SmILE Semantic Information Systems and Language Engineering Group

Last week's WebScience conference is over; time for a little summary. Now in its second year, the conference was for the first time co-located with the WWW conference in Raleigh, NC. On the one hand, this was great, because it meant that, if you're part of the WWW crowd, you would get to kill two birds with one stone. Also, WebSci obviously benefitted from the great location.

I went to Hong Kong to attend the IUI2010 (Intelligent User Interfaces) conference. On the first day of the conference, I presented two papers at two different workshops. First I presented the paper "Konduit VQB: a Visual Query Builder for SPARQL on the Social Semantic Desktop" at the VISSW2010 workshop (which I co-organized), on behalf of my colleagues who could not be there.

I just spent a whole week in Stockholm at ICSOC 2009, first chairing our workshop on User-generated Services (UGS2009) (see below) and then immersing myself in the service-oriented computing crowd. The whole event took place in Kista, which is something like a huge, IT-related business park north of Stockholm (apparently some 30.000 people work there).

With a short break after trips to IJCAI'09 and AIME'09, I finished the summer conference marathon at CBMS'09, 22nd in the series of IEEE symposiums on Computer-Based Medical Systems. The conference was rather small, organised through two days as one general session and a lot of parallel special tracks with more or less independent program committees.

Immediately after leaving IJCAI'09 (see the respective report for details), I went to Verona in Italy to attend AIME'09, a conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine where I was to present a full paper about CORAAL.

From July 12th to 14th, I had a chance to attend IJCAI'09 in Pasadena, CA - the 21st event in the series of IJCAI conferences that are perhaps the most prestigious gatherings of the global AI research community. I went there to present a contribution accepted for the collocated AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium, which was organised on July 12th and 13th.

Reading guide: This is a report on the Elsevier Grand Challenge final. For a general information on the event, read on the whole post. For a shameless self-promotion of us, the CORAAL team, and a couple of enthusiastic shouts, you can directly jump here... ;)

With a couple of months of delay, I'm going to share with you the experience I had at Web Intelligence 2008, in December, in Sydney, Australia.

Last Monday (December 15th) we were in the (in)famous Stata Center at MIT in order to give a talk at the Elsevier Grand Challenge semifinals. Ed Hovy, the chair of the committee judging the challenge contestants, had a nice remark in his brief morning key-note.

VoCamp is new series of events that sets out to build vocabularies for the Semantic Web in a bottom-up, grass roots like fashion. The first one just took place in Oxford last week, where 20 SW and linked data practitioners met in Wolfson College to discuss and design vocabularies and ontologies for various topics. The next VoCamp will take place in November, here in Galway. More on my blog.