symposium

The ESWC2019 PhD Symposium

~ Victor ~ Leave a comment

As part of the ESWC 2019 conference program, the ESWC PhD Symposium was held in wonderful Portoroz, Slovenia. The aim of the symposium, this year organized by Maria-Esther Vidal and myself, is to provide a forum for PhD students in the area of Semantic Web to present their work and discuss their projects with peers and mentors.

Even though this year, we received 5 submissions, all of the submissions were of high quality, so the full day symposium featured five talks by both early and middle/late stage PhD students. The draft papers can be found on the symposium web page and our opening slides can be found here. Students were mentored by amazing mentors to improve their papers and presentation slides. A big thank you to those mentors: Paul Groth, Rudi Studer, Maria Maleshkova, Philippe Cudre-Mauroux,  and Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese.

The program also featured a keynote by Stefan Schlobach, who talked about the road to a PhD “and back again”. He discussed a) setting realistic goals, b) finding your path towards those goals and c) being a responsible scientist and person after the goal is reached.

Students also presented their work through a poster session and the posters will also be found at the main conference poster session on tuesday 4 June.

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6th International Symposium “Perspectives on ICT4D”

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On 23 May, as part of the VU ICT4D course, for the 6th time, W4RA and SIKS organized the annual symposium “Perspectives on ICT4D“. This year’s theme was how to tackle “Global Challenges” in a collaborative, trans-disciplinary way. Food Security is one of the Global Challenges Lia van Wesenbeeck – Director of the Amsterdam Centre for World Food Studies – gave a great presentation on “Tackling World Food Challenges”.

Our international speaker on the same topic, Mr. Seydou Tangara, coordinator of the AOPP, was unfortunately not able to join due to visa problems. He was replaced by prof. Hans Akkermans, who presented the Vienna manifesto on digital humanism and its relation to ICT4D.

Andre Baart from UvA talked about the CARPA project and challenges in developing applications for people in Mali while Jaap Gordijn discussed the need for business modelling for developing sustainable services, with interesting case studies from Sarawak, Malaysia.

The ICT4D students presented their voice application services during the coffee break. They demonstrated applications ranging from equipment-lending services to seed markets and weather services.

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VU’s 4th ICT4D symposium: a look back

~ Victor ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, 18 May 2017, the 4th International ICT4D symposium was held at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.  The event was organized by the W4RA team and supported by VU Network Institute, the Netherlands Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems SIKS, VU Computer Science Department and VU International Office. Invited speakers from Ghana, France and the Netherlands highlighted this year’s theme was “Sustainability and ICT4D”.

Keynote speaker Gayo Diallo from Universite de Bordeaux discussed the possibilities of ICT for African Traditional Medicine (ATM). In his talk, he showed how semantic web technologies can play a role here to connect heterogeneous datasets for analytics and end-user services. Such services would need to be based on voice-interaction and localized technologies. His slides can be found here.

Chris van Aart from 2Coolmonkeys discussed a number of smartphone applications developed in the context of W4RA activities, including Mr. Jiri a tree-counting application. He proved there is a market for such applications in the African context (Slides).

After the break, Francis Dittoh from UDS Ghana discussed issues around sustainbility for a meteo application he is currently developing for Northern-Ghana (slides). Wendelien Tuijp from VU’s CIS then presented multiple perspectives on ICT4D (Slides). The symposium was closed by a video presentation from Aske Robenhagen, showcasing the ongoing work in Nepal around mapping knowledge networks and developing a smartphone application supporting information exchange for local accountability extension workers. More information on that project can be found at nepalnetworks.org/

The presentations of the day can be found through the links above. The entire symposium was live-streamed and you can watch it all on youtube or below.

