long time… no posts…

yes… i’ve been away for too long but that doesn’t mean i haven’t worked…

here are a few lines about it…

first semester ended by february but one important event before that was the doctoral symposium: DSIE’10

this doctoral symposium is where all prodei phd students rehearse a conference from choosing committees, organizing everything, writing a paper and reviewing pairs, etc.

i confess my presentation didn’t went that good and i felt lousy afterwards…

i’m very much used to talk/present about subjects i’m really pro or at least very sure of myself and seems like presentations (doing it and speaking before an audience) always go smoothly… this was not the case…

first, i was not inside the theme so despite all lack of time for lots of other things and other curricular units, i was nor sure how to state my point of view moreover to talk about it in a coherent and transparent way…

people didn’t understand the message and they asked questions as if i was talking about lots of other things that where peripheral, accessories…

this really put me down…
i felt not only i failed to tell the message as well as gave a poor image about the research theme… and that is really bad…

later that day was the symposium dinner and i had the chance to talk to professor eugénio (i was sitting right beside him at the table) and that made me feel a little better as i talked to him more calmly and explain what i had researched and found and what were my core ideas… i’m really sorry that my supervisor didn’t had the chance to go to this dinner…

one of these days i will post more just about just and my presentation…

stay tuned… i’ll back in no time!

today’s msr lecture by eduarda mendes rodrigues…

today’s lecture on methodologies in scientific research has an invited guest… eduarda mendes rodrigues is a recent phd [2004], she was a undergraduated student here at feup and did her research and graduation …

eduarda worked 4 years at microsoft research in cambridge, uk and is going to talk about microsoft research labs and the work there…

microsoft research is the main research lab in computer science… (didn’t know this…)

we watched this video

this is a promotional video but it illustrate some projects mr has done or is involved in and also shows researchers talking about research…

the areas of expertise at mr cambridge, uk

• computer science
• computer-mediated living
• machine learning and perception
• online services and advertising
• programming, principles and tools
• systems and networking
• external research
  • european science initiative
  • research partnership program

what’s it like to work at mr?… you have the experts next door jic :)

about eduarda’s research…

• data mining: text and graphic mining [map the skeleton of a website just looking at its url]
• analysis of online communities and social network
• information management interfaces

~ social web

• social networking
• content sharing
• knowledge sharing

“people interact online, generate social media… … patterns are left behind”

• community buzz [‘hot topics’ in newsgroups communities]
• node xl [network analysis and visualization add-on for ms excel]
• social footprints [analysis of content and social interactions in social communities]

§ classify messages automatically to predict how will be answered

§ detect situations on answers/voting reliability

§ nodexl and the visualization of social networks… clustering… cohesion…

§ research desktop… a work more on the user interface

researchers needs… how to improve this and put things in an integrated environment that facilitate all these ? [tags objects!!! everything is tagged :)]

activities | tools | library | notes [see video here]

lecture ended with some notes on “how to write a paper” and this presentation by simon peyton jones… [more here]

try to publish on top conferences…

read papers from top conferences…

see conclusions and future work from top conferences to grasp ideas to future work and research directions

work! don’t expect your supervisor to work for you :)

[eduarda’s presentation will be available soon]

and left us this nice game :)

ec-tel 2009 ~ future learning landscapes workshop

i’ve just finished presenting the “a framework for Personalized e-Learning Environments” at future learning landscapes workshop, at ec-tel09…

i will update this post later but meanwhile here is the abstract and the presentation

data mining and knowledge discovery… ecac to friends…

Information Extraction is the last class i have… this forth is about knowledge discovery and subjects around information extraction, data mining, information visualization,…

very interesting!

i have to say i’ve been interested in visualization for some time and this class sure feels like it’s going to be a happy marriage between something i’ve always been keen to know more about and the technical and technological aspects i never learned before…

this is also a discipline common to both ProDEI and MIEIC so there are more or less 30 of us in classes… again there are slight differences, specially because they – mieic – have an exam and prodei students have a “more substantial” paper to present and no exam…

we started by seeing the discipline’s website and then professor josé luis borges (jlb) gave an introduction to data mining.

i found quite interesting:

