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MultimediaN is going for gold
From 18 to 20 June 2007 MultimediaN presented itself to its main relations in science center NEMO in Amsterdam. On 18 June a Golden Pavilion was opened by the project leaders of MultimediaN. The Golden Pavilion was an expo of ten Golden Demos, that showed the innovative work of MultimediaN. On 19 and 20 June the midterm review of the multimedia project took place. MultimediaN have been assessed by an international evaluation commission.
To get an impression of the event, see the pictures.
Fulbright grant for Jan Willem Streefkerk
Jan Willem Streefkerk (TNO) is awarded a Fulbright grant. Within N6 (Professional’s Dashboard) Jan Willem Streefkerk is working on his PhD in mobile, location-based and adaptive attentive services for professionals in dynamic and critical environments, like police officers on surveillance. The grant has been awarded to enrich this research in an international context, in collaboration with one of the top scientists in the field, Prof. D. Scott McCrickard. Every year, about seven grants are available for PhD's, who want to do research at an American university. This September, Jan Willem will leave to conduct a series of experiments for three months at the Centre for Human Computer Interaction (CHCI) at Virginia Tech, studying the timing and interruptions of notifications for teams of officers.
Best student paper award received by Roberto Cornacchia and Arjen de Vries
Roberto Cornacchia and Arjen de Vries – both working for MultimediaN) have been awarded the best student paper award at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) in Rome (April 2007), for their paper ‘A Parameterised Search Engine’. This paper introduces the concept of a Parameterised Search System (PSS), which allows flexibility in user queries, and - more importantly - allows system engineers to easily define customised search strategies. Putting this idea into practise requires a carefully designed system architecture that supports a declarative abstraction language for the specification of search strategies. These specifications should stay as close as possible to the problem definition (i.e., the retrieval model to be used in the search application), abstracting away the details of the physical organisation of data and content. In their paper, Roberto and Arjen show how extending an existing XML retrieval system with an abstraction mechanism based on array databases meets this requirement.
For the complete paper: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~roberto/files/ECIR07.pdf