Successful PhD dissertation to close the year

Friday 20th of december, IE doctorate student Alejandra Segura presented her thesis defense in the Rectorate building of the University of Alcala. This research work, supervised by IE member Salvador Sanchez and Manuel E. Prieto from the University of Castilla la Mancha, aimed to propose a strategy for query expansion based on domain ontologies. According to this work, it is possible to find an strategy allowing instructional designers to find objects in a repository relevant enough as to be reused in the design of new courses or in the composition of new, more complex resources. To achieve this goal, proposals of query expansions both in the field of information retrieval in general or specifically on learning object repositories were analyzed.

For the purpose of evaluation, an experiment in the area of genetics was designed. This experiment used the Gene Ontology as a knowledge base and the MERLOT repository as a provider of learning objects in this domain. In the picture above these lines, Alejandra during her presentation in front of the evaluation board (left).

Third Organic.Mednet project meeting in Athens

This Thursday and Friday Athens hosts the third consortium meeting of the Organic.Mednet project. IE member Salvador Sanchez -the project coordinator who already attended the Organic.Balkanet meeting and the First Joint Workshop of the three Leonardo DaVinci projects on Organic Agriculture- ,  is attending the sessions. The Greek Certification and Inspection Organization (DIO) is hosting the meeting.

Sessions will cover important issues such as the design of the pilot courses our agricultural experts will be giving to farmers in Greece, Spain and Turkey next spring, the agreement on technical decissions related to the MOLE platform, the decission on having a new silent partner on board –TSRI, who will be providing solutions for sustainability issues-, and the organization of the Organic.Mednet european workshop that will take place in Switxerland in June. As in the other meetings in this project, we enjoyed a very nice athmosphere as well as a very good disposition from everyone to do their best in the benefit of our project. In the picture below, a photo with all the attendees, including Alain Sandoz from our silent partner Prodague, who was in one of our project meetings for the first time. Unfortunately, Juan Manuel Dodero from TSRI -the soon to come new silent partner- had to flight back to Spain before we could take this photo.

Representatives of the project partners posing outside DIO offices in Athens

3rd Balkanet consortium meeting in Athens

Monday and Tuesday this week Athens is hosting the third consortium meeting of the Organic.Balkanet project. IE member Salvador Sanchez is attending the sessions together with TSRI representative Juan Manuel Dodero, who is presenting his association to the consortium to explore the possibility of having TSRI on board as a silent partner. Very important issues need to be decided upon, such as the sustainability strategy, the train the trainers event (which will likely take place in Maribor next June), the way we will use MOLE in the project, the design of the pilot trials, etc. In the picture below, a moment of the Tuesday morning session.

One of the sessions of the project in GRNet premises

PhD dissertation in Salamanca

IE member Salvador Sanchez has been invited to be part of the review board of a PhD dissertation supervised by Francisco Garcia Peñalvo, leader of the GRIAL research group at University of Salamanca. The PhD thesis by Hector Barbosa, a Mexican lecturer working in GRIAL’s research projects, presented Adasat, an automated generator of QTI-compliant tests. This tool generates personalized tests depending on the learner’s learning styles and preferences.

It’s veeeery cold in Salamanca these days (during the night, it cools off to -5ºC !) but the warmth welcome by our Salamanca friends, the beautiful university city of Salamanca and the nice research work finished helps to warm up. Below, a shot taken from Francisco’s desk. Everybody wish to had this view from their desks!

Salamanca seen from Fan Peñalvo's desk

EHR meeting in Lund, Sweden

Two weeks ago, IE member Leonardo Lezcano attended a two-day meeting in Lund where the Centre for eHealth in Sweden (CeHis) and The National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) presented their archetypes approach to the rest of teams involved in implementing EHR systems. This meeting was a follow up to the CEN/ISO EN13606 Workshop held in Madrid in June, 2010.

The first day focused on the foundation for the information structure from a clinical perspective while the second day focused “technical” aspects of creating and handling archetypes based on the clinical perspective.

It was a great opportunity to meet Thomas Beale, CTO of Ocean Informatics UK and one of the founders of the openEHR Foundation, and Rong Chen, project leader of the openEHR Java Reference Implementation Project.

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Pilot training course of agricultural professionals and advisors in Adana, Turkey

This week, IE member Salvador Sanchez-Alonso is in Adana (Turkey) coordinating the first (of the three planned) pilot training courses of agricultural professionals, advisors and trainers. The course runs from the 8th to the 12th of November 2010, and is part of the activities of the Organic.Mednet project.

Different moments of the course activities

Apart from the trainers -members of almost all parner intitutions- the people participating in this training are advisors operating in the field of organic agriculture, teachers at vocational schools and trainers of farmers. The event is being a success as we have 13 agricultural professionals from the area of the Çukurova area. Later on, we will replicate the course in Spain and Greece.

