First Workshop

After the very troublesome journey the workshop began next day later than we thought (I could have used some sleep ;-) The first afternoon proceeded with the presentation of the test corpora and the creation of topics supervised by the according track coordinator. The workshop specific terms session, track, campaign, task and breakout session aren’t clear to me. The most interesting part of this day were the coffee breaks for me. That is mainly due to networking. I talked mainly to PhD students about their work. I also met a French men who is working in the very same institute as Lux (a good friend of mine in Singapore). In the evening we had a very nice reception in one of the fanciest hotels in town. Ironically enough I set next to a black researcher … and he was working in Groningen. The talks were very interesting and the food very good (although they like a lot of meat)

The next day could be considered as the “real” workshop. There were two parallel sessions one topic for each topic (ad hoc, web, geoclef, speech, image, q@a). I visited the imageClef session as I was interested at what the people from I2R (the institute in Singapore) are doing. Unfortunately I didn’t really find any anchor point for a cooperation – but we will see. After lunch I had my first presentation in front of a scientific audience (not considering talks in front of my groups. It was only 8 minutes but it still was very exciting. My main back draw was the continuous “mmmhhms” - I really have to work on. On the way back to town I sat next to a rather famous IR-researcher-women as it seems. The evening brought a invitation of the City Hall of Alicante. The food was very nice and I met a more senior researcher from I2R who was also French and a very nice person. He even knew Lux personally, good friend of mine.

The third day, Friday, consisted of “breakout sessions” on the various areas. I only attended the speech session. The track seemed to be some kind of stuck as there was no real progress made. The MALACH collection will be expanded to contain more data in the check language. I announced that I will evaluate whether there is interest in my groups to combine GeoCLEF with speech recognition techniques… Let us see how that works out.... The workshop was ended with a set of rather boring talks.

The flight back was not spectacular!