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2006/07 Conference Cycle

The conference cycle includes the Computer Sciences module seminar offering for the 2006/07 academic year.

Strategic guidelines for engineers in business and as businessmen

Guillem Bou, (Universidad Ramon Llull)

Wednesday, 25 April 2007, 12.30 pm
H-1001 (Building I)

The conference will discuss what strategic management issues an engineer should consider at both the middle management and senior management level of an organization.

It will provide useful information for two different contexts, that is, when engineers are their own boss (enterpreneurship) or are acting in an management capacity (qualified manager).

It will discuss strategic management topics like:

Guillem Bou is a tenured professor at the La Salle Higher School of Engineering and Architecture (Universidad Ramon Llull). Bou graduated in mathematics and computing and holds a doctorate in educational sciences, specialized in communication and strategy. He is a regular author for the Anaya group (Anaya Multimedia, Ediciones Pirámide), and his works are available for consultation at www.conflicto.net.

 

Application of goal-directed design in the interaction of wearable and mobile systems for cardiovascular risk prevention

Elena Villalba Mora, Ignacio Peinado Martínez (Life Supporting Technologies, UPM)

Wednesday, 24 April 2007, 12.15 pm
H-1001 (Building I)

Usability is now considered one of the most important attributes of any software application and is one of the key factors determining an application's success or failure. Almost all companies and research groups have doubled their efforts in the usability field, and many consultants have focused exclusively on human-computer interaction in recent years. Since the appearance of the concept of usability in the late 1970s, many researchers and research groups have worked on methodologies to improve the user experience. In 1995, Alan Cooper published “About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design”, developing a goal-directed methodology. The book soon became a bestseller and this methodology was adopted by many research groups and large companies like Philips.

In the field of e-Health, usability is an especially critical factor, as user adherence is essential for achieving both medical and financial goals. Many European Community 6th and almost all the 7th Framework Programme projects have attached equal importance to usability as to attributes like functionality and security, and work packages have been created focusing exclusively on user interaction design.

The objective of the MyHeart project, part of the 6th Framework Programme (reference IST-2002-507816), is to fight against cardiovascular diseases through the prevention and the promotion of healthy living habits. To do this, it divides its potential users into four major groups. It develops an application for each group: healthy population (Activity Coach), at-risk population (Take Care), post-event population (NeuroRehab) and chronic patients (Heart Failure Management). Cooper's goal-directed design was the methodology applied to user interaction design in the global project. This methodology was adapted to the specific project needs. During the talk we will show how we applied the methodology to two such different applications as the Activity Coach (an application for healthy people that want to monitor their state of health) and Heart Failure Management (an application designed to monitor and evolve heart failure for chronic patients).

Elena Villalba Mora has passed her researcher proficiency examination at Madrid's Higher Technical School of Telecommunications Engineering. She rounded out her studies with a stay at the Medical Signals Processing Department of the Fraunhofer Institute in Darmstadt (Germany), where she completed her final-year project focused on ECG processing. In 2004, she joined the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's Life Supporting Technologies Group, where she is now pursuing doctoral studies. She has coordinated and participated in several European-level R&D project activities as part of the 6th Framework Programme. She has also participated in numerous international congresses. Her research field includes user interaction in wearable systems and software architecture design for mobile distributed monitoring systems. She is now leader of the EC-funded 6th Framework Programme MyHeart project user interaction work package and designer of the MyHeart project professional platform.

Ignacio Peinado Martínez is a Telecommunications Engineer from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. After several years working as an illustrator and designer for several companies and publications, he joined the Life Supporting Technologies Group in 2005, where he is completing his final-year project focused on user interaction design for the prevention of cardiovascular disease. He is now pursuing doctoral studies and working as a user interaction designer on several European and national R&D&I projects, like MyHeart, NUADU or S@Mi.

Understanding User Requirements: a Semiotics-Based View

M. Cecilia C. Baranauskas (Institute of Computing, UNICAMP)

Monday, 15 January 2007, 18:00
Lecture Theatre 6103

Requirements Engineering (RE) is the process of discovering the purpose of a prospective software system by identifying and documenting stakeholders and their needs in a form that is suitable for analysis, communication, and subsequent implementation. Requirements elicitation is closely related to and even interleaved with other RE activities such as: modelling, analysis and negotiation, and communication of requirements. RE is a multidisciplinary and human-centred activity with a big impact on interaction design. In this talk we will illustrate a participatory approach to requirements elicitation. This approach deals with functional and non-functional requirements and considers the social, political, cultural and ethical issues involved in understanding the problem in the process of RE. The proposed approach is theoretically grounded on methods and models taken from organizational semiotics. We will illustrate the approach through the development of applications in different domains such as Web-based geographical information systems (Web GIS), e-Gov and Web-inclusive design. From the interim results, we have been able to observe the contribution of organizational semiotics to the proposed approach, including elements to provide information about the system user interface design.
This talk is also an opportunity to foster cooperation between our university in Brazil and the UPM through the proposal of joint research projects and student exchanges.

