NEPOMUK Summer School brings hands-on experience to 28 students

The presentation of the results of five mini-projects on Saturday, 13 september 2008, marked the successful conclusion of this year's NEPOMUK Summer School.

Participants, Lecturers, and Tutors

The NEPOMUK summer school took place september 7-13 in Sliema, Malta. 28 Students from 12 different countries spent the week learning about semantic technologies and the Social Semantic Desktop in particular. While the mornings were dedicated to theoretical and conceptual lectures, the afternoons were spent in guided hands-on sessions which allowed to collect experiences with the new techniques. Lectures and tutoring were performed by senior researchers from the NEPOMUK project team. Keeping balance between hard work and hard party, the evenings were dedicated to enjoying Malta by boat trips, visits, music, and social events.

Thursday afternoon all students grouped in small teams and started to worked on miniprojects of their own, aimed at using the newly-gained know-how to investigate and realize new, creative, and funny ideas. The groups presented a total of five prototypes and interaction designs on Saturday morning as the concluding highlight of the summer school.

Top-rated presentations were the semantic chat "Chatamuk" and the interaction paradigm "File@Pile".

"Chatomuk" presented a Semantic Chat which extends the traditional chat ? which allows to exchange just text messages between participants ? towards the sharing of enhanced information items. Such semantically-enhanced chat messages allow the users to immediately access related background information stored on their own computers, thus creating a much richer user experience and better chat performance.

"File@Pile" showed how the content analysis and document classification services of the Social Semantic Desktop can help the user to manage large amounts of available information: For any issue of interest ? being it business or private ? the user may name a "pile" to collect the associated information. The system helps by automatically sorting all kinds of information, like e.g. Chats, web browsing, e-mail, documents, into the appropriate piles, so the users find all relevant material in a single, context-adequate location.

Further projects were "1.2 times better", a draft of an iconic interface suitable to cross language barriers; "Share Malta" showing how people can profit from the improved sharing of information and their interpretation which is made possible by the Social Semantic Desktop; and "Doost", an automatic task handling application.

Working on their mini projects, the students proved their familiarity with the new techniques learned during the summer school, including the NEPOMUK framework, the concepts and details of semantic annotation, the generation and use of scenarios and video prototypes, and demonstrated that complex applications can be realized quickly by mashing up the available components. Operative prototypes presented convincing integrations with the available NEPOMUK services.

"It has been a great experience working in such a collaborative setting" says Stephanie, a computer science student at university of malta. "I got insights into large research projects, learned a lot, and I enjoyed being creative and having the opportunity to express myself. I will miss everyone" she concludes.

"It was a great experience working with different people from different cultures, with different backgrounds and different opinions" adds Samur, master student in computer science at the Pontifical Universidade Catholica at Rio de Janeiro. " It was the most important experience in my professional life".

"Learning the new technologies and those new techniques for fast prototyping and expressing ideas about an innovative project have been a wonderful experience for me" concludes Nuno, professor at ISEP polytechnical school of engineering in Porto, Portugal."The encouraging discussions have been an excellent personal and professional experience"

Hung, PhD student in his final year at the University Sud of Paris, adds: "The experience about semantic technology will greatly help me in my own research".

Ioana, research assistant at DERI in Galway, Ireland, feels "meeting the people whose names I have read on many papers was so fascinating. I throughoutly enjoyed the intensive and inspiring cooperation at this summer school"

"I was pretty fascinated by the inheritly interdisciplinary work. It was interesting to see how all the pieces fit together" comments Navid, PhD student at Università svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland.

Leaving the NEPOMUK Summer School after one week of intensive collaboration was hard for students and lecturers alike, as this successful event brought new insights, valuable feedback, and a lot of fun to everybody involved.