From left to right Salvador, Zeynel (Çukurova University), Kostas (DIO), Bas and Charlie (IFSAT) and Xenia (Technical University of Crete)

The training course meetings are hosted by the Turkish partner of Organic.Mednet, Çukurova University, in the huge campus that this university has in the outskirts of the city of Adana. The weather is so nice that we (the trainers of the course) usually have a coffee after lunch in one of the areas outside the cafeterias, as in the picture above these lines, taken this afternoon in the one that faces the Seyhan reservoir.

New paper on clinical archetypes associations through UMLS

The Journal of Medical Systems has recently published an article that describes a method to trace semantic connections between clinical archetypes, based on the Unified Medical Language System:

Associating clinical archetypes through UMLS Metathesaurus term clusters

Clinical archetypes are modular definitions of clinical data, expressed using standard or open constraint-based data models as the CEN EN13606 and openEHR. There is an increasing archetype specification activity that raises the need for techniques to associate archetypes to support better management and user navigation in archetype repositories. This paper reports on a computational technique to generate tentative archetype associations by mapping them through term clusters obtained from the UMLS Metathesaurus. The terms are used to build a bipartite graph model and graph connectivity measures can be used for deriving associations.

 

Bipartite graph between clinical archetypes (blue nodes) and UMLS terms (green nodes)

 

 

The thicker the edge, the stronger the relationship between the associated archetypes.

 

Successful end of the Organic.Edunet project

Last week the whole consortium of the Organic.Edunet project gathered in Budapest for the final review meeting. During the last 3 years, we have developed a portal which provides educational resources about organic agriculture and agroecology in digital format, a methodology of work through scenarios, and a federation model that is already been used as the basis for “derived efforts” such as Organic.Mednet, Organic.Balkanet and CerOrganic.

The Organic.Edunet project was originally intended to facilitate access, usage and exploitation of digital educational content related to Organic Agriculture and Agroecology. Today, our Web portal provides access to more than 10,000 resources from 11 institutional collections and 2 user communities. After all the presentations, the result of the review was a green++ flag (in the own words of the Project Officer) and a explicit recognition of the quality of the work and the consortium team.

Representatives of all partners pose with the Project Officer and ther reviewers

On the personal side, I look back and realise how these 3 years represent an unforgettable learning experience -not always, but most often- for the good. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to lead the UAH team in the most exposed Work Package by far: the development of the portal and the creation of the semantic search engine. My special thanks to Nikos Manouselis, the man behind the idea; to Aage Steem, for his kindness and comprehension during the ontology creation (good luck on your new dedication!); Alberto and Ramiro, my close collaborators and excellent programmers (without them everything would have been harder); to Maria Toader, always ready to help and by far the quickest in all translation tasks! ; and to Nikos Palavitsinis, for his flexibility and patience when I submitted the cost reports later (virtually always!)

Drinks on the success of the Organic.Edunet project

UAH core development team celebrates

After all, we built a group that will hopefully cooperate in new projects in the forthcoming years, so we had many reasons to celebrate with a few drinks and enjoy the lively Budapest nightlife. Well done everybody and… Cheers!

Organic.Balkanet second project meeting in Alcala

Last Thursday and Friday Alcala hosted the second project meeting of our Leonardo da Vinci project Organic.Balkanet. It was a a very productive and interesting meeting, including useful discussions which will be very relevant for the success of the project.

But maybe the words that better express what happened in Alcala during these 2 days are those of our coordinator, professor G. V. Roman, who said: “a very nice location – Alcala de Henares, an University City, in an academic environment of culture, science and history; a meeting room with complete endowment, very adequate for the meeting and in a very interesting building; very good accomodation in El Bedel Hotel; meeting room, accomodation, cafeteria and restaurant almost in the same location in the middle of the City, and… the very nice Joint Dinner, in a noble environment, with specific tasty Spanish drinks and food, and a friendly atmosphere.”

Photo of the group in the patio of the Malaga College (Colegio de Malaga), where the meetings took place

Research stay of Leonardo Lezcano at GRNET

Leonardo & Nikos

IE member Leonardo Lezcano is currently staying at GRNET premises in Athens as part of his PhD research plan. It’s being a great opportunity to meet the GRNET group, led by Dr. Nikos Manouselis, who is an important partner of our IE group and the project manager of the Organic.Edunet project. During the stay, Leonardo and Nikos will be designing and carrying out some ontological approaches to knowledge representation in the biological and medical domains, which is closely related to their lines of research.

The city of Athens is really hot and full of tourists these days of the year (35º – 40º C). Therefore, it’s not a bad idea to escape from the urban area and visit some near and interesting places like the Temple of Poseidon. It is located on the southern tip of the peninsula of Attica, at Cape Sounion. Built in 440 BC, the temple offers quietness and relax as well as stunning views of the Aegean Sea and one the most famous sunsets in all the Mediterranean Sea.

Temple of Poseidon