Final Report Summary - ENGINE (European research centre of Network intelliGence for INnovation Enhancement)
Executive Summary:
The ENGINE project supported by The European Framework Programme Horizon 2020 in order to establish a national and international leadership of the ENGINE Centre, an integral part of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology (WUST), in research and innovation around core expertise in Network Intelligence and a broader areas of model driven data analytics. These competencies are primary located within computer science but they also foster interdisciplinary research boosting the progress in physics, social sciences, medicine, management sciences and many others. Additionally, the idea of ENGINE was to become a driving force for cooperation between academic researchers and other various institutions, including industrial and governmental ones and first of all SMEs.
The ENGINE Centre potential was built upon (1) development of the ENGINE staff through specialized trainings and through bilateral exchange with twenty leading European research centres, (2) recruitment of over a dozen of experienced researchers, (3) organizing international courses, training days, seminars, workshops and conferences, becoming a considerable centre for professional traineeship and life-long learning, (4) upgrading and establishing new research laboratories, (5) fostering cooperation with industry through the organization of workshops on IPR-related topics, legal aspects of technology transfer, priority areas of innovation policy and funding schemes for commercialization and brokerage events. All these initialized new perspectives for advanced and innovative research on network intelligence and its deployment in industry.
The ENGINE Project has become a beacon of research excellence at the international level through a significantly expanded professional network that comprises active collaborators on joint projects, co-mentored students, co-organizers of conferences, workshops, and seminars, and co-authors of journal and conference publications. Now, it is an innovative institution of prior interest for Polish end-users, however, fully integrated with the European Research Area.
The staff involved in the project has increased visibility through reputable publications with a three times larger number of reference count when compared with previous time periods of same duration. It has also established deep collaboration and links with academics at leading US and EU Universities that are now the basis for further international and national collaboration and funding. The team has expanded its capacity in terms of graduating doctorate students, expanding the experience of young researchers, and establishing a practice of visitors who contributed to the local projects in the involved groups.
Recently, the ENGINE project team and Wroclaw University of Science and Technology are well positioned with regards to the demand for expertise in computing. It became a strong forum for sharing knowledge, tools, and infrastructure for joint interdisciplinary research projects providing the reliable and effective support for coordination of conferences, visits, and exchanges enabling fostering of professional growth of junior researchers to build the capacity for future research initiatives.
The team has already been successful in securing national funding and is actively pursuing EU project proposals with stronger ties with the rest of the EU and US research community.
Project Context and Objectives:
Contemporary man is surrounded by information. In 2009, Ganz et al. reported that we produced 487 exabytes in 2008 and in 2012 we will create five times more data as in 2008. The collected huge amount of data, e.g. by projects devoted to high energy physics, bioinformatics, astronomy and earth observation, climate modelling, etc. cannot be analysed effectively by human beings. The growing amount of the distributed data has triggered a rapid development of effective, distributed methods of smart analytics. The mentioned above methods are usually applied to many practical areas like credit approval, prediction of customer behaviour, fraud detection, designing of IPS/IDS, medical diagnosis, to name only a few.
Gartner, Inc. defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote such significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt. Among the top 10 strategic technologies for 2012 Cloud Computing, Contextual and Social User Experience, and Next Generation Analytics are worth mentioning
Taking into consideration the hottest technologies mentioned above, we should realize that present-day problems are in a need of new, innovative solutions which use effective computing systems and flexible, non-standard method of data acquisition and user communication to make smart decisions on compound practical tasks. Such an approach we called Network Intelligence; it groups versatile methods of effective computing using distributed computer network environment, intelligent human-computer interaction (HCI) and smart decision making smart decision making especially achieved by means of intelligent processing and analysis and of associations and connections within networked, complex, distributed and dynamic data sets and streams.
Researchers from the ENGINE Centre have detected the needs mentioned above and recognised Network Intelligence as a promising research area, but it could be developed according to the needs formulated by the industry, especially by SMEs. Such companies usually do not have enough technical and human resources at their disposal to carry out research and adapt innovative solutions alone. Simultaneously, academic scientists need new acknowledged procedures, experience transfer and even new research directions to adjust their studies to industry requirements. Therefore, the main objective of the ENGINE Centre is to bridge the gap between academia and industry and develop together effective solutions for the practical applications.
