Yes, I am back. Almost 28 hours later than expected, but I am back to Urbana. The trip started with a very tiny little delay of 8 hours in Barcelona. Yes, COA121 was the flight to Newark. Yes, COA121 was the first leg toward Urbana. Yes, the plane had technical problems on the way to Barcelona and had to land at the Azores islands to get it “fixed”. Yes, we did not dare to ask....
A while a go I wrote about tools for managing your LaTeX bibliography. Despite the fact that the tools I described help managing your LaTeX bibliography collection, it still did not help much with managing the tons of PDFs files you end pilling up when doing research on a particular topic. BibDesk has now the ability to attach files to entries, Zotero with its ability to store snapshots is still the closest thing I have found so far....
If you are looking for a list of the related blogging done during ICEIS 2008 just follow this link. During Sunday morning I run into Angel A. Juan, an assistant professor at Open University of Catalonia (UOC), interested on analyzing online teaching efforts and how tools to assist professors monitoring students performance on online media. I visited him yesterday at his office and we got and interesting exchange of ideas. Most of them revolved around the work we have conducted under the DISCUS project, and how similar is our efforts on marketing focus groups and their online teaching environment....
This is the final sprint for ICEIS. I have been mostly focusing on posters this morning. It his hard to pick one up. I would just say that there was some interesting work on personalized recommender systems—paper 219. But as I said, there were a bunch of interesting ones and quite a few interesting by-the-poster conversations. Actually, I am having a very interesting time after the mix of attendees’ profiles. The morning finally meandered into Ricardo Baeza-Yates’s keynote talk....
The morning started with Jean-Marie Favre and his invited speech about “Software languages through the ages”. Quite an eclectic presentation that was quite a bit thought provoking. Some excerpts out of his amalgam of concepts: Human kind is defined by language Civilization is defined by writing Languages expand across a vast period of history, computer science for just a few millimeters in such history line You may agree or dispute his claims, but you cannot dispute that it was a thought provoking talk....