Workshop 1

9:00am-12:30pm

Prof. Dr. Maria Petrou
Title: Next generation Artificial Vision Systems: Reverse Engineering the Human Vision System

Synopsis
This tutorial will review the workings of the human visual system and identify some parts of it that may be modelled to produce image processing algorithms with improved performance over standard algorithms. It will also identify some issues that are currently being investigated by physicists and engineers who try to develop human-like artificial vision systems. Finally, it will go in depth in relation to one aspect of the human visual system: the fact that it does not rely on the use of a regular rectangualr grid, but rather on samples irregularly placed in 2D.Methods for performing image processing with irregularly sampled data will be examined in depth.

Brief Biography

Maria Petrou was a lecturer in Astronomy at the Kapodistrian University of Athens (1981-1983) and a Post Doctoral Research Assistant at the University of Oxford, Department of Theoretical Physics (1983-1986). She has been working on Computer Vision since 1986, initially as a Research Associate at the NERC Unit for Thematic Information Systems (NUTIS) in the Geography Department of Reading University, later as an Atlas Research Fellow of St. Hilda's College Oxford at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, from 1988 to 2005 at the Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering of Surrey University, initially as a lecturer subsequently as a Senior Lecturer then as a Reader and from 1998 to 2005 as the Professor of Image Analysis. From September 2005 she holds the Chair of Signal Processing at Imperial College London. She became the Head of the Communications and Signal Processing Group at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of Imperial College in April 2006.
 

Dr. Thanos Demiris
Title: Augmented Reality

Synopsis

The tutorial will be conducted into four sections:

Section 1 - Introduction: A brief overview of Augmented Reality
History, Classification of various systems, Core Technologies, Introduction to Computer Vision and
Visualization principles necessary to comprehend the technology.

Section 2 - Applications of Augmented Reality in Cultural Heritage
Recent advances in augmented reality and portable systems bring us closer to the introduction of such advanced technologies in everyday routine of cultural heritage sites, providing an extremely helpful means of disseminating and communicating information to the visitors of such sites. Portable multimedia guides are already a reality, while fixed-position AR has also found its way to various sites. This presentation describes the core technology involved in augmented reality, and then takes a survey through significant developments and applications in the past years in the realm of cultural heritage dissemination. The concrete projects undertaken in the archaeological sites of Ancient Olympia and Ancient Pompeii will be presented and the experiences gained (both technological and organizational) will be discussed.

Section 3 - Applications of Augmented Reality in other areas: Interactive Television and Interior
Decoration
The application of augmented reality in various areas may introduce new means of exchanging information. A typical example is the interior design, where large spaces need to be transformed into new areas for living or working. The conceptions of the interior architects and designers need to be communicated to the interested parties and discussed prior to any implementation. The results of the research project ARIS in this domain will be presented and the technology developed will be analyzed. ARIS is a very example of the infrastructure necessary around the actual augmented reality system necessary for increasing the acceptance of such a solution. Another application area is the still emerging realm of interactive television. The PISTE Project focused around advanced mixed reality concepts for sports television. The work and results will be presented and new possible advancements will be discussed.

Section 4 - Current Trends in Augmented Reality
A survey of various research themes internationally dealing with augmented reality and some of the open issues in the wider application of the technology will be presented and discussed.

Brief Biography

Dr. Demiris received his Diploma in Medical Informatics (1994) and Ph.D. in Medical Image University of Heidelberg in Germany. He is currently a senior research engineer with Micro2Gen, a startup company for microsystems, microfluidics for genetic tests and molecular diagnostics. He is specializing in bioinformatics and more specifically in image analysis and visualization of genetic tests. In the past he has worked as a research assistant at the German Cancer Research Centre, lecturer for the University of Heidelberg, invited lecturer for the Aegean University, the University of Athens, the Athens Information Technology Institute and the Technical Chamber of Greece. Prior to his current employment he has been seven years with INTRACOM S.A. and European Dynamics S.A. Dr. Demiris has coordinated and participated in several research projects in the realm of augmented reality with applications on interactive television (PISTE, MELISA), cultural heritage (Archeoguide, Lifeplus, LoVEUS) and architecture (ARIS). He is currently actively involved in the research projects Micro2DNA and CDMEDICS, which are focusing on micro-nano-technologies for molecular diagnostics. He has published over 50 papers in journals and reviewed conferences, he has organized workshops and conferences and is serving as reviewer for scientific journals and conferences. His research interests include Biomedical Informatics, Augmented Reality, Image
Processing and Visualization, and Human Computer Interaction. He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of the ACM.