The main goal of the project was to enhance the research potential of the ENGINE Centre, an integral part of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology, by know-how exchange, upgrading the laboratories, initializing new perspectives for advanced and innovative research on network intelligence and its deployment in industry, with particular emphasis on SMEs. The idea of ENGINE was to become a driving force for cooperation between academic researchers and other various institutions, including industrial and governmental ones and first of all SMEs.
The ENGINE project objectives
- Training and development of the staff through specialized trainings and through bilateral exchange with leading European research centres.
- Recruitment of experienced researchers.
- Updating and improving the research equipment and organization in the ENGINE Centre.
- Becoming an innovative institution of prior interest for Polish end-users, fully integrated with the European Research Area.
- Improvement of the competence in the development of new, innovative technologies related to network intelligence.
- Organizing courses, training days, seminars, workshops and conferences. Becoming a considerable centre for professional traineeship and life-long learning for ICT companies, researchers, governmental officials and politicians.
- Developing Polish and European procedures for patenting and IPR management in computer science
- Reinforcing links, cooperation and innovation transfer to the industry, in particular to SMEs.
- Increasing participation in the EU collaborative research projects resulting in the joint grant proposals for national and international research projects, especially FP7 and Horizon 2020.
- Increasing contribution to the economic and social sustainable development of the Dolny Slask (Lower Silesia) region and The European Union.
To achieve the objectives of the ENGINE Project 7 Work Packages were designed and executed:
Work Package 1 Project Management
WP 1 served for coordination and management activities performed within the entire project. All individual work tasks within this work package was carefully supervised by the ENGINE Project Manager. For the purpose of WP 1, three periodic reports to the European Commission was prepared. In each reporting period, the external auditors certified the incurred costs. The Steering Committee meetings was organized on a monthly basis to summarize activities performed within all work packages and to make strategic decisions. An International Advisory Board (IAB) meet three times: at the beginning of the project, after the midterm review and at the end of the project to assess the most promising research directions in Network Intelligence and to recommend improvements in the project implementation.
Work Package 2 Enhancing expertise and exchanging know-how through twinning activities with partnering organizations
WP 2 reinforced the cooperation with 20 leading research institutes spanning over 11 European Union countries. Foreign researchers were invited to Poland for (i) the short-term (up to 2 weeks), (ii) mid-term (2 weeks-2 months) and (iii) long-term (2-6 months) visits. The ENGINE researchers had the opportunity to learn new techniques and methods as well as to create a lasting network of contacts during their visits with the partnering organizations. In total, 109 visits were carried out within over 3 years of the project duration. As a result of this cooperation, 5 research projects proposals, and 25 papers were prepared.
Work Package 3 Enhancing expertise and exchanging know-how through international workshops and conferences
WP 3 increased the ENGINE Centre visibility in the scientific environment through organization of 5 large conferences supported by ENGINE with about 420 participants considering all events; organization of 12 workshops supported by ENGINE and co-located with other well-known conferences with about 300 participants considering all events; organization of 6 training workshops supported by ENGINE with about 375 participants considering all events. The next key part of WP 3 was to increase the ENGINE Centre research potential by participation of the ENGINE in the key European and international conferences on Network Intelligence during which the ENGINE Centre also will be promoted, i.e. 111 presentations were given by the ENGINE staff members at international scientific conferences including 14 invited/keynote speeches. Finally, 9 conferences/workshops were organized with technical sponsorship of ENGINE Centre.
Work Package 4 Reinforcing the ENGINE research potential by the recruitment of experienced researchers
The goal of WP 4 was the enhancement of human resources of the ENGINE Centre through recruitment of 7 experienced researchers for 108 months in total. Additionally, one experienced Engineer (WT 4.8) was planned to take care for new laboratory equipment (lab WT 5.1 and WT 5.2). Unfortunately, many experienced and desirable researchers did not want to join the ENGINE because of WUST rank, some of them were not able join WUST because of the internal regulations of their own institutes which do not allow them to work for another research institute; some valuable researchers, who ENGINE is interested in, were usually very busy, they led their own stable teams, and they were not able to spend so long (12 months) period in Poland. Most of the candidates agreed to work in ENGINE only if their stay could be divided into several short periods. Therefore, the chosen WTs were reformulated (more short term positions instead of long ones and open postdoc position). Finally, 10 experienced professors and 4 postdocs were hired for 169.93 months in total.
