.Balkanet and ISLE. The training was addressed to all teachers, trainers and professionals interested in the field of Environmental & Ecological Education, aiming to provide a better understanding of the current advances related to Organic Farming, Sustainable Education, Blended Learning and Modern ICT tools. It was collocated with the Green Ideas workshop, an event  aimed at bringing together people and institutions that are interested into agricultural, biodiversity and rural education, so that collaboration opportunities may be explored and exploited.

IE role in the Joint school was twofold: to promote and disseminate Organic.Balkanet results to the attendees of the courses on one hand, and to teach on metadata annotation practices to agricultural experts on the other.

Both events (Green ideas and Joint school) took place in the medieval village of Mesta, heart of the “masticohoria” or mastic villages, a region of the island renowned for their cultivation of mastic trees. This village is a fortress-like complex of narrow streets, a laberinth of houses and arches. Mesta is unique -if we compare it to other medieval villages in the island- because it is the most well-preserved.

A panorama of Mesta from a nearby olive tree field