Below is a lost of the approximate starting time of the various speakers in the video

  • 6m19 Dr. Gayo Diallo – UniversitĂ© de Bordeaux (FR): Towards a Digital African Traditional Healthcare using Semantic Web.
  • 56m28 Dr. Chris van Aart – 2CoolMonkeys BV (NL) : Developing Smartphone Apps for African farmers.
  • 1h30m00 break.
  • 1h52m00 Francis Dittoh – University for Development Studies (Ghana): ICT business development in rural Africa.
  • 2h23m00 Wendelien Tuyp – CIS-VU : Sustainable Community Initiatives and African Farmer Innovation.
  • 2h52m00 Aske Robenhagen Network Institute Academy Assistant VU – Building resilient applications for sustainable development. Better video of this can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hzRSo4TJtA

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A look back at the 3rd VU ICT4D symposium

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VU Rector Prof. Subramaniam opens the symposium

On 6 April 2016, the Third International Symposium “Perspectives on ICT for Development (ICT4D)” was hosted by the VU Network Institute, the Netherlands Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems SIKS, the Computer Science Department and VU International Office. This year’s theme was “Community Service & Education”. A great team of invited speakers from India, Ghana, South-Africa and the Netherlands discussed the merits, challenges and research agendas for ICTs for Development, presenting case studies from various contexts: rural development, health, and education.

2016-04-06 10.39.25The symposium showed different technical solutions, including mobile technologies and small and cheap hardware to cope with local contexts in developing countries. Different speakers also discussed bottom-up methodologies designed for the local context to discover and co-develop interesting ICT solutions and services.

You can watch the entire event through the recorded livestream as presented below. Speakers presented in blocks of 2 around a single topic or location and engaged in discussion after the second speaker. We here present a list of speakers, their timestamp in the recording (including a direct link) as well as PDF slides for their presentations (all rights remain with the original authors).

0.00 Welcome by Symposium Chairs Victor de Boer and Anna Bon (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) [Slides: Victor Introduction]

0.00.40 Opening address by the VU Rector Prof. Dr. Vinod Subramaniam

0.06.40 VU-Informatics/ICT4D: Gossa LÎ & Romy Blankendaal (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)  [Slides: Gossa Lo Romy Blankendaal]
0.24.39 VU-Informatics/ICT4D: Dr. Stefan Schlobach (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)  [Slides: Stefan Schlobach]

1.18.52 Ghana: Prof. Dr. Saa Dittoh (University for Development Studies, Tamale, Ghana)  [Slides: Saa_Dittoh]
1.39.46 Ghana: Dr. Nana Baah Gyan (Accra, Ghana)  [Slides: Nana_Baah_Gyan]

2.05.59 India: Prof. Dr. Maneesha Ramesh (Amrita University, India)  [No slides available]
2.32.16 India: Prof. Dr. Jacqueline Broerse (Director Athena Institute VU)  [Slides: Jacqueline_Broerse]

3.49.48 Water and Data: Frank Annor (TU Delft / TAHMO)  [No slides available]
4.10.42 Water and Data: Annabelle Poelert (AKVO, Amsterdam)  [Slides: Annabelle Poelert]

4.51.40 South-Africa: Prof. Dr. Mmantsae Moche Diale (University of Pretoria, South-Africa)  [Slides: Mmantsae Diale]
5.18.10 South-Africa: Prof. Dr. André Ran (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)  [Slides: Andre_Ran]

5.48.30 Wrap up by Symposium Chairs 

 

 

 

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3rd ICT4D Symposium at VU

~ Victor ~ Leave a comment

[Cross-posted from http://w4ra.org]
On 6 April 2016, the Third International Symposium “Perspectives on ICT for Development (ICT4D)” will be hosted by the VU Network Institute, the Netherlands Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems SIKS, the Computer Science Department and VU International Office. This year’s theme is “Community Service & Education”. Invited speakers from India, Ghana, South-Africa and the Netherlands will highlight the theme, presenting case studies from various contexts: rural development, health, and education.ict4dposter2016_wide.png

@VU Tuinzaal, W&N building, (Ground floor, between S/T/U corridors) De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Symposium chairs: Dr. Victor de Boer (VU/FEW/INF) & Drs. Anna Bon (VU International Office/CIS). For more information and registration (free), visit http://w4ra.org/

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