FAU students in China (and Argentina, Spain, ...)

Several FAU students are enjoying a unique international experience during the summer break, thanks to a joint FIU/FAU PIRE Project, funded by NSF.

One of them, Lina Ortega, is in China to work on and learn more about "Emerging Solutions and Standards for Multimedia on the Web". Borko Furht and I are her advisors. She just started blogging from China and seems to be enjoying the experience a lot!

Other dear students involved in this first batch (and their blogs) are: Simone Pasmore (Argentina), Ingrid Buckley (Argentina), and Chris Holder(China).

I wish all of them a great time! I'll continue to check their blogs throughout their stay abroad.

Visit to TU Graz

I was invited by Prof. Markus Strohmaier, through Mathias Lux, to visit Graz University of Technology on Wednesday (tomorrow), and present a brief talk on "Image organization, annotation, and retrieval from a human-centered perspective", where I'll have a chance to show a little bit of the work that my students, collaborators, and I have been doing along those lines.

I look forward to meeting Prof. Strohmaier and his team and visiting this prestigious Austrian university.

First joint paper!

My colleague Mathias Lux, his student Arthur Pitman, and I have just finished (in record time!) our first joint paper: "Using Visual Features to Improve Tag Suggestions in Image Sharing Sites", which has been submitted to KASW 2008.

I am very pleased with this concrete outcome of our collaborative efforts, shortly after they've started. I look forward to the implementation and evaluation stages of this project and -- hopefully -- to many other papers and projects to come.

Course

My course on 'Selected Topics in Visual Information Retrieval' started very well and seems to be moving forward at a very high speed. Here are some highlights:

• I have a small but very qualified group of students: 10 in total, three of which are PhD students.
  
• They are all busy working on their implementation-oriented projects and the partial results (I've divided the project into milestones to better check their progress and help them along the way) are very encouraging.
  
• Due to limited classroom availability, the class meets in different rooms and buildings depending on the day, for a total of seven different classrooms. Talk about a great way to learn my way around campus... :-)
  
• Speaking of classrooms, an interesting story: before my first lecture I wanted to check if the classroom had projector, etc. I was told how to look up this information online. To my surprise, they have a system that contains that information and much more... Starting from the course page, when one clicks on the classroom number, a popup window shows information about the resources available in that room, and -- in the best German / Austrian tradition -- detailed quantitative information about the room's length, width, total area, number of seats, etc. Great!
  
• I'm using Moodle (in German!), which is a great CMS tool for online learning (that I was scheduled to test drive at FAU in the Fall anyway, so I'm enjoying the head start, even if some things have been learned by trial-and-error due to my notoriously limited knowledge of the German language).
  

Back to blogging...

I can't believe it's been almost a week since my last post... This is the longest I've been away from posting since this blog was created. 

The main reason is that things picked up a lot of speed here at Klagenfurt University, with my course in full motion, my first joint paper with colleagues from the Department, an invitation to go to Graz tomorrow, and many new developments, all very good and positive!

I'll blog about some of the many things that have happened over the past few days in separate posts. Stay tuned...