award

André Baart and Kasadaka win IXA High Potential Award

~ Victor ~ Leave a comment

Andre and his prizeOn 19 June, André Baart was awarded the High Potential Award at the Amsterdam Science & Innovation en Impact Awards for his and W4RA‘s work on the Kasadaka platform.

Kasadaka (“talking box”) is an ICT for Development (ICT4D) platform to develop voice-based technologies for those who are not connected to the Internet, cannot not read and write, and speak underresourced languages.

As part of a longer-term project, the Kasadaka Voice platform and software development kit (VSDK), has been developed by André Baart as part of his BSc and MSc research at VU. In that context it has been extensively tested in the field, for example by Adama Tessougué, journalist and founder of radio Sikidolo in Konobougou, a small village in rural Mali. It was also evaluated in the context of the ICT4D course at VU, by 46 master students from Computer Science, Information Science and Artificial Intelligence. The Kasadaka is now in Sarawak Malaysia, where it will be soon deployed in a Kampong, by Dr. Cheah Waishiang, ICT4D researcher at the University of Malasia Sarawak (UNIMAS), and students from VU and UNIMAS.

André is currently pursuing his PhD in ICT4D at Universiteit van Amsterdam and still member of the W4RA team.

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Niels’ paper awarded first Bob Wielinga award at EKAW

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Niels Ockeloen’s paper on Data2Documents was awarded the first Bob Wielinga memorial award for best research paper at the 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW2016). “Data 2 Documents: Modular and distributive content management in RDF” was authored by Niels Ockeloen, Victor de Boer, Tobias Kuhn and Guus Schreiber from the Web and Media group.. The paper describes Niels’ PhD. work on a method for creating human readable web documents out of machine readable Linked Data, focussing on modularity and re-use. You can view the slides for Niels’ presentation slides here. 

Niels wins Best Paper Award

The award is named after Prof. Bob Wielinga, one of the most prominent European scientists in the area of knowledge-based systems, best known for his work on the KADS methodology, who has been one of the key influences on the development of the area in the past three decades. Bob was both my own and Guus Schreiber’s promotor so this makes it extra-special for us. In 2009 he was also appointed at our department, where he continued supervising PhD students until he passed away earlier this year. It is especially nice that the award, which was named after Bob Wielinga goes to work that is not only authored by people from Amsterdam but also work that Bob at some point discussed with Niels in the Basket, before his passing.

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