Workshop 2

9:00am-12:30pm

Dr. Mukesh Mohania
Title: Data Analytics, Integration and Business Intelligence

Synopsis

The growth of organizations invariably leads to creation of multiple isolated data sources which are totally disconnected from each other. This leads to reduced efficiency and lack of complete knowledge of the enterprise and its customers while making critical business decisions. This is the classical Information integration problem which has become the biggest pain point for enterprises today. Information Integration has received considerable attention from researchers in academia as well as industry in the recent past. Information integration refers to the category of middleware which lets applications access data as though there were in a single database.

The popularity of information integration has lead to it being used in diverse domains. Each domain has its peculiar requirements; like in some domains it is not feasible to know the schema of all the data sources whereas in some domains the information integration has to be aware of the users access rights. Such requirements lead to new approaches for doing information integration. In this talk, we will discuss new trends and techniques for integrating information that provide organizations the ability to generate insights that would not be normally obtained by analyzing either type of information source (structured or unstructured) independently. We further show that this new way of integrating information has several applications in the area of active data warehousing, semantic search, and business intelligence for providing real-time and personalized analytics in the CRM domain.

Brief Biography

Mukesh Mohania received his Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India in 1995. He was a faculty member in University of South Australia and Western Michigan University from 1995-2001. He was also associated with Kyoto University and Purdue University as Senior Research Fellow from 1996-2001. Currently, he is a senior manager in IBM India Research Lab, and leading information and interaction team. He has worked extensively in the areas of distributed databases, data warehousing, data integration, and autonomic computing, and has published more than 100 papers in these and related areas. He also holds more than 20 patents on his name. He was awarded Technical Achievement Award in the area of Web Database Management and Data Warehousing by Association of Database and Expert Systems Applications in Greenwich, U.K., 2000. He received the best paper award for his XML and data integration work in CIKM 2004 and CIKM 2005, respectively. He was also a recipient of the "Excellence in People Management" award in IBM India in 2007. He received the “Outstanding Innovation Award” from IBM Corporation in 2008 for his Context-Oriented Information Integration work. He is an IEEE Distinguished Speaker.

 

Dr. Liana Rahmerita
Title: User Modelling and Semantic-Enhanced Information systems

Synopsis/Abstract

The design of advanced information systems is a continuous challenge for modern organizations. Information systems featuring intelligence have recently implemented as complex applications with modular architecture relying on web services, integrating user modeling, machine learning approaches, semantic web technology and/or agent-based technology. This talk will discuss some of the challenges and opportunities opened by semantic web technology and user modeling for a next generation of information systems.

Personalization tends to become one of the most important features given the fact that we are overloaded with data and information. In order to support personalized interaction with the users, information systems need to construct or access and maintain a user model.  Furthermore apart personalization, user modeling is a key component for providing enhanced features like: expertise discovery, networking, collaboration and learning (Rahmerita, 2007).

Within this session we will discuss methodological, technical and application aspects of user modeling and semantic web technology for semantic-enhanced information systems. In particular we will discuss some of the lessons learned within the effort to build a semantic-enhanced information system, evaluation results and problems left to be addressed. Within this talk I will address and try to answer a number of opened questions such as:

·What is the role of semantics for users and information systems?
·What are the actual main limitations and issues to be overcome in the next years?

Brief Biography

Liana Rahmerita is Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Centre of Applied Information and Communication Technologies. She holds a PhD in computer science from University Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France. She has worked extensively on international and European funded research projects conducting research on the role of user/student modeling, ontology-based representation, web services, Social and Semantic Web within the areas of information systems design and implementation, Knowledge Management, e-Learning and e-Government. She has served as program committee member in several international conferences and workshops. She has published more than 40 refereed papers including journal articles, book chapters and conference papers in domains such as: Knowledge Management, User Modeling, e-Learning and e-Government.