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Awards 2008

Awards CTIT symposium 2008 on Creative IT

The PhD student poster competition that complements the CTIT annual symposium has been organized four times already, so this can be safely called an “invention of tradition”. Our distinguished guests Marleen Stikker (Waag society), Peter-Paul Verbeek (Philosopher, GW) and Willemijn Heeren (HMI - CHoral) were kind enough to act as the jury. My own role was just to facilitate the task of the jury, mainly to hurry them on.

We asked the students to submit an abstract in advance to help the jury to select the three best posters during the Symposium. Even with the abstracts at hand, time was short to judge the research behind the posters. Another complication is the fact that the jury had to compare work of beginning PhD students and students who are about to graduate, and work by very small and very large teams, all in a vast range of areas. Also, I must say that several posters didn’t really communicate to a jury outside core-technology IT. We probably should train our PhDs for “pitching” their work.

The jury based its verdict on the criteria published for the competition i.e. clarity, novelty, attractiveness, and appreciation of related work. Relevance to the theme of the Symposium was not amongst the selection criteria. Still, the jury appreciated that many presenters related themselves to Creative IT.

The jury unanimously agreed to award three prizes of 500, 250 and 100 EURO. The awarded posters cover quite different research areas.

The third prize of 100 EURO goes to poster #4 made by Irene Anggreeni of the CTW-OPM group. Her work connects very will with the new design perspective, where the focus shifts to the users. Her proposal involves a solid basis for working with scenarios. But the jury found it hard to judge how radically new the approach is.

The second prize of 250 EURO goes to poster #9 made by Anna Sperotto of the DACS group in EWI. She presented an innovative approach to detect intrusions in network traffic of over 2GBps. The presentation was clear and attractive. The abstraction based on flows seemed technologically innovative to the jury. This kind of “virtual knowledge” and visualization may be applicable to quite diverse other applications as well.

And then, the first prize of 500 EURO. It goes to poster #6 made by Laurens van der Werff of the HMI group. He proposed an improvement on querying audio-fragments, based on a better combination of speech recognition and information retrieval. Both abstract, poster, and presentation were very clear and attractive. The proposed research has a clear relevant application, and the work is also properly put into context. Well done.

So far the prizes. Finally, the jury grants a honourably mention for poster #5 made by Riham Abdel Kader of the DB group. This work, on optimizing queries for XML documents was also relevant, well presented, and has a nice technologically innovative core. But we had to choose somehow. Actually, it was a tough decision. The other posters had just a little bit more description of the application context and the environment.

The jury thanks all the students who have spent countless hours creating their posters, and wishes them well in the pursuit of their research. The jury believes that the attention the students received from the delegates to the symposium was both well deserved and appreciated by the students.

Finally, may I thank the members of the Jury on behalf of CTIT for their heroic efforts to judge the 19 posters fairly and quickly, spending a lunch and a coffee break!

Jaco van de Pol