Organic.Lingua 5th Project Meeting

The 5th project meeting of Organic.Lingua took place between 20-22/2/2013 at the premises of University of Alcala, in the lovely Alcala de Henares, Spain. It was my second time there and I surely enjoyed it more than the first time. It was also my first time in the project to appear as a member of the UAH team, as I will be offering my services to UAH for the next months in the context of the Organic.Lingua project :-)

Strange to be on the other side of the lens!

The meeting took place some weeks before the 2nd review meeting of the project, so there were important things to be discussed and issues to be clarified before that. As usually, a lot of time was devoted to the technical aspects of the project (mostly machine translation components and CLIR services) along with the core software tools such as MoKi and UGC component. The main issue of the meeting were the revisions in the Organic.Edunet Web portal (which should be publicly available pretty soon), as it is the core component of the project.

I had the opportunity to present the revised Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM AP, the status of the content population (both topics are among my favorite ones!) as well as present the AgLR tool to the user partners, as a part of the user trials that they are going to host in various countries, such as France, UK, Estonia and Turkey.

This time we also had some free time (by limiting the number of hours for rest of course!), which we enjoyed with beers and tapas (in the evening), thanks to our good friend David. On top of that, we had some really nice time at a more classy restaurant, in a joint dinner which almost all partners joined. My evenings were also challenging as I had to fix my netbook, the performance of which suffered after upgrading Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 8 Pro... low memory issues rendered the netbook almost unusable, when I needed to prepare slides, respond to urgent emails and keep the minutes of the meeting at the same time. Installing various Linux distributions did not solve the problem...

The meeting ended with a lot of tasks to be taken care of in the next weeks. For me this includes deliverables, reports, work in AgLR, communication, deadlines etc. After all, these are the ingredients that keep the work interesting ;-)

Additional info about the meeting along with more photos can be found in the IERU blog of the UAH team.

VOA3R 5th project meeting

I recently came back from Paris, where the 5th project meeting of VOA3R was held during 29-31/5/2012. The meeting was interesting as always, discussing a wide variety of issues including the project's management, quality assurance & risk management aspects, dissemination and affiliation plans and activities etc. My part had to do with the content population activities of the project, as I am a member of the GRNET team which is leading the specific work package. The task is rather complex, since it heavily relies on other WPs, such as the one developing the VOA3R metadata AP, the harvesting and portal parts, the quality assurance and dissemination/affiliation plans.We already had some delays with these tasks but during the meeting we tried to describe the current status and define the next steps for the next months.

Presenting the next content population tasks (photo by Imma Subirats)

It was a nice opportunity for me to meet Diane (since we had to solve some issues for the Organic.Lingua project) and David Martin from UAH who has only recently joined the team and has also helped in the Organic.Lingua tasks.

Panoramic photo of the meeting (photo by Imma Subirats)

Apart from that, I had the opportunity to see Paris and its sights for the first time. I managed to get some hours off and really quickly visit the major sights including the Eiffel tower, the Notre Dame, Champs-Élysées, Monmartre, while I also passed just outside the Louvre, taking photos all the time on the road. Despite the bad weather (it was drizzling all the time) I really enjoyed the evening.
Next VOA3R project meeting is to be held in Cyprus, courtesy of George from ARI!

Organic.Balkanet 5th project meeting

Prof. G.V. Roman discussing during the
project meeting

The 5th (and last) project meeting of the Organic.Balkanet EU project took place at the premises of the University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Bucharest between November 16-18, 2011. All project partners were available and discussed the pending issues of the project, a few weeks before the end of the project. I had the opportunity to meet the project partners for the last time after a couple of years. I have to admit that I was especially connected to this EU project, since it was the first one that I was so actively involved (and the second one in my short career so far, after my involvement in the Organic.Edunet project).
Some photos from the project meeting can be found in the project's Flickr set.

The project meeting was collocated by the Organic.Balkanet European Workshop that took place at the Eula of the University on November 17th, 2011.