This year we had a bilateral project with Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Belgrade, Serbia. My Serbian friend Bojan Furlan and I were working on Intelligent Question Routing Systems to predict best users as answerers for a given question. The result of the cooperation was a joint paper that we published at the Informatics 2013 conference.
The conference was held in Spišská Nová Ves, Slovakia to where I decided to go by car.
On the 2nd November I went to Budapest where I met some friends and did some sightseeing. On monday (4th November) Bojan came by train and then we went to Slovakia. As we set the GPS to use the shortest path, we drove through Drožnjava, where the road is not in a very good condition and also there was a thick fog. We were moved from the Metropol hotel to Renesance hotel as there were some accomodation problems. Also, we were joined with a friend from Ukraine in the same room.
I Spisska everythin was closed at 9 o’clock and there was nothing to do in the evenings. Otherwise the city is nice and they also have some shopping centres – e.g. Tesco, Madaras, …. One afternoon I went there to buy some shoes and clothes.
The conference social events were really calm and ended soon – at around 9pm in the evenings. On tuesday we went to see Kežmarok castle, which is very nice with a lot of collections from 15h century until today. There I also tried the Slovakian national alcohol – Borovička.
The conference programme was more general informatics and programming languages oriented. One of the keynote speakers was Prof. Dr. Andreas Bollin from the University of Klagenfurt, whose title of the talk was “Evolution before Birth? – A Closer Look on Sofware Deterioration”. He presented some ideas of the formal models and future directions. The second keynote was regarding the definitions of languages from mathematical point of view and was given by Prof. Dr. Zoltán Fülöp. I also remember few interesting presentations, especially the one regarding website fragment processing – Isomorphic mapping of DOM trees for Cluster-Based Page Segmentation. The idea was to represent the webpage as a tree structured HTML and eliminate redundancy to encode the structure. Another talk was regarding the on-the-fly decisions how much data to send to the clients to reduce the number of server-side processing – Benchmark-based Optimization of Computational Capacity Distribution in a Client-server Web Application. There exist some frameworks that can benchmark clients and when a request is send to server, the server knows the capabilities – e.g. processing power – of the client. The third interested talk was about performance evaluation of Micro instances at Amazon EC2 – Performance of a Java Web Application Running on Amazon EC2 Micro Instance.
Our paper was presented by Bojan Furlan and I shot the presentation, which is available below:
(If you do not see the video, you can download it from http://zitnik.si/temp/informatics2013/IQRS_Informatic2013_BojanFurlan.mp4.)
Presentation:
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Some pictures from Budapest, Spisska, Kežmarok castle and Košice:
