SSFW09

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

 

Visit of Dr. Manouselis

Nikos Manouselis arrived in Madrid yesterday from Athens. Dr. Manouselis, from GRNet Athens, is the project manager in the Organic.Edunet project and one of our best partners in Europe. He will be in Spain during the summer so that we can plan and organise a few things we collaborate together in.

Dr. Manouselis gave a very interesting talk on collaborative filtering in technology-enhanced learning to our students and Faculty, and he will be working with us in related topics during his stay with us.

 

Research stay at Athens

These days, IE member Salvador Sanchez is in Athens to strengthen links with the GRNet group lead by Dr. Nikos Manouselis. During his stay, Salvador will be working on the design of the Organic.Edunet portal, as well as attending a few sessions for planning future joint project proposals, and meeting PhD students.

Remains of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

In such a long stay in Greece it is almost mandatory to visit the Oracle of Apollo, established in the 8th century BC in Delphi. In this place on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, Apollo -who was in Greek mythology the god of light and truth-, dispensed oracular wisdom through the Pythia. It is well known that this oracle at Delphi was visited by kings, philosophers and politicians, whose decisions were often influenced by the oracle’s responses. It was so important in the antiquity that ancient Greeks even established a right and a precedence for consulting the oracle: the promanteia.

 

Stay of IE members at KTH

IE members Ramiro Cano and Alberto Abián are these days in Stockholm (Sweden), in a technical meeting with researchers from KTH (Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan) and Uppsala University. The meeting is enclosed in the framework of the Organic.Edunet project, and will help all the participants to achieve a better understanding of their respective technologies.

 

The song remains the same

Here in Reading everything seems to be the same month after month. Last post from here compared the infamous English weather to that in Spain. As it can be seen in the screenshot below, taken from my laptop a couple of hours ago, not many changes from then on.

IE members Daniel and Salvador are working almost full time these days, even though most of our fellow teachers in Spain are on holydays. However, many projects in mind, and a lot pending tasks are being finished, so we have many reasons to be happy about being in Britain!

 

San Fermin as seen from Reading

This is intended to be a very short message just to state the difference between staying in Alcala on july and doing so in Reading, England.

The bottom-right part of the image below speaks for itself.

Salvador Sanchez-Alonso’s google desktop on 7th july 2008

 

Summer stay of IE members in the UK

IE members Daniel Rodriguez and Salvador Sanchez-Alonso are now in the UK and will be the whole summer until 31st august. Daniel will be partially visiting Brunel University and doing some collaboration work with both Brunel and Reading researchers. Salvador will stay at Reading University for the whole period.

From left to right: Prof. Vassil Alexandrov, Daniel Rodriguez, Salvador Sánchez-Alonso and Ismail Bhana