Academic Blog

Hello and welcome in 2010!

This time I’m still going to write partially about 2009 but with some thoughts about 2010 as well. J

First of all, let me finish writing about my academic odyssey in December. After Malaysia and Korea, I attended conferences in Delhi and Tumkur. In both places, I enjoyed talking and answering questions about Infobright’s technology, with some interesting remarks from the Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing experts. I also enjoyed other presentations and discussions, for example the meeting with people from TCS, as well as wonderful cultural program, especially the music!

The most inspiring keynote talk was on Granular Computing. It was delivered by Dr. Andrzej Skowron, who used to be my PhD supervisor, who is my all-time scientific mentor and the head of research team that I’m working with at the University of Warsaw. (Yes, now I’m also back to academia!) Still, I learnt something new. You often need to travel across continents to finally get something you hear every day.

You’ll find references to Granular Computing at Infobright’s page in Wikipedia. It’s about data granules (like our data packs) and information granules (like our knowledge nodes). It’s about computing with information granules instead of dealing with single data points. Granules are usually formed basing on various kinds of domain knowledge, for example ontology in search engines, variable resolutions in image analysis, et cetera. With Infobright, the formation of granules is perhaps not as sophisticated (JJ) but overall methodology remains the same!

I’m sure I’ll go back to Granular Computing at least several times this year. But now let me finish with 2009. Many academic projects have been finished successfully. The above-mentioned conferences concluded the Rough Set Year in India. International Rough Set Society starts 2010 with the newly elected executive members. But not everything was so successful. For example, we have put a lot of effort in preparing the rough data contest in Delhi. However, we didn’t clarify the contest rules well enough. Also, some people claimed that the provided rough data (knowledge nodes; aka information granules) were of insufficient quality to mine any patterns or dependencies. We will need to improve ourselves very quickly…

But let me conclude with something optimistic. Thanks to Dr. Skowron’s generosity, here are handouts from his talk (careful! - big pdf).

And… I attach one of the conference pictures. – Guess where I am!

Best greetings,

Dominik