XWiki Seminar'10

The XWikiers have spent last week at the Iasi office to celebrate the 6th anniversary of the company. This was the perfect opportunity for the team to bond and brainstorm about ways of making XWiki better.
Seminar sessions included updates from our different teams: marketing, research (congrats guys for wining the Compatible project bid), client projects, platform, support and tech.
The "Easy XWiki" brainstorming session was all about improving the user experience, while interacting with any of the faces of the product: Public Website, CMS, Simple Wiki, Advanced Enterprise Wiki, Dev Platform, Admin System. Result: a lot of jira issues opened for our ideas.
The week was not all work and no play. Mountain trip the weekend before the seminar to the Red Lake, a city quest and a Casino Party organized by the Iasi team.

Dan was our blackjack croupier ...

while Ludo was playing an important hand at poker.

We had fun and I am looking forward to our next big reunion.
Meanwhile: Happy anniversary, XWiki!

Tradition

The XWiki tradition says you have to get a customized cake on your birthday. The guys made the most of my Apple affinity this year and got me the one and only edition of the ICake:



My friends' tradition says your present must be "special" in every way: from carefully packing the items so that the birthday girl does not loose the trill of not knowing what the hell is inside, to the present itself. It must always include something one would never use in public, but would make a great centerpiece. Previous items included a baseball bat with one's brother name on it (to be used in cases of major necessity :-)) cleverly packed in a hammer-like box.
This year made no exception and my special present came wrapped up in a garbage sac:


It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a telephone!


Other special items in this year's sac: a Jackie Chan image cut from a magazine just for me (BTW Chuck Norris still kicks Jackie Chan's ass), a very fluffy fan which I fear will come in handy soon in July. Bonus: Audrey Hepburn for my wall.

Notes on a Standard: Unicode

More homework for the "Ontology" class. The title was inspired by "Notes on a Scandal", the 2006 drama starring Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench :-).

Notes on a Standard: Unicode

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A Survey on Unsupervised Graph-based Word Sense Disambiguation

My assignment for the Natural Language Ontology class was not easy: write a paper report about an article presented at Cicling 2010. We had to "blindly" choose our paper while reading only the available abstracts, but I made my choice wisely (or just had a bit of luck ;)) since I picked one of the awarded articles: An Experimental Study on Unsupervised Graph-based Word Sense Disambiguation, by George Tsatsaronis, Iraklis Varlamis, Kjetil Nørvåg.
I did not stick only to the paper above, but made a comparison with the work done by Sinha, R., Mihalcea, R. in their paper Unsupervised graph-based word
sense disambiguation using measures of semantic similarity.
Here is the paper report and the short presentation I gave to my Computational Linguistics colleagues yesterday:

A Survey on Unsupervised Graph-based Word Sense Disambiguation

View more documents from Elena-Oana Tabaranu.

A Survey on Unsupervised Graph-based Word Sense Disambiguation

View more presentations from Elena-Oana Tabaranu.

PS: Google Books already published most of the Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing proceedings.

The Dutch Spring Break

I loved the tulips, the North Sea beach, the Saturday afternoon in Utrecht and the view over Rotterdam from the Euromast tower. I know I am not being fair, but I hated the weather.

The junior geeks have taken over the Iasi office on Job Shadow Day

Following last year's tradition, the XWiki geeks have welcomed the students at the Computer Science High School at the Iasi office on Job Shadow Day. The event allows high school students in their final years to spend a few hours at a "serious" company and get acquainted with the daily responsibilities of the employees.
Caty welcomed them and did the warm-up session, then Silvia showed some insight about our marketing strategy. As a former student myself, I was more then happy to talk about my daily responsibilities as a web developer at XWiki. Marius gave them some feedback about his first week at the Iasi office, Miruna shared some "tricky" interview questions and Anca proved that fixing a bug is not as hard as it looks.
The Wii tennis session was organized, the geek jokes were made fun of and the XWiki goodies were exchanged. I hope the junior geeks had just as much fun as we did and we will be expecting them next year for some more geek talk.

My top 5 "art" pieces in Brussels

1. The 2 Pieces of the Berlin Wall

Thx to @glerouge for being a pioneer and finding the way to the European Parliament. Without his blog, we might have not discovered the two pieces of history which were so close to our hotel.

2. The "eco" trees

Made of wood and iron, they guard the platform in front of the Justice Palace.

3. Music to my eyes

Small music shop. Many great musicians.

4. Frida Kahlo

This was actually a temporary exhibition and this is the only photo I took just before a nice man informed me about "pas de photos, mademoiselle!". I consider this to be just her words in black on white and, as a consequence, I am not breaking any copyright law by publishing them.

5. The tea house

This year’s annual Europalia art festival in Belgium, from September 2009 to February 2010, was focused on China. I loved the art nouveau pavilion turned into a modern artwork using "Heavenly Lanterns".

NoSQL , the social Web and the Romanian accents

I wrote a nice survey in Romanian for my web class on the very "hot" NoSQL technology. Sadly, the title, the description and the presentation transcript provided by Slideshare do not like very much the Romanian accents. Too bad.
Here are the problematic pages:

Miscarea "NoSQL" in contextul Web-ului social/semantic

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