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My PhD project unveiled!

With the publications awaiting review, more and more collaborations incoming and partners requesting detailed info I figured it’s time to bring to light my current project.

GI2MO is an acronym for Generic Idea and Innovation Management Ontology. In practice, the project aims to introduce Semantic Web technologies into Idea Management Systems. The ontology is the foundation for that but not the only building block. We already have quite some achievements and with the new collaborations I hope for even more! For details see GI2MO website – most of the progress about the project is going to be posted there.

GI2MO project being the framework for my research done on UPM will also serve as the primary topic around which I plan to build my PhD.

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DEA marks two years spent in Spain (almost)!

This week I did my exam for ‘Diploma de Estudios Avanzados’ – short DEA. This marks roughly 2 years time spent in Spain doing my PhD. The “exam” is fairly simple, basically just a presentation about the research I did during the time and the courses I took. My presentation was mainly about the Semantic Web research I’ve done and the areas I apply it. You can check you the slides here.

I was talking about:

  • research I did on mashups during my first year here and the courses I took concurrently on the university (all this was rather a brief talk)
  • my current research on applying Semantic Web to Idea Management and my project (GI2MO) that will hopefully be the main pillar of my PhD (this was the main part of the presentation)

After being awarded with DEA the road to getting the PhD diploma is opened and in theory, if I had done enough research/publications, I might as well get it the day after (which obviously won’t happen ;p).

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Innovation (management) jungle

Soo finally proposal time ended and I’ve started doing some initial research towards my PhD that I plan to do on idea management techniques (and few other things that I wont disclose now :p).

The first goal for me is to find all out there and analyze the state of the art in both research and industry. So far the academia part seems fairly easy since there is quite little public research on the specific topic of idea management (like software rather then methodologies). The industry study is the real pain!

It’s been over a week of reading information on the web and to be honest at the moment I think it might be actually easier to forget about a deep SoA investigation and construct a innovation environment from scratch with my ideas rather then investigate all solutions out there available on the market. When at the end of the day I’m happy to comprehend all, I get to find the next day another 10 apps that claim to do the same and be ‘the market leaders’ 🙁 Also the amount of marketing flavored info stead of facts makes my head hurt.

Oh also dont bother sending requests for trials or demos to companies in the area…responsivness is 0.

Either way I’m starting to write my report on everything and publishing it hopefully fairly soon!

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Conference spotlight: WISE2009

Finally the EU proposals rush is over. It was a great time with lots of new experiences but now finally I have some time to catch up with other things like doing actual research or .. writing on my scientific blog:)

During October I went to WISE 2009 conference hosted in Poland/Poznan this year. I was presenting a paper on mashups and integration of visual environments:

“Integrated Environment for Visual Data-Level Mashup Development”

here are the slides of my presentation: mashups_wise2009.pdf

The presentation went surprisingly well, and instead of doing a 20 min talk, I think I did 35-40 min since one of the presenters after me didnt show 😀 My paper was really short/simple and more like an idea rather then genuine research (initially I got accepted for a workshop which was then converted to a special session or something). I kept the presentation simple as well and to fill the rest of the time I tried more of a business oriented talk so I had lots and lots of questions and feedback from the audience. Feels nice ! Ok maybe it was less science in all this but I think it was more enjoyable for everybody and I had really a lot more options for collaborations afterwards then when giving the usual geek talk. So there was time for details in f2f talks too. Too bad this is not really my primary research area. In general – good training for presentation skills but I think I’m happy that the paper didnt get accepted for the bigger conferences before, they would eat me alive I’m sure of that 😉

As for the conference – I’m a bit disappointed with it, did not really find much interesting presentations for me during the conference time and well…after WWW earlier this year, I think its gonna be hard to impress me anyway 🙂 For WWW I would be happy going just to listen, for WISE – not really, especially not for this price.

Some of the papers that had quite good presentations were during the Visualization and User Interfaces sessions by a group from Kyoto University – there were few papers by those guys mostly everything connected to mining and presenting or searching information/news about the past. Quite interesting I have to say especially that I talked with one of postdocs from Kyoto about this ealier and I knew what’s the deal.

Oh one more thing that I obviously was most interested in: semantic session – not so semantic at all and felt like listening to people from past era of Semantic Web. I suppose working at DERI and participating in events like LOD@WWW sets high standards 🙂

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Time flies – one year in Spain

So…one year passed since I came to Spain. As expected, it was a major change, especially that I’ve decided to finally start a PhD after working for past years in Ireland at the DERI institute.

My first year on the university was in large part about participating in obligatory PhD courses (in spanish!). Now, I’m almost done with that (the student year formally ends in September). For each of the courses students have to prepare some kind of work – usually a publication style paper and present it in class room for others. Depending on the course type I was writing and investigating some interesting topics. I’ve put quite some work into this, hence, I figured I’ll publish the papers here:

  • Semantic Web evolution: towards the usability of data (for Aplicaciones y Servicios Avanzados Internet course) [paper]
  • The Two Cultures (for Aplicaciones y Servicios Avanzados Internet course) [presentation]
  • Overview of Cloud Computing large-scale processing technologies (Metodologias y Arquitecturas Orientadas a Objetos para Sistemas Telematicos) [paper] [presentation]
  • Dynamic FAQ systems (Agentes Inteligentes. Aspectos Metodologicos, Logicos y de Contexto) [paper] [presentation]
  • Sentiment Analysis: Introduction and State of the Art overview (Tecnologias Lingüisticas y Aplicaciones en la Web) [paper] [presentation]
  • Metodología de desarrollo ágil para sistemas móviles (Temas Avanzados de Ingenieria de Servicios Telematicos) [paper]
  • some paper about PhD Thesis planning (Metodologia y Documentacion Cientifica) [paper eng] [paper esp]
  • bunch of  writeups about seminars on UPM during the year (for Seminario de Investigación course)
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Hello (research) world!

Yep, it’s a fact. After quite some years of my engagement in various research projects, I’ve finally decided to run a research blog and publish information about various things I do or think about with relation to my scientific work.

Time will tell how sucessful I’ll be with this but I plan to update this space constantly and publish the progress/news of my work on PhD. Also most likely I’ll put here some ideas regarding my work, since lately I’m getting a lot of those and I figured it’s part of my work to share this too!

Welcome and enojoy.