Departaments La Salle :: News & Events

News & Events

06/28/2011 - Student from our department posts an app for iPhone

This new application for iPhone is known as My School Agenda, it has been created by some of the students at the Computer Engineering and Networking department and coordinated by prof. Enric Farguell from La Salle Campus BCN.

This application, which can be downloaded as free software, is an agenda that allows a universitary student to manage a calendar with his current courses, works to deliver, exams and his contacts such as other students or professors. The applications does also allow creating working groups such as the teams used to deliver the required homeworks.

On the other hand, the application allows sending messages within the working group or synchronization with Google Calendar and a gmail account.

The application, which was posted two weeks ago, has been downloaded now more than 2,400 times; it has also been placed in the Spotlight from the AppStore.

04/30/2011 - Doctorate student in the ASAP research group

Álvaro García did a seven-month research at the The Automated Scheduling, Optimization and Planning (ASAP) research group of The University of Nottingham (UK). This group carries out research in models, heuristics and algorithms for automatically producing high-quality solutions to a variety of real-world applications. Alvaro’s research was focused on multiobjective evolutionary clustering algorithms, which have become a useful technique for tackling complex problems where traditional clustering algorithms fail. The main idea is to use a set of criteria (objectives) to promote the definition of clusters, returning a set of possible solutions with different trade-offs among all the analyzed criteria. The results of the research were sent to two top international journals, Knowledge and Information System and Applied Soft-Computing, and now the articles are under review.

On other hand, Álvaro had the opportunity of giving a lecture in the Computer Science School called Data Mining Techniques and Applications: clustering. The main idea was to expose how the improvements of computer technology, in terms of processing speed and storage capacity, have allowed the development of information systems featured by having huge volume of information. This issue has made necessary the definition of new strategies to help experts to identify and understand relationships between data. Clustering is a Data Mining technique that groups data according to their similarities, it means, the elements belonging to a group (cluster) are similar to each other but different from those in other groups. Thus, the approach provides to experts a possible classification or categorization of elements based on criteria such as for example a distance metric. In some problems, these criteria are difficult to define due to the data typology, and it is necessary to combine several criteria to group the data. Multiobjective clustering uses a set of criteria (objectives) to promote the definition of clusters, returning a set of possible solutions based on multiple criteria simultaneously. These techniques can be applied in several domains, as education, network nets, health or energy sector. .

04/26/2011 - DI to participate in the Summer School with Utrecht
We are now preparing the Summer School courses in collaboration with the Utrecht University. We offer an iPhone development course and the always interesting Hacking High Scool. If you need more information about these plese click here.

03/09/2011 - DI Racing Team wins LSMaker challenge: The Slope Running Race

On march 9th, the first true LSMaker challenge took place: the slope running race. The aim was to use the LSMaker capabilities to drive itself, without the help of any human being, through one of the main entrances of the University, reaching the goal in the lesser time. This track consisted of a large slope with several curves in which the robot had to automatically detect the greatest rate of increase of such slope. Several groups accepted the challenge of finding the goal and compete against the chronometer. Our department was one of such groups, starring Virginia Jiménez, Carme Martinez, Cristina Borda, Eduard de Torres, Xavi Salada, Jordi Martori, Enric Costa, Andreu Sancho and Joan Navarro. We employed the standard LSMaker hardware configuration, focusing our efforts on the software component, an approach that gave us the victory!

More information: http://blogs.salleurl.edu/LSMaker/2011/03/01/lsmaker_vertical-normativa/

02/09/2011 - PhD student Joan Navarro at Universidad Pública de Navarra

In early February 2011 our PhD student Joan Navarro did a two-week research stage at the Computer Science and Mathematics Department in Universidad Pública de Navarra with the Research Group of distributed Systems. There, he learned the latest advances in replication and consistency protocols regarding cloud computing and shared his experiences with other PhD students and Professors. Taking advantage of this new knowledge and as a result of some interesting discussions, he started his work on developing a novel distributed storage architecture which might be able to fulfill the particular requirements of smart grids.

More information: http://www1.unavarra.es/dep-matematicaeinformatica/investigacion/grupos-de-investigacion/sistemas-distribuidos

02/01/2011 - iPhone development course

The iPhone development course just began yesterday! We have currently 8 students enrolled in the program, which makes a good number of people to work with.

More information: www.beslasalle.net/portal/masters/cursos-telecos-tt008-barcelona

11/17/2010 - BDigital Conference

Enric Farguell attended the BDigital apps conference on movile application development that was held at CosmoCAIXA on November, 17th. His participation in the event was under the scope of the workshop for mobile application development, as an introductory class for iOS based devices (iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad) programming.