Biographical Note: M. Cecilia C. Baranauskas is Professor at the Institute of Computing, Unicamp, Brazil. She received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UNICAMP, Brazil. Her research interests have focused on issues of human-computer interaction, particularly investigating different formalisms (including Semiotics and Participatory Design) in the design and evaluation of user interfaces. She leads several projects investigating the use of such formalisms for analysing, evaluating and designing domain-oriented applications (collaborative learning systems, geographical information systems, systems for work practice). Currently she is the Brazilian Representative at IFIP TC13, member of the BR-CHI (an ACM SIGCHI local chapter) Executive Council and member of the Special Committee for HCI at SBC (Brazilian Computing Society).

The Thrill of Discovery: Information Visualization for High-Dimensional Spaces

Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland - College Park)

World Usability Day

Tuesday, 14 November, 11.30
Assembly Hall

Interactive information visualization provides researchers with remarkable tools for discovery. By combining powerful data mining methods with user-controlled interfaces, users are beginning to benefit from these potent telescopes for high-dimensional spaces. They can begin with an overview, zoom in on areas of interest, filter out unwanted items, and then click for details-on-demand. With careful design and efficient algorithms, the dynamic queries approach to data exploration can provide 100msec updates even for million-record databases.
This talk will start by reviewing the growing commercial success stories such as www.spotfire.com, www.smartmoney.com/marketmap and www.hivegroup.com. Then it will cover recent research progress for visual exploration of large time series data applied to financial, Ebay auction, and genomic data.

Our next step was to combine these key ideas to produce the Hierarchical Clustering Explorer 3.0 that now includes the rank-by-feature framework. By judiciously choosing from appropriate ranking criteria for low-dimensional axis-parallel projections, users can locate desired features of higher dimensional spaces. Demonstrations will be shown.

Professor Shneiderman's short bio

Ben Shneiderman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

Ben is the author of "Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction" (4th ed. April 2004). With S. Card and J. Mackinlay, he co-authored "Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think" (1999). With Ben Bederson he co-authored “The Craft of Information Visualization” (2003). His book “Leonardo’s Laptop” appeared in October 2002 (MIT Press) and won the IEEE book award for Distinguished Literary Contribution.

Cooperation with the Third World from the Facultad de Informática

Susana Muñoz, Mariano Hermida, Álvaro Ojopi, Jesús Martínez

Thursday, 26 October, 12.00
Assembly Hall

The Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's Facultad de Informática is home to a registered cooperation group called TEDECO: "TEchnology for DEvelopment and COoperation". This group is composed of professors and students from this school and also has external collaborators. Its goal is to use technology to promote the development of third-world, mainly educational, institutions.

The aim of this talk is to disseminate the activity of this cooperation group among Facultad de Informática students and invite them to join in possible cooperation activities (for example, by offering cooperation final-year projects).
We will describe recent group experiences at Burundi during the last academic year working at the University of Ngozi. We will speak about this country, the problem of education in Africa and especially how we can help from Spain, from the UPM and from the Facultad de Informática.

How to graduate from a BSc in Informatics Engineering to an MSc in Information Technologies

Francisco Bueno (Associate Dean for Research and Postgraduate Programmes)

Friday, 30 June, 12.00 to 1.00 pm
Seminar Room H-1002

In the 2006/07 academic year, the Facultad de Informática is to offer its Master in Information Technologies, a unique opportunity for recently graduated students to also earn their official Master's degree with just a little additional effort. This degree is part of the postgraduate studies within the new higher education degree model resulting from the adaptation of the degrees to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA; Bologna declaration). This new model, covering undergraduate and postgraduate studies, is just around the corner: a process of change is to start next year and will continue into 2011. Be among the first to adapt! How? This is what we will tell you.

Satellite image fusion using a joint multiresolution-multidirectional representation

Dr. Mario Lillo Saavedra, Universidad de Concepción, Chile

Thursday, 29 June, 11.30 am
Seminar Room 1002

Image fusion can be defined as the synergic combination of information provided by several sensors and by the same sensor in different scenarios (spatial, spectral and temporal). In this talk we will describe a new fusion methodology for adequately selecting the information taken from the source images with the aim of producing fused images that are of good both spatial and spectral quality. This methodology is based on a joint multiresolution and multidirectional representation of the source images using a computationally simple single directional filter bank.

Mario Lillo Saavedra. In 1997 Mario Lillo Saavedra received his degree in civil electrical engineering from the Universidad de Concepción. In 2001 he received his Master in Sciences with an honorary mention in electrical engineering and in 2005 his doctorate in computing from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. At present he is associate professor at the School of Agricultural Engineering of the Universidad de Concepción, Chile. His current research projects include the fields of image fusion and their application to natural resources.

Spatial and spectral quality control in satellite image fusion.

