Members of the Palestinian eGovernment Academy visited STAR Lab at Vrije University Brussels in Belgium, from January 11, 2012 to January 14, 2012 as a part of the academy activities. The goal of this visit is to review and evaluate the training program (6 tutorials, 300 teaching hours), which are Data and Business Process Modeling, Data Integrating and open Information System, Process Integration and Services Oriented Architectures, Ontology Engineering and Lexical Semantics, Information Security and Legal Information and IT laws.

During the meeting the tutorials were discussed with highly experienced professionals in the mentioned fields.

The OTM 2011 federated conferences and workshops are organized in Crete, Greece (17~21 Oct. 2011)

Current and future software needs remain focused towards the development and deployment of large and complex intelligent and networked information systems, required for the internet- and intranet-based systems in organizations, and covering a very wide range of application domains as well as technology and research issues.

STARLab thesis topics for 2011-2012 can be found here. Additional topics are regularly added. If you find a topic that interests you, but does not completely fit your interests or you have an idea that fits the research of STARLab, do not hesitate to contact us.

On Thursday 7 July 2011 at 15:00 D2.01 Prof. Dr. Tharam Dillon - Research Professor and head of R&D of the Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence Institution at Curtin University in Western Australia - will hold a seminar entitled "Cloud Computing: Issues and Challenges". The seminar is open to anyone. Confirm your attendance by sending an email to chrdebru@vub.ac.be.

The seminar is organized in the context of the INNOViris Strategic Platforms project "Open Semantic Cloud for Brussels" (http://www.oscb.be). 

Zhenzhen Zhao works at Institut Télécom, Télécom SudParis as a HCI researcher and is currently pursuing a PhD on the topic of end-user driven service creation. Her current research interests include user perceptions of web mashups, front-end web page customization and social networks. She received her M.S. in Telecom Engineering from the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), China.

VUB STARLab leads a new project called "Open Semantic Cloud for Brussels"(OSCB) started on February 1st, 2011. OSCB aims to cover Brussels with a cloud of structured and interlinked information elements produced by "atomizing" a collection of relevant databases and other resources. Linked Data is a global initiative to interlink resources on the Web using two "simple" technologies: Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) for accessing the resources and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) for representing knowledge and annotating those resources.

VUB STARLab has participated in the ITEA 2 DiYSE Project (Do-it-Yourself Smart Experiences: Supporting Users in Creating Aware, Interactive & Flowing Experiences in an Internet-Of-Things World) review meeting (Nov. 9, 2010) and general assembly meetings (Nov. 8 and 10. 2010). It started to snow in the morning of Nov. 9, 2010. The atmosphere was warm although it was very cold outside.