More information: www.bdigitalapps.com/programa

11/02/2010 - Gerard Inglés wins the Golden award in the eHealth Challenge 2010

Our co-worker Gerard Inglés and Montse Presno (designer) have been awarded with the Golden Award in the International Contest "e-Health Challenge 2010" organized by the Saint Jude Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, USA. The game called "Yummy Tricks" tries to inform children about illnesses such as cancer or healthy eating habits, among others.

More information: http://www.cure4kids.org/kids/university.php

10/09/2010 - Lancelona 2.0

Lancelona is a unique event that took place in Barcelona where the main topic are new technologies. La Salle contributed to it by offering different workshops and demonstrations. The Computing Engineering and Networking Department offered two workshops: ZigBeeCars programming and Android divice programming, which complemented the offer of other departments of La Salle. In the Android programming workshop, those present could program two beginner applications. There were also three demonstrations: ZigBeeCars, Photo 3D and the new La Salle LS Maker.

More information: http://lcnv2.lancelona.org/

09/11/2010 - Machine learning and marketing: An interesting marriage

On September 2010, Albert Orriols-Puig attended the Global Marketing Conference at Tokyo to present the research work entitled A soft-computing-based method for automatic discovering of fuzzy rules in databases: uses for academic research and management support in marketing. The work proposed to replace or complement the theory-driven approach typically used to analyze marketing problems with a data-driven approach, which does not require any a priori information – i.e., the expert does not need to define any structural model – of the problem. More specifically, a new unsupervised learning technique, named Fuzzy-CSar, was expressly designed for this purpose. The new methodology was applied to the problem, previously addressed with a theory-driven approach, of modeling the role that managers and peers play in shaping salespeople’s ethical behavior. The experimental results obtained with the new methodology evidenced that it enabled not only to confirm the conclusions obtained with the theory-driven approach, but also to provide the marketing expert with novel, interesting and useful information about the domain that was overlooked by the theory-driven approach. The presentation of the paper led to a nice discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of the new proposal.

More information: http://www.kamsconference.org/

09/07/2010 - Interview with Dr. E. Golobardes at "La Vanguardia"
The dean of the Escola Tècnica Superior d'Enginyeria Electrònica i Informàtica (ETSEEI), Dr. Elisabet Golobardes has been interviewed by the newspaper "La Vanguardia", in their special monograph on Computer Science. To read the whole document, click here: http://www.guiadeprensa.com/prensa/lavanguardia/pdf/2010/2010-09-07-lavanguardia-informatica.pdf

09/07/2010 - The GRSI at CEDI 2010

The CEDI (Congreso Español De Informática) took place at the Universidad Politécnica of Valencia on September 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th whose intention is to be a meeting framework for professionals whose work deal with research, development, innovation and academic teaching within the computing engineering field. The CEDI is structured as a multi-conference which covers all the fields in which computing affects nowadays and inside each of them were presented, by means of papers, the most innovative aspects with major future projection, always from a very academic and scientific perspective. In addition, there are other activities taking place such as round tables and plenary conferences which deal with topics such as computing and research, computing and training, connections with companies and the computing profession.

The Research Group in Intelligent Systems from the Computing Department participated in the symposium on TAMIDA (Teoría y Aplicaciones de Minería de Datos), where they presented one of their works linked with the application of data mining in the educational field. Specifically, how could be automatic techniques used to group data to ensure the correct acquisition of the competences by students.

Some pictures of the event

http://cedi2005.ugr.es/2010/contenido.php?apartado=organizacion⊂=presentacion

http://cedi2010valencia.wordpress.com/

09/01/2010 - OPNETWORK 2010 - OPNET's annual conference

OPNETWORK is OPNET's annual industry conference, focused on advancing the state of application and network performance management. It is the largest event of its kind, attracting thought leaders from industry, government, and academic communities from all over the world. The attendants of the conference were people from universities, government and industries.

The main topics of the conferences were:
•   Application Performance Management
•   Network Engineering, Operations, and Planning
•   Network R&D

The paper “Simulation and Analysis of a QoS-Aware Routing Protocol for Smart Grids” was presented by Guillermo Ravera on September 1st in the session 1538 “Customer Presentations: QoS in Routing, Switching and Transport”.

The paper focuses on the considerations that must be taken into account in the design of a novel multipath routing protocol for data networks for smart grids. The studied algorithms belong to the so called distance-vector routing algorithms. The topology and vision of the INTEGRIS project was explained as an example of an intelligent electrical communication grid.

More information about the INTEGRIS project: http://www.fp7integris.eu
More information about the conference: http://www.opnet.com/opnetwork2010/

04/15/2010 - The Computer Engineering and Networking page is done...
We just changed some things on the Look'n Feel of the page. However, the projects from our research areas have not yet been introduced...

04/08/2010 - The Computer Engineering and Networking page is almost done...
Today we finish the web page of the Computer Engineering and Networking department. However, we have yet to introduce the projects from our research areas, but this will happen soon.