• netflix prize
• kdd ~ knowledge discovery in databases process
• outlier detection
• power of visualization [visual complexity website example]
• napoleon russian campaign graphic [by edward tufte]
• kdnuggets.com

on my small and brief incursion on kdnuggets i found some links that seemed interesting… next week i shall put all these in my recent http://delicious.com/4phd

• http://twendz.waggeneredstrom.com/
• http://www.kdnuggets.com/solutions/twitter-analytics.html
• http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23101/
• http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2004/10/towards_tagbased_bookmark_management_in_web_browsers/
• http://www.rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2006/05/social_networks_2.html
• http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/neville/papers/jensen-neville-nas2002.pdf
• http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/pedrod/papers/iis04.pdf
• http://www.slideshare.net/alexsingleton/geographic-data-mining-of-online-social-networks
• http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1570068
• http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~isabelle/cci.pdf
• http://konterkariert.tumblr.com/post/42355329/twitter-starts-web-data-mining-with-summize
• http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/managing-infosec/data-mining-twitter-29498

must see datasets to work with and think about a project…

dapi… in english Information Description, Storage and Retrieval

yes… Information Description, Storage and Retrieval class today was quite “fast and furious”…

ok… not really furious because professor joão correia lopes (jcl) is quite a nice professor (i was surprised to see he knows lots of his students’ names and he is very friendly in classes) but the way he talks is really fast and managed to get my head spinning…

first a “curiosity” :) i arrived 5 minutes late to class and when i opened the door i was expecting a room with 4/5 people and i saw more than 20 inside… this class is shared with the integrated master in informatics and computing engineering so there are a lot of us, students. from ProDEI we are 5 or 6, not sure, and we have somewhat different rules, not meaning better or worst…

about the discipline…

we have some strict rules, about assignments, reports/papers and presentations and there is a final exam… i like these…

i have to say that classes’ planning is very detailed and the website is full of information and resources…

these classes have two parts: one lecture and second part hands-on and it was on the second-half i met professor maria cristina ribeiro (mcr)

this next week i will have to think about the project proposal and the data set it’s going to be about…

and looking forward to it…

2nd day…

today’s class was the first on Interaction and Visual Simulation Environments…

professor nunes ferreira (fnf) gave an introduction on the discipline and what is expected for us (four) to do… then professor augusto sousa (aas) talked about the first part with more detail…

about the two parts how the discipline is going to function:

> next 4 weeks we will have to learn the basics of computer graphics and then we will have an oral q&a session on the 20th october…
aas and fnf proposed the following chapters of the “introduction on computer graphics” foyer and van dam book:

• interaction
• geometric transformations
• modeling ~ surfaces | solid
• rendering ~ local and global light models | visibility
• non-photorealistic rendering

> on the second part we will present a paper on the state-of-the-art of a interaction related theme… the idea is for each one to study a theme, reading some relevant papers, and to research and present a paper about the state-of-the-art around that theme/technology…
proposed themes were around:

• gestures interaction [ex. OvO game]
• face interaction [ex. Opera face gestures, video]
• tactile interaction [ex. quick writing by ken perlin]
• audible and tactile interaction [ex. one-hand round selector with audio feedback]

i’ve already got the book from the library so now i’ll have to study :)

see you tomorrow…

and finally the adventure began…

i woke up really anxious and looking forward to my big (huge) adventure: the prodei classes started today…

yes… the first day…

starting classes with MIC – Methodologies for Scientific Research – but before MIC presentation, professor Eugénio Oliveira (Scientific Committee of ProDEI) gave a brief presentation about the Doctoral Programme.

curiosities:
§ the number of ECTS translated to working hours is, after all math, 40h per week
§ there are 9 non-portuguese colleagues, 5 of which are brazilian
§ we present ourselves (15 of 25 were attending classes today) and later i will give some insight about the group

then came MIC presentation and program (here), started with professor Eugénio Oliveira (eco) and ended with professor António Augusto Sousa (aas) talking about the Doctoral Symposium we will have to organize.

it’s very interesting the idea and experimentation and i will see previous DSIE for inspiration…

aas told us to start thinking about the Scientific Committee and Organization Committee for the Doctoral Symposium and specially about the 2 elements to be chair in each of them…

well… 3 hours full…

and already looking forward for tomorrow’s classes :)