New collaborations
I'm not a PhD student anymore! Though, I'm not a PhD yet... :-)
Yes, this is how it works here: on Dec, 31st I have stopped being a PhD student, as my school officially ended that day. But I won't be a PhD until after my dissertation which will take place on April, 7th!
This is a very weird feeling, being basically... uhm... "nothing". Especially after I have been both a PhD student and an Intern last summer, splitting my time between two tasks: days working for HPL, nights working on my thesis. I still remember (and kinda miss) all those nights biking back home on El Camino, after a 14-hour session of work - tired and dizzy, I guess I risked my life sometimes :)
Btw, during this limbo, in which I still don't know exactly what I am, I managed to find a couple of project to contribute to:
- the Webatelier laboratory at USI (Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano) is working on a project called Web2rism, which aims at developing a web2.0 (buzzword! buzzword!) reputation analyzer for touristic destinations. My work is related to system design, data extraction (scrapeers!), knowledge management (did anyone say RDF store?) and... well, as many technical stuff as I can stand :)
- a nice, not huge but smart company called Noustat, located in Milan, is financing a project aimed at creating taxonomies (or, well, taxonomy skeletons that could be used as suggestions for ontology managers) out of unstructured text. The approach is inspired by Fionn Murtagh's work, which I did not know and while on one hand it sounds really weird on the other it makes me very curious... well, we'll see :)
So, that's it... Still nothing whose life spans longer than some months, but I believe a good start not to get bored after the end of my PhD school!