Dr. Mario Lillo Saavedra, Universidad de Concepción, Chile

Thursday, 29 June,10.00 am
Seminar Room 1002

There is a wide range of applications in the field of teledetection requiring high spectral and spatial resolution images. One way of providing this type of products at relatively affordable costs is to use image fusing techniques. Most classical fusion techniques are unable to control the trade-off between final spatial and spectral quality in the fused images. In this presentation we will describe the range of fusion techniques now available, emphasizing the description of new techniques that do control this trade-off.

Usability maturity models and developing usability culture in partnership with companies

Jarmo Palviainen
Institute of Human-Centered Technology. Tampere University of Technology (Finland)

Monday 19 June, 5.30 pm
Lecture Theatre 6102

This presentation gives a short introduction to some UMMs (usability maturity models), after which it delves into the experiences from recent case studies conducted during the last year at Tampere University of Technology. Some fundamental questions about how to organize one’s own usability efforts are raised, while answering these questions is mainly left for discussion with the audience.

An organization's consistent ability to create usable products can be defined as the usability maturity of that organization. This ability can be viewed either by evaluating the product itself and/or evaluating the processes by which the product is produced. This presentation is an introduction to evaluating the user centeredness of an organization’s product development processes and infrastructure.

Different usability maturity models start with an assumption that there is an ideal process to design highly usable products, and that the organization’s processes can be evaluated against this ideal to define the maturity of the organization. Evaluations can be carried out to identify what parts of the process are the most important for development. Sometimes the motivation can be a need to prove the capability of the organization to customers or other outsiders. The motivation steers the way the evaluation is carried out, particularly the level of formalism in the evaluation process.

UMM’s have been developed both separately and in parallel with software process quality models, like CMM or SPICE. They offer a possibility to fruitfully evaluate and discuss the way that an organization is dealing with usability issues but many of them are at their best only when the desired level is relatively high and also the starting level of the organization is already somewhat higher than what it really is in many organizations at the moment.

Round Table: Job-Seeking Guidance in the ICT Sector

Tuesday, 23 May 2006. From 5.30 to 7.30 pm
Assembly Hall

Speakers

Day at DMR Consulting

Thursday, 18 May 2006

But... What is being a consultant all about? If you want to know what a computer scientist like you is doing at DMR Consulting, come and see for yourself.

Agenda

09.30 - UPM student pick-up (at School of Computing) and transportation to Finca
10.00 - Arrival at la Finca and tour of facilities.
10.15 - Company presentation and talk ( Francisco López Luque, Madrid Office Manager)
11.30 - Routine work of a consultant (consultant and UPM computing graduate)
12.15 - Coffee Break
12.30 - "Blue Ink" project presentation
13.30 - Questions
14.00 - Session closure, return to the UPM

Registration is required. Places are limited and will be assigned by strict order of registration. Closing date for registration: Tuesday, 16 May 2006

Topic Maps - knowledge management technology

Kamila Olsevicova (University of Hradec Kralove)

Wednesday 17, 11.00 am to 1.00 pm
Seminar Room H-1002

Topic Maps standard family (ISO 13250) was proposed for the organization of large bodies of information and knowledge resources. The application of Topic Maps reuses domain ontologies to simplify navigation in resources. The main concepts of the Topic Maps model are topics, associations (relations) and occurrences of resources. Topic Maps offer numerous interesting features, e.g. filtering according to user preferences, query language, possibility of visualizing the ontology, merging Topic Maps, etc. The objective of this presentation is to introduce the Topic Maps principles.

Brave New World: the War on Weaklings

José Alfredo Elía Marcos

Tuesday, 9 May, 4.00 pm.
Lecture Theatre 6102

Eugenics is now a forgotten word. Nobody openly talks about eugenics any more, but it is there. Eugenics comes from the Greek and means well-born. It is an ideology that impregnated early 20th-century Western society. Its aim was to achieve a pure race, a clean society where the best had the right to reproduce under the best conditions and, in return, the undesirable social elements, like the physically or mentally ill, the blind, blacks, gypsies, Jews, etc., would be "removed". This is the civilization that years later Aldous Huxley was to describe in his famous "Brave New World”. A world of the fit excluding the "unfit". This civilization reached its zenith in Nazi Germany, where politics designated who deserved to live. But, was that the end of eugenics? Or do some government policies and reports hark back to it? Do they not still pursue the same goals, albeit wrapped in different words and packages? Are we not living in a culture of death?

Speaker's short bio

Graduate in Physical Sciences and Electronics Engineering.
Teacher at Condes de Saldaña Secondary School in Palencia.
Enthusiast of the language of images and advertising. He has given several talks and courses on advertising and manipulation by the mass media. He has written books on human values with classroom dynamics. He has been researching the topic presented at the talk for several years.

Free choice credit recognition

Credit recognition is based on the annual agreement on free choice credit recognition through equivalence with other activities.

To be eligible for one free choice credit students shall have to prove they have attended five cycle conferences. To this, they should get the attendance certificates provided at each conference stamped and submit them together with the credit transfer application to the Registry.

Note: Students may qualify for up to three free choice credits for attending cycle conferences.