There is a list of questions I had to answer when joining a group. Here they are, "Five minutes with ...
Boanerges Aleman-Meza:
What do you do in your spare time?
do excercise, watch movies
What hobbies do you have?
maybe take photographs
Tell us about any recent vacations:
Not really a vacation, attended WWW 2004 Conference at NY. It was my first visit to NY, got to do the 1 hour train commute each day, used subway system as well. Visited central park, ground zero, statue of liberty, and also went to a broadway show titled "Bombay Dreams"
Describe your home town.
Relatively medium-big city (about 1 million people) in north Mexico. Safe place, friendly people, clean and well developed city
How would you describe your job?
Currently (summer 2004) my job is research related to Web mining. It is different to my research work at school mainly because at ARC there is a more solid base to build interesting things, and because the business benefit of the research is valued more. Other than summer, I'm a research graduate student working in a project of about 8 people at a research lab, where we discuss and test ideas and try to publish papers when the ideas turn out good
What is the most misunderstood aspect of your business?
Probably the fact that feedback from 'bosses' is critical at early stages.
What is the best part of your job?
Be able to perceive the research contribution of different people when evaluating related research in order to highlight/discover the pros and cons in our own work
What keeps you up at night?
TV or email
What is your favorite Web site?
The latest interesting site is a9.com
What is your favorite item with an IBM logo on it?
My laptop
What is the last item you purchased online?
Flight ticket
Dream job?
Project leader for a small research lab. Although being a journalist working abroad fits more the definition of a dream job
What is your favorite toy?
Rubick's cube
What is the most common question you answer?
When will you finish school? Answer: By the end of next year
What is the best piece of advice you have received?
Go for it
Education: (degree & university)
B.S. Computer Engineering, Technical Institute of Chihuahua II (Mexico). Master's in Applied Mathematics, University of Georgia. Currently: Ph.D. Student, Computer Science, University of Georgia
Favorite way to relax?
Go to BestBuy, Circuit City
Favorite movie?
Contact
Favorite television show?
X-Files
First job?
Parking lot clerk
What did your parents want you to be when you grew up?
Chemical Engineer
Do you play a musical instrument?
not really, tried to learn to play guitar once
Last book read?
Absolute Power
Any pets?
Not yet, likely to get a labrador really soon
Where would you love to live?
San Diego, California
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Spend weekend with family after a rewarding week of work
What was the last concert you attended?
Collective Soul (in 1999)
Watched the DVD of the movie
Talk to her. Noteworthy to mention is the song
Cu-cu-rru-cu-cu paloma, played in the movie.
Last weekend, I watched the movie
Shrek 2, which introduced a very funny cat.
Also, I watched the movie
The Day After Tomorrow, which is very interesting. Also that weekend, I watched the movie
Troy, which was a bit disapponting.
Yesterday I rented a car from
Hertz. Isn't it nice when they give you a free upgrade?
Got a Toyota Camry, same color as the one that
Kunal has.
Yesterday, also, I watch the DVD of the movie
Kolya
Thursday at WWW-2004
- The talks by Udi Manber, Rick Rashid provide insight for future possible developments as well as innovation
- Eric Miller Presentation of
Semantic Web, Phase 2: Developments and Deployment
- Charles Myers (Adobe) mentioned someone has to put the metadata (should be easy), tons of XMP data out there already!
- Frank Careccia (
BrandSoft), content management with real use of semantic technologies
- Dennis Quan (IBM Watson) talked about BioHaystack and gave examples of its usage with myGrid
- Jeff Pollock (Network Inference) explained an example of real-world usage of OWL
- Dave Reynolds (HP Labs) talked about Jena
Attended WWW 2004 Conference.
Arrived little bit late (due to issues of NY transportation).
Few Talks in the
WWW2004 Workshop Application Design, Development and Implementation Issues in the Semantic Web
Developing and Managing Components in an Ontology-base Application Server, presented by Daniel Oberle. Summary: an approach for extending the use of XML configuration files thus supporting the development and administration of software components in an application server.
Towards Semantic Web Portals, presented by Michael Stollberg. Describes a framework for Semantic Web portals.
Lifecycle of a Casual Web Ontology Development Process, presented by Aditya Kalyanpur. Rapid and easy creation of ontology with an easier GUI than Protege, etc.
Towards Semantic Web Engineering:WEESA - Mapping XML Schema to Ontologies, by Gerald Reif. An approach for creating RDF from XML (Schema).
Interesting remarks at the (closing) panel "Are semantic web applications really viable?"
- how useful is a language (OWL-DL) that only five people in the world can exploit?
- the web is about exchanging information
- using many URIs for the same resource is very likely, using same URI for different resources is unlikely
- research in Web engineering can definitely be incorporated into Semantic Web research
Also attended part of the tutorial on "Text Mining and Link Analysis for Web Data"
