Summer School Organization – The Second European Business Intelligence Summer School (eBISS 2012) will be organized by the WIT laboratory. It will take place from July 15 to 21 in Brussels, Belgium.

IRIDIA participates in the project H2SWARM: Hierarchical Heterogeneous Swarm, funded by the European Science Foundation within the EUROCORES programme "Bio-inspired Engineering of Sensors, Actuators & Systems (EuroBioSAS)". The main goal of the project is the study of hierarchical communication and control strategies for swarms of heterogeneous robots, which, despite the differences among sub-groups, coherently operate in an integrated manner to achieve a common goal. This will be achieved by looking at how Nature structures and organises large groups, such as ant colonies or honeybee swarms.
Heterogeneous swarms pose a number of research questions that have been investigated only to a limited extent so far. For instance, what are the relevant interactions among heterogeneous groups that can lead to an overall coherent behaviour? How to design self-organising robotic systems with multiple levels of organisation, which can allow intra- and inter-group coordination? How do swarm robotic systems compare with more classical engineering approaches in practical application scenarios? The H2SWARM project will address these questions with a multidisciplinary approach that is strongly grounded on biological studies.

New Erasmus Mundus Master – Esteban Zimányi is the coordinator of a new European Master's Programme in Information Technologies for Business Intelligence (IT4BI). The main objective of the programme is to train computer scientists who understand and help develop the strategies of modern enterprise decision makers. The curriculum is jointly delivered by Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Belgium, Université François Rabelais Tours (UFRT) in France, Ecole Centrale Paris (ECP) in France, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Spain, and Technische Universität Berlin (TUB) in Germany. This consortium will prepare the graduates not only to answer today's professional challenges by a strong connection with the needs coming from the industry, but also to pursue their studies into doctorate programs, through strong connections with the researchers' and innovators' views. IT4BI is a 2-year (4 semesters, 120 ECTS) programme.

New journal – Esteban Zimányi is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal on Data Semantics (JoDS), published by Springer. As in modern distributed environments, data comes from heterogeneous, autonomous sources, semantic elicitation and availability of appropriate semantic metadata are the key to meaningful use of information. JoDS will be devoted to research and development issues related to semantics. The first issue of this quarterly journal will appear in March 2012.

Best Video Award, AAAI-11 AI Video Competition - The video "Swarmanoid, the movie" won the Best Video Award at the AAAI-11 AI Video Competition! This video, written and directed by Mauro Birattari and Rehan O'Grady, presents the main results of the Swarmanoid project, a FET-OPEN project funded by the European Commission and coordinated by Marco Dorigo. For more information, see the website of the Swarmanoid project.

Research project – A new project called "Advanced ICT Platform for Rehabilitation" (ICT4Rehab) started on February 1st, 2011. The ICT4Rehab project addresses a new rehabilitation paradigm in the domain of muscle spasticity rehabilitation. It will require the integration of various data sources, the development of novel algorithms and putting into practice several ICT tools supporting 2D/3D user interaction. The project's main results will be the ICT4Rehab platform that will include the developed technology in several demonstrators (a Serious Gaming demonstrator and a Clinical Analysis demonstrator). Developments will be guided by the goals of generalising the methodology to other pathologies requiring motivational sustainability and clinical analysis, and to lead to a technological platform for future developments in diverse areas. ICT4Rehab is a research project supported by the Brussels Capital Region. In addition to CoDE-WIT, there are three other teams taking part in the project: ULB MLG and ULB LABO and VUB ETRO.

Summer School Organization – The First European Business Intelligence Summer School (eBISS 2011) will be organized by the WIT laboratory. It will take place from July 3 to 9 in Paris, France.

Research project – A new project called "Open Semantic Cloud for Brussels" (OSCB) started on February 1st, 2011. OSCB aims to cover Brussels, metaphorically speaking of course, 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. Various governments (UK, US, Germany) are launching initiatives to (a) make public sector data easily available with Linked Data and (b) encourage researchers to analyze the data as well as application developers to build applications around that data, in order to stimulate innovation, business and the general wealth of society. OSCB is a research project supported by the Brussels Capital Region. In addition to CoDE-WIT, there are three other teams taking part in the project: VUB STAR Lab and VUB ETRO and EHB-CVC.