Work Package 5 Capacity building through acquisition, development and upgrading of research equipment
The main objective of WP 5 was to upgrade the old and acquire the new research specialized equipment and software. Specialized units of the research infrastructure were purchased to improve the quality of research carried out in the existing laboratories. In total, one new laboratory was created, and three other ones were significantly upgraded.
Work Package 6 Increasing the ENGINE Centre visibility and activity directed towards collaboration and innovations
WP 6 aimed to increase the visibility of the centre at the European and regional level. ENGINE continued its actions of raising the awareness regarding the importance of the Network Intelligence, focusing mostly on regional and national authorities as well as on industrial partners, including SMEs. Innovative solutions developed for the purpose of disseminating knowledge as an interactive HCI lab were developed. The Centre also promoted its areas of research through very innovative interactive web portal and social networking sites. WP 6 increased the ENGINE capacity to support innovation and foster cooperation with industry through the organization of workshops on IPR-related topics, legal aspects of technology transfer, priority areas of innovation policy and funding schemes for commercialization, brokerage events between representatives of the research and industry, preparation of a catalogue with the offer for industry.
Work Package 7 Evaluation of the ENGINE research potential
WP 7 was dedicated to the independent assessment of the ENGINE research potential performed by three experts appointed by the European Commission. The evaluation started on the 1st October 2016 and ended on the 30th November 2016. The main outcome of this WP is an Evaluation Report (D7.1) which contains the summary of the ENGINE Centre research potential increase and the future directions for ENGINE Centre development.
Project Results:
Wrocław University of Science and Technology
Wroclaw University of Science and Technology (WUST) is one of the largest academic schools in Poland. In Polish rankings of universities, WUST ranks the high second place among Polish technical universities (according to the Ranking of Higher Education Perspectives 2016). WUST is a member of many associations, among others European University Association in the European Society for Engineering Education. According to the Patent Office report 2016, WUST was ranked the first in the number of granted patents and proprietary rights, and the second in terms of number of applications. A team from WUST has won a gold medal at the innovation fair in Brussels. They received the award for innovative solutions applied in a mobile land platform they developed – a versatile new generation vehicle.
WUST is active in internal co-operation by involvement in such international research programs as: EUREKA, COST, ARISS, The Coal And Steel Fund, structural funds. The University also participates in international students exchange programs Erasmus+, Erasmus-Mundus, Student Exchange Programme, T.I.M.E. It also participates in double diploma programs.
WUST is the largest employer in Wroclaw: over 4 000 employees, including about 2 000 research and teaching staff. WUST occupies 184 buildings with modern laboratories, libraries, Internet access, multimedia-fitted lecture rooms, etc.
The University educates over 34,000 students, at 16 Faculties (including three outside Faculties). WUT researchers published 12,195 publications in journals on the ISI Master Journal List, and 11,345 publications in JCRI indexed journals. 8 languages are taught in the School of Foreign Languages at WUST (English, Czech, French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Russian, Italian). There are 17 student culture agencies at WUST. Two WUST faculties were involved in the ENGINE project: The Faculty of Computer Science and Management and The Faculty of Electronics.
The Faculty of Computer Science and Management combines technical and economic sciences. It began its activities in 1968 as the Engineering-Economics Faculty. The present name has been used since 1972. It means that the Faculty has more than 40 years of tradition, and 17,000 graduates throughout its history. Each year 4.000 students study at the Faculty and more than 1,000 graduate annually. It employs about 170 academic staff involved in two disciplines: computer science and management. Students can chose one of three fields of study: Computer Science, Systems Engineering, and Management. The structure of the Faculty is departments and divisions. There are four Computer Science Departments: Department of Information Systems, Department of Computational Intelligence, Department of Informatics, Department of Software Engineering, and three departments and one division in Management part: Department of Operations Research, Finance and Applications of Computer Science, Department of Infrastructure Management, Department of Management Systems, Division of Management and Development of Organization.
The PhD study is in two disciplines: Management (economic sciences) and Computer Science (technical sciences).
• The 1st level, full-time study: Computer Science, Systems Engineering, Management, and new one, starts in February 2017 – Engineering of management.
