SemaGROW 2nd Project meeting at Rome + LINQ2013 conference

IERU members Miguel-Angel Sicilia, Jaakko Lappalainen and the new member Alberto Nogales, attended the 2nd biannual meeting of this project in Rome. The host of this meeting was the Universitá di Roma Tor Vergata the first two days, and the rest was hosted by FAO at their headquarters in the downtown of Rome.

During the sessions, the partnership went deeper on design issues on the project and presented the status of several deliverables. The work on SemaGROW keeps on going!

At FAO took place the last 2 days the LINQ2013 conference, where IE member David Martín presented his recent research work

Also Miguel-Angel Sicilia gave a keynote speech… the future of the world seems to be decided here at FAO!

 

 

LAK 2013 Conference

Last week, IE member Enayat Rajabi, attended the LAK 2013 conference and the ODS workshop in Leuven, Belgium. There was also a common meeting between GLOBE and ARIADNE members on 8th April (in the afternoon) that he participated as well. In this meeting, attendances shared their ideas about some issues that large educational repositories are faced. They discussed the topics in several groups and finalized them in a conclusion session.

Enayat also presented a paper in Lacro 2013 workshop held in the LAK conference. The paper reported on a investigation about keywords space of the GLOBE materials.

Enayat during his presentation at LAK2013

There was another meeting which discussed the ODS(Open Discovery Space) challenges and attendances shared their ideas about many technical and non-technical issues about this project. INTRASOFT led the meeting and posed several issues about statistical data over the ODS. Enayat was the UAH representative in ARIADNE General Assembly which held on 9th of April in the afternoon. ARIADNE General Assembly is a private meeting restricted to the ARIADNE members and considers the new status of current projects, opportunities and general ideas.

Night view of Leuven

The city of Leuven is a fabulous Flemish city, and it’s just a jump from Brussels (25km). Leuven (Louvain in French) is the chief town of the province of Vlaams-Brabant. It’s an ancient capital – the home of the Dukes of Brabant since 1200 – and in medieval times an important cloth trading centre. Today it boasts one of Belgium’s most ornate town halls and is Flanders’ oldest university town.

 

IE members in MTSR 2012

Last week, IE members Salvador and Miguel Angel participated in MTSR 2012 in several ways: presenting papers, chairing sessions and overall networking with collegaues in other universities and institutions working in similar topics. This year, this important event for researchers in the area of metadata and semantics was held in Cadiz, a city in southwestern Spain. Below, some images taken during these days.

Taken from http://www.flickr.com/people/mtsr2012/

 

IE in SPDECE 2012 in Alicante

Last week several IE members visited Alicante for the annual Conference on Learning Objects SPDECE. This year’s edition took place in the University of Alicante and the group presented not only a good number of papers but also a keynote on our current EU projects and carried out several dissemination activities for projects Open Discovery Space and Organic.Lingua.

As usual, we met old friends and collaborators such as Juliá Minguillón from UOC, Manuel Prieto from University of Castilla la Mancha, Manuel Marco and Pedro Pernías from University of Alicante and Juan Ramón Pérez from University of Oviedo, among many others.

IE member Salvador Sanchez-Alonso and Manuel Prieto from University of Castilla la Mancha ready to share a typical Alicante paella

 

SPDECE 2012 in Alicante

As every year by this time, several IE members are strongly involved in the new (9th) edition of SPDECE, a yearly conference aimed at providing an open forum for educators and computer specialists to present and discuss research on the different aspects of Technology-Enhanced Learning. Therefore, SPDECE will cover, but is not limited to: new teaching and learning environments, content standards and metadata, learning objects and learning designs and repositories of learning resources.

Streets of Alicante (photo courtesy of "where are the joneses' " and taken from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wherearethejoneses/905138906/)

SPDECE 2012 emphasizes inter-disciplinarity and multi-disciplinarity, fostering interchange between educational and learning sciences, computing and other disciplines. The event thus welcomes papers using a diversity of kinds of research methods, including but not limited to empirical studies, ICT developments, action research and experimental studies.

This year’s edition will be held in the mediterranean city of Alicante, in the eastern coast of Spain.

 

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.

 

MTSR 2010 Conference in Alcala

From yesterday, and during 3 days, Alcala de Henares is hosting the 4th Metadata and semantics research conference, MTSR 2010. This conference aims at becoming the main event for researchers in the area of metadata and semantics with an inter-disciplinary focus.

 

Partial view of the room where Ferdinando Villa gave his keynote talk

 

This years’ edition includes interesting keynote talks by international experts such as Christian M. Stracke, an expert and senior consultant with international reputation and numerous references within his main working fields policies and quality for learning, quality management, E-Learning, competence modelling and standardization; Dave Roberts, from the National History Museum, London, well known after his contribution to the EDIT project (in particular his work on Scratchpads); Ferdinando Villa, a renowned researcher on high-performance computer simulation, ecological modeling, and artificial intelligence applied to environmental data and model integration; and Brigitte Joerg, an elected CERIF taskgroup leader at euroCRIS -a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of Research Information Systems and their interoperability- and member of the euroCRIS Board.

The conference can be followed in Twitter searching for the tag #mtsr2010 and also through the Facebook MTSR (MeTadata and Semantics Research conference) open group.

 

IE members meet Richard Messnarz

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.

 

CCITA 2009 – Spanish conquest of Yucatán

This week IE members Miguel Angel and Salvador will be attending to CCITA 2009 a latin american conference on learning objects and learning technologies. They will be givin a workshop on learning objects lifecycle, from birth to death.

But before the conference starts, they will broaden their minds with unvaluable knowledge about the Maya gods -Chac Mol is everybody’s favourite- and secrets. In the picture above, visiting Chichen Itza.

Below Miguel-Angel is in front of “La Iglesia” (the building at the left). La Iglesia is a Puuc-style temple with Chaac (a rain deity) in the middle of the facade.

 

Miguel-Angel in front of “La Iglesia”, learning about Mayan religion

In “La Iglesia” we can see the four “Bacabes” (sustainers of heaven) two at each side of the Chaac mask in the center. Below you have the pictures. It is said that the bacabes are in the form of several animals: armadillo, snail, turtle and crab. Can you identify them in the pictures?

 

Ontose 2009

Today IE members Daniel Rodriguez and Salvador Sanchez-Alonso are attending to Ontose 2009, the latest edition of a series of bianual workshops on ontologies for information systems and engineering. Ontose was conceived as a forum promoting challenging discussions and cross-fertilization over multidisciplinary research areas from the ontologies point of view.

This year’s edition has has been organized by the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (Austria) as part of the 21st International Conference on Advanced Information Systems, CAISE 2009. We have been lucky enough as to count with the presence of Nicola Guarino, one of the key names in the field of ontology in computer science. His keynote on the ontological foundations of Service Science has been not only thought provoking but also very interesting from the point of view of the challenges that the new service-based economy will have to face in the near future. In the photo below these lines, Christian Kop from Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Nicola Guarino and IE member Salvador Sanchez-Alonso.