On March 19th and 20th 2009 took place the annual meeting of the MID-CBR (Marco Integrador para el Desarrollo de Sistemas de Razonamiento Basado en Casos, TIN2006-15140-C03) a coordinated project by the Instituto de Investigación de Inteligencia Artificial (IIIA-CSIC; Main Researcher: Dr. Enric Plaza), the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (GAIA-UCM; Main Researcher: Dra. Belén Díaz-Agudo) and the Universitat Ramon Llull (GRSI-URL; Main Researcher: Dra. Elisabet Golobardes). The aim of this meeting was to summarize all the work done, throughout the last year, reported all the articles published and the communications presented in the most relevant journals and conferences of the CBR community. There were also explained the current lines of research and there were proposed future collaborations. In particular, we can highlight some events of the agenda for the first day: Enric Plaza (Research Coordinator) started the meeting presenting the achievement degree of the project goals and the assessment of the different pattern’s project outcome. All this information was reported in the official annual report sent to the Science and Technology Ministry.
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Then, Juan Antonio Recio and Antonio Sánchez, two members belonging to the GAIA-UCM group presented the last version of jcolibri2, where the most relevant changes are related to their work on textual CBR and the incorporation of templates. There were also presented their beginning in incorporating planification based on descriptive logic for the reuse phase in CBR systems. Secondly, Albert Fornells and Guiomar Corral presented the most recent advances in the MID-CBR project achieved by the GRSI group, both in the melanomas domain and the telematic domain. Thirdly, Eva Armengol and Josep Lluís Arcos from the IIIA introduced their research work in extraction and explanation in lazy domains and in using introspective reasoning to improve CBR system performance, respectively. Enric Plaza was in charge of introducing their first results on Social Choice CBR (based on social networks topologies), where different methodologies inspired on argumentation and poolcasting. Finally, Pedro González, member of the GAIA-UCM group, presented an overview of their research in artificial intelligence mainly applied on the virtual reality (games) domain. During a coffee break all the MID-CBR team took the opportunity to visit the laboratory Media Lab La Salle of La Salle Campus. The last day all the MID-CBR team participated in a brainstorming where all the new research lines were discussed, and where new lines and collaboration were opened. The discussion will make easier the definition of our future work in the CBR framework, making possible the transition from the MID-CBR to futures projects. |
Prof. León Chua visited Barcelona to preside over the examining committee of one of our former members and current collaborators, Giovanni Pazienza. On this visit, he had time to share his main discovery with us in the talk: “Memristor: 37 years later”.
Through an unusual presentation, overhead transparencies, amusing jokes, technological explanations hidden in works of art, this endearing scientist brought the technology of the future closer to us.
To know more about this conference and the memristor, please refer to the full “El País” article.
This week started with the master thesis (PFC) presentation of one of our scholarship holder, Marc Aguilar. I could not attend his presentation but the attendants praised the talk and told me that Marc was fantastic and confident. For this reason, I decided to interview him and you will find below his impressions.
Interviewer: “Marc, were you nervous on Monday?”
Marc: “Well, as a person who is not used to speaking in public, a speech always makes you feel a bit nervous. However, after the first minutes, I forgot about that and felt really comfortable.”
Interviewer: “How was the presentation?”
Marc: “The last days before the presentation, Albert Fornells and I had planned and debated what the content of it and the main concepts that had to be clear to the jury and the rest of the audience should be. I think I managed to explain almost everything we agreed to in a way I liked it. Obviously, there are thousands of ways in which to improve a presentation and I will work to develop better skills in that field.”
Interviewer: “Could you briefly explain what your project consists of?”
Marc: “My project is related to melanoma’s cancer, which is the most lethal skin cancer nowadays. In the framework of a bigger project named MID-CBR (TIN 2006-15140-C03-03), the collaboration between Hospital Clínic i Provincial de Barcelona (HCPB) and GRSI arose to help them face this disease and so did the opportunity to develop what finally became my project.
In it, a conceptual model of the melanoma’s domain was defined –extracting the knowledge from the hospital experts–, a huge database in which to save all the information was created and a web management tool was designed and developed.”
Interviewer: “Do you plan to continue this research line?”
Marc: “As I said in the ‘future work’ section of my presentation, there are two different threads that will be followed: on the one hand, in my master thesis (TFM) I will enhance the management tool and work on the migration of data. On the other hand, data mining will be applied to the data in the database to extract implicit knowledge or patterns in the context of project Next-CBR, the continuation of MID-CBR. Therefore, I am going to continue this research line for some months in my TFM project although I still have to make a decision on what path to take afterwards.”
Many congratulations Marc and thank you for sharing this post with me!
What does the equation ZigBee + Cars = ZigBeeCars mean?
On March 19, ZigBeeCars will be presented in the Saló de l’ensenyament in view of promoting the engineering at La Salle. In a space of 35 square meters, offered by the EnginyCat program of the Generalitat de Catalunya, a spectacular racetrack will allow the public to drive seven cars at the same time through remote control from a PC. By means of this fun activity, many technical concepts could be brought to the students.
Further work of this project aims at incorporating AI to provide the cars with autonomy.
Hope you enjoy the activity!
