SmILE Semantic Information Systems and Language Engineering Group

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.

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.

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.

I had a chance to attend the IV08 conference in London to present a paper there. The scope of the conference was quite broad, so it featured a lot of work from Theory, Techniques, and Applications of InfoVis to Imaging, Virtual Reality, Open Source Intelligence & Web MIning, etc. Just to highlight a few talks I found interesting:

It's already a month ago that I was at ESWC2008 (01/06 - 05/06), so the memory of the conference is no longer that fresh. However, I'll try and give a short trip report anyway. Personally, the highlight was obviously winning the best demo award, but of course there was more. For the Smile group, the whole event was a great success, with a total of three accepted full papers, as well as the Konduit demo and workshop papers. In more detail, we had the following contributions:

I have just come back from a very cool games research workshop, where I gave a presentation about mashing up World of Warcraft with the Semantic Web. More over on kantenwerk.

IUI08 is one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. The topics were very broad, and as can be expected the presentations and demo’s very visual and interactive. I also met a lot of interesting people - from an academic as well as a social point of view. And of course the venue was also optimal for January (Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain)!

I’m sitting in my hotel room, relaxing after the this year’s combined ISWC and ASWC has come to a close yesterday afternoon. All the talks have been given, the posters and demos presented, name cards handed out, dinners eaten, beers drunk, discussions had and new contacts made. So, how was it?

For the Smile group, I think I can safely say that with three papers presented, as well as a lot of smaller stuff such as posters, demos and Semantic Web Challenge contributions, the conference was a great success. Tudor’s paper on SALT even got nominated as one of the three best student papers (and, I’m proud to say, I was co-author on that paper :)! Congratulations Tudor! We didn’t get the award in the end, but so what.

Also the paper on the CLOnE controlled language, which Brian had co-authored, was well received. Quite surprinsingly, I had been given the chance to chair that session (Natural Language Interfaces), which was a new experience to me, and a lot of fun.