• The 1st level, part-time study: Computer Science.
• The 2nd level (Master), full-time study: Computer Science, Systems Engineering, Management.
• The 2nd level (Master), part-time study: Computer Science, Management.
• Additionally, studies in English are provided: 1st level full-time in Computer Science, 2nd level full-time – specialization in Computer Engineering, 1st level in Business Management, 1st level at the Neisse University, in Information and Communication.
The Faculty supports its students to participate in international exchange and in internships with potential employers.
The advisory board of the Faculty, called the Convent, consists of representatives of locally settled companies: VOLVO IT, Capgemini, InsERT, CCC Factory, Dozamel, etc.. It plays an important advisory role in shaping the curriculum.
The staff of the Faculty was and is still involved in many research projects, among others: ICT COST Action IC1302: Semantic Keyword-based Search on Structured Data Sources (KEYSTONE); Słowosieć (Polish WordNet); CLARIN-PL; RENOIR – Reverse EngiNeering of sOcial Information pRocessing, H2020; Machine learning methods for complex networks, research project funded by National Science Centre, 2014-17; TRANSFoRm – Translational Research and Patient Safety in Europe; Analysis of the wholesale electricity market using a structural vector autoregression models SVAR: Evaluation of the impact of renewable energy on the level and volatility of prices; Analysis and modeling of processing visual information in a human-machine.
The Faculty of Electronics is the biggest faculty both at the University and in Poland, dealing with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) including Control Engineering, Robotics and Electronics. The Faculty has over 60 year experience in education and scientific research. The Faculty of Electronics is one of few faculties in Poland, which has the right to confer doctoral degrees in 4 disciplines: electronics, computer science, telecommunications, control engineering and robotics. The number of students at the Faculty is about 6,000, the academic staff is about 240 professors, associated professors and doctors. Within the last 5 years, the Faculty staff realized 86 grants from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, 12 EU grants, developed 40 patents, organized 29 conferences. It maintains 58 research and education laboratories, including general computer laboratories and work-labs with specialist equipment. The Faculty cooperates with industry, among others with: IBM Polska; Volvo Polska, KGHM Polska Miedź S.A. WHIRLPOOL, Siemens, Dolby Poland Sp. z o.o. Polkomtel Sp. z o.o. Cisco Systems Poland Sp. z o.o. LG Electronics Polska Sp. z o.o. Orange Labs, Nokia Siemens Networks Sp. z o.o.
The students can chose one of the six courses of study: Control Engineering and Robotics; Computer Science; Teleinformatics; Electronics; Telecommunications, Electronic and Computer Engineering (1st level of studies – in English). The Faculty has wide international cooperation within bilateral agreements.
Work Packages
Work Package 1 Project Management
Objectives
The objectives of WP1 were:
1. To effectively implement the management structure of the ENGINE Centre;
2. To ensure the successful performance of the project and fulfilment of all tasks on the schedule;
3. To ensure the reasonable use of resources and adequate allocation of the budget according to the activity plan;
4. To adjust activities of the Centre to international standards;
5. To ensure the efficient and adequate reporting and communication with the European Commission due to the schedule;
Execution
Successful performance of the ENGINE Project, reaching its objectives and achieving the desired impact was possible thanks to the proper management structure. The most important element of that structure was the Steering Committee (SC), which has overseen the project execution. The SC consisted of:
1. Project Coordinator (PC) and Work Package 7 Leader – Przemysław Kazienko
2. Project Manager (PM) and Work Package 1 Leader – Piotr Bródka
3. Scientific Coordinator – Halina Kwaśnicka
4. Work Package 2 Leader – Urszula Markowska – Kaczmar
5. Work Package 3 Leader – Krzysztof Walkowiak
6. Work Package 4 Leader – Michał Woźniak
7. Work Packages 5 & 6 Leader – Janusz Sobecki
According to DoW, SC should gather 4 times a year and prepare the Action Plan twice a year. However, at the beginning of project The Project Coordinator (PC) together with Project Manager (PM) have decided to change that model to enable the project’s smooth implementation and react faster on project changes. The Steering Committee has gathered more or less every month, less often during summer time and more often close to important events like end of reporting periods, deliverables deadlines, big events like NetSciX or ENIC conferences. Overall there were 35 Steering Committee meetings. Minutes from every meeting can be found in Deliverable D1.1 Scheduling meeting so relatively often allowed us to continuously track the project progress, react very fast and deal with all problems and issues, which have occurred during project execution.
Management Tasks of SC:
• WT 1.1 The communication and decision-making in the project
• WT 1.2 Financial and administrative management
• WT 1.3 Monitoring of the project phase
• WT 1.4 Project coordination – Annual meetings with International Advisory Board
• WT 1.5 Communication and reporting to EC
• WT 1.6 Scientific Coordinator – overseeing the scientific progress of the Project
Successful performance of the ENGINE Project, reaching its objectives and achieving the desired impact was possible only because the decision making process was effectively coordinated and supported by external advisors gathered in the International Advisory Board (IAB). The IAB meetings were organized three times: at the beginning of the project together with kick-off meeting in September 2013, at project midterm in November 2014 as well as close to the project end in April 2016. The IAB recommendations and suggestions allowed to adjust the ENGINE project during its runtime, to prepare the Amendment in 2015 (incl. e.g. employment of post-docs and Polish researchers out of Wroclaw) as well as identify promising but not in initially planned activities. Minutes from IAB meetings as well as the IAB recommendations can be found in Deliverable D1.2
During the project runtime the fallowing main elements were prepared:
1. Nineteen deliverables
2. Three periodic reports
3. The final report
4. The amendment
5. Three milestones
6. Thirty five steering committee meetings
7. Three international advisory board meetings
Summary
The management of such a big project was a challenge. We have encountered many obstacles (the most important were enumerated in the periodic reports), but we were able to overcome them and successfully complete the project. Since all objectives of WP2-WP7 were achieved, we can assume that all objectives of WP1 were met as well. Of course, this can be confirmed only if this and the Third Periodic Report are accepted.
Work Package 2 Enhancing expertise and exchanging know-how through twinning activities with partnering organizations
Objectives
The main objectives in WP2 were as follows:
• To exchange know-how and expertise within the ENGINE strategic research directions;
• To learn new research methods and techniques;
• To integrate with the European mainstream research;
• To boost ENGINE collaboration with industry, especially with SMEs, including non-Polish ones;
• To establish long term cooperation;
• To increase WUST’s (the ENGINE Centre) participation in FP7 and similar programs in the future (Horizon 2020);
• To increase ENGINE visibility in partnering institutions and the EU countries.
Execution
After the last Amendment, the number of partnering institutions grew from 17 to 20. The cooperation with one partner is described as one task in WP2, so together there are 20 tasks called from WT2.1 to WT2.17. The cooperation with the new partners is included in task WT2.18 (from a to d).
The objectives of WP2 were implemented as twinning actions – incoming and outgoing visits. They gave us occasion to perform joint research with our partners, to know new methods and well-equipped labs. Collaborative discussions with partners, writing joint papers and grant proposals integrated us with partners. It prognosticates well for future cooperation. Scientific seminars given by the members of partnering institutions during incoming visits enhanced knowledge of the Engine staff but also other members of the faculty. During the outgoing visits, each visitor presented, apart from scientific problems, information about WUST. It boosts the WUST visibility growth at the partnering institutions.
We have planned 107 visits in total: 27 short-term, 19 middle-term, 8 long-term outgoing visits and 31 short-term, 14 middle-term, 8 long-term incoming visits. We have carried out in total 109 visits: 37 short-term, 11 middle-term outgoing visits and 48 short-term, 12 middle-term, 1 long-term incoming visits.
Unfortunately, it was not possible to implement all middle-term and long-term visits. As a result of our correcting actions, some financial resources from WP2 were allocated to new tasks. Nevertheless, the main objectives of WP2 have been achieved. The results of cooperation with partnering institutions in WP2 measured by joint papers and project proposals can be described as follows: there are 25 papers from the cooperation submitted or accepted for publications and 5 project proposals. Moreover, there are also many unmeasurable benefits that cannot be expressed by numbers as for instance: new knowledge acquisition in the area of ENGINE center expertise or getting to know other academic institutions to organize joint research in future.
Apart from scientific benefits, during our visits at the partnering institutions, we tried to recognize the collaboration of our partners with industry – the way how the partnering institutions acquire funding for such cooperation and how this cooperation is organized.
The detailed description of WP2 execution in reference to each task is described below.
WT2.1. King’s College London, Department of Informatics, London, UK (KCL)
The collaboration with Kings College London concentrated mainly around joint research related to social networks and decision support systems in medicine, which resulted in five articles, research dissemination (SNAA2015 workshop) and writing grant proposals (1).
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 3 - short-term visit, 2 - middle-term visit,1 - long-term visit
carried out : 5 - short-term visit, 0 - middle-term visit, 0 - long-term visit
incoming planned : 3 - short-term visit, 2 - middle-term visit,1 - long-term visit
carried out : 1 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit, 0 - long-term visit
WT2.2. University of Piraeus, The Department of Digital Systems Piraeus, Greece (UPIR)
The partner had some potential but unfortunately, we failed with intensification of collaboration with the main Greek representative - prof. Demetrios G. Sampson. We found some other cooperation domains and researchers working on operational research (Data Envelopment Analysis ), especially using fuzzy approach: prof. Dorota Kuchta (WRUT) and prof. Dimitrios Despotis (Piraeus). The link between them is promising but was established relatively late (autumn 2015). Hence, so far the real outcome of the cooperation with this partner is below our expectations.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 1 short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 2 short-term visits.
incoming planned : 1 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 1 short-term visit.
WT2.3. Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS, Sankt Augustin, Germany (FHI)
Due to the fact that the collaboration was initiated with Prof. Kersting that at the beginning of the Engine project moved to TU Dortmund all the performed visits were accounted to WT 2.18a with new partner – Technical University Dortmund.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 1 - short-term visit, 2 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 0
incoming planned : 1 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit, 1 - long-term visit
carried out : 0 short
WT2.4. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Due to lack of any contact from prof. David Tax or any of his team members it was impossible to coordinate any outgoing visit. Communication with prof. Tax was suddenly cut-off. We have no information what caused this situation. This however made carrying out the planned tasks and joint research impossible. Cooperation with prof. Patrick Dewilde was initiated, which was the most fruitful one. During his stay prof. Dewilde attended several meetings with ENGINE members, during which the plans for future collaborations were established.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 1 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit, 1 - long-term visit
carried out : 0
incoming planned : 1 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit, 1 - long-term visit
carried out : 2 - short-term visit
WT2.5. Politecnico di Milano, Department of Electronics and Information, Milan, Italy (PMIL)
The most important added value gained by cooperation with prof. Massimo Tornatore from Politecnico di Milano is new knowledge in the field of modelling and optimization of optical networks with a special focus on elastic optical networks, content oriented networking, cloud computing services. Prof. Massimo Tornatore is a world class researcher with a great number of good publications and research experience from both Politecnico di Milano in Italy and UC Davis in California, US.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 3 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 4 - short-term visits
WT2.6. European Centre for Soft Computing, Mieres, Spain (ECSC)
The collaboration with European Center of Soft Computing was developed from very premature prior relations. The collaboration might be summarized as diversified, with promising research collaboration plan and significant expected outcome. Due to the fact that European Centre for Soft Computing was suddenly suppressed and by the end of January 2016 operationally liquidated all the achieved insights and developments in research collaboration in the Engine project became a subject to individual involvement of particular researchers formerly worked in ECSC.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2 - middle-term visits, 1 - long-term visit,
carried out : 1 - middle-term visit
incoming planned : 1 - middle-term visit, 1 - long-term visit,
carried out : 7 - short-term visits, 5 - middle-term visits
WT2.7. Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden, (BTH)
The scientific collaboration between BTH and WrUT was tighten by Piotr Bródka, Henric Johnson and Fredrik Erlandsson. They focused their research on social media. The main outcomes are 2 scientific papers and one more in preparation (Smart Crawling in Online Social Media), the ENIC 2015 conference hosted by BTH and Piotr Bródka becoming the co-advisor to Fredrik Erlandsson PhD thesis.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 5 - short-term visits
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 5 - short-term visits
WT2.8. University of Salamanca, Spain, (USAL)
Both partners are going to continue the joint research and organize the scientific events in the future. The number of visits from USal was reduced, because Prof. Corchado declared to sponsor visits of his workers from his department founds, so some resources were reallocate to boost the cooperation with partners under the frameworks of WT2.18.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2 - short-term visits, 2 - middle-term visits, 1 - long-term visit,
carried out :1 short-term visit, 3 - middle-term visits
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit, 1 - long-term visit,
carried out : 1 short-term visit
WT2.9. University of Bradford, Bradford (UBRA)
The cooperation with University of Bradford proceeded with groups: one led by prof. Daniel Neagu and the second one led by prof. Rahmi Qahwaji. It concentrated on model assessment for new data and image processing. The result of cooperation are two joint papers and one grant proposal. The last visit of prof. Neagu identified as a potential collaboration H2020 Public Private Partnership calls for applications of big data to personalised and efficient patient healthcare.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2 - short-term visits,
carried out : 3 - short-term visits, 2 - middle-term visits
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visits.
carried out : 3 - short-term visits, 1 –middle-term visit.
WT2.10. Ecole Supérieure d’Ingénieur en Informatique et Génie des Télécommunications, Fontainebleau, France (ESIGETEL)
Initial results of cooperation were encouraging, but because of some life problems of the partner the cooperation is almost stopped now. We hope it will be continued in the future, especially in the area of tweet’s analysis.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 3- short-term visit, 1- middle-term visit,
carried out : 1 - short-term visit
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 3 - short-term visits
WT2.11. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden(UU)
The scientific collaboration between Wrocław University of Technology and Uppsala University in Sweden focuses mostly on collaboration with Dr. Matteo Magnani and his team there. Dr. Matteo Magnani is a renowned expert on multilayer networks. Thanks to a number of visits a link between those two teams has been established and is currently heavily used in order to study the diffusion processes in multilayer networks. It is expected that the collaboration will lead to a number of conference papers and journal articles. Teams are also considering writing joint grant proposal.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2- long-term visits,
carried out : 2 - short-term visits
incoming planned : 2 - long-term visits,
carried out : 2 - short-term visits
WT2.12. The Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research, Utrecht, The Netherlands (NIVEL)
In general, the collaboration with NIVEL focused on how to analyse medical data that NIVEL is processing in order to introduce new quality in inference. WUST team shared their experience gained in other projects with NIVEL and there was initial interest in further collaboration. Yet, since one of crucial NIVEL employees left NIVEL, the joint activities were suspended until another expert will be recruited there.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 1 short-term visit, 1- middle-term visit,
carried out : 0
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visit,
carried out : 2 - short-term visits, 1 middle-term visit
WT2.13. Tampere University of Technology, Department of Signal Processing, Tampere, Finland (TUT)
The visits implemented in this task helped to establish new scientific research subject concerning application of eye tracking in 3d video coding. They also cover works on saliency estimation and Foveated Video Compression and their applications to 3D video processing and compression.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2- short-term visits, 1- middle-term visit,
carried out : 1- short-term visit, 1- middle-term visit,
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 1 short-term, 1 - middle-term visit, 1-long-term visit
WT2.14. Universidad Carlos, ÍII de Madrid, Computer Science Department, Madrid, Spain (UC3M)
In general, the collaboration with UC3M focuses on three areas: social network analysis, sentiment analysis and the research on ontologies. In each of them there are parties at both sides interested in collaboration and the willingness to progress together. The research on social network analysis will lead to writing PhD thesis by Stanisław Saganowski, moreover the work on sentiment analysis will lead to faster progress of Łukasz Augustyniak’s PhD. Yet, WUST can also offer their competences to UC3M in many areas, such as information diffusion and ontologies.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 3- short-term visits, 1- middle-term visit,
carried out : 2 - short-term visits, 1- middle-term visits
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 3 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit
WT2.15. University of Turin, Turin, Italy (UTUR)
The cooperation with the partner fails just after the good starting point. After the visits in November 2014, in the period December 2014 – March 2015 we focused on preparing the proposal on working title “Pilot Research for the Development of Personalised Medicine Health and Care Strategy, based on Big Data Information Technology Solutions”, Call: H2020-PHC-2015-two-stage. We stated some most important things, as our new potential partners, the main goal of the projects, deliverables, etc. We have cooperated by Skype and emails. We had planned incoming visits to February/March 2015, but due to obligations and one of the collaborators left the University in meantime, the partners cancelled their visits.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 1- short-term visit, 2- middle-term visits,
carried out : 2- short-term visits, 0 –middle-term, 0-long-term
incoming planned : 1 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 1 - short-term visit, 0 –middle-term, 0-long-term
WT2.16. Trinity College Dublin, Distributed Systems Group, Dublin, Ireland (TCD)
Two short visits were performed in the first period of the project. The cooperation was not very fruitful. The reason for that was that actually the research groups directly involved in the project didn’t find so many common areas of research and the TCD team had too many obligations at that time. However, based on previous visits, WUST team still intensively collaborates with other Dublin-based institutions, e.g. RCSI.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2- short-term visit, 1- middle-term visit,
carried out : 1 - short-term visit, 0- middle-term visit,
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 1- short-term visit, 0- middle-term visit,
WT2.17. The Informatics & Telematics Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece (ITI)
The collaboration with ITI made it possible to extend our experiences related to methods of diagrams and chart analysis previously developed in other projects carried out in WUST (especially in NEKST project). The main result of the collaboration is the novel method of multi-part captioned image segmentation that we called “caption-based image segmentation”. Primarily it was applied to patent image segmentation but can be also used in case of any multi part diagram, scheme and chart images where it is necessary to split it into captioned subimages. Currently the method is still being improved. One joint paper from this study was published.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2- short-term visit, 1- middle-term visit,
carried out : 3 - short-term visit, 1 middle-term visit
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 2 - short-term visit
New partners introduced from May 2014
WT2.18a. Technical University of Dortmund, Germany (TUD)
The joint work with this partner concentrated on random walks in multiplexes and relational classification. Latent Dirichlet Allocation methods for multiplex networks partitioning were also discussed. Prof. Kersting, the coordinator of the task at TU Dortmund, was available for the visiting activity only once due to his internal commitments. Therefore many collaborative actions were performed remotely.
Visits in numbers:
carried out : 2 short-term - outgoing visit
1 short-term - incoming visit
WT2.18b University of Granada, Spain (UG)
This cooperation is the most fruitful among twining activities managed by Prof. Wozniak. Several papers have been already published and submitted to the prestigious journals. Additionally, we boost the cooperation with Prof. Herrera’s teams and open new topics as instance/prototype selection which was not enumerated among topics of ENGINE team previously. The members of the both teams support the events organized by partners and serve as program committee members and/or plenary speakers. We plan to supervised new PhD by persons from WUT and UG.
Visits in numbers:
carried out : 4 - short-term visit, 2 - middle-term incoming visit
1- Short-term outgoing visit
WT2.18c University of Birmingham, UK (UBi)
The cooperation was very fruitful. The joint research and organizing the scientific events will be continued in the future. Future research cooperation will be focused on topics mostly related to data stream classification and on ensemble techniques for data stream classification.
Visits in numbers:
carried out: 2 short-term incoming visits, 2 short-term outgoing visit
New partner introduced from October 2015
WT2.18d. Max-Planck Institute for Informatics
The collaboration between Max-Planck Institute and WUST involves the partners in the research on epidemic processes in temporal networks. Radosław Michalski and Marcin Kulisiewicz from WrUT work on how to implement the expected force measure introduced by Glenn Lawyer in the temporal setting. The scientific collaboration introduced new and fast approach to predict the epidemic power of a node. The collaboration in this field enables the researchers from the ENGINE team to work on epidemic processes – the field in which their knowledge on complex networks can have an application In the public health domain.
Visits in numbers:
carried out: 1 short-term incoming visits
Future plans
WT 2.1 Kings College London, Department of Informatics, London, UK (KCL)
Area of cooperation: social networks and decision support systems in medicine
• Currently, new publication is in preparation.
WT 2.4 – Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands (DUT)
Area of cooperation: intelligent signal processing
• New cooperation between the team led by Prof. Zarzycki with Prof. Dewilde
WT 2.5 Politecnico di Milano, Department of Electronics and Information, Milan, Italy (PMIL)
Area of cooperation: optical communication network
• Expected new visit of the group of Massimo Tornatore. The cost will be covered by research project “Advanced methods for optimization of optical networks with spatial flexibility” financed by National Science Center
• Cooperation on Network Function Virtualization (plans to submit a project proposal to the National Science Center in the next call
WT2.7 Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden (BTH)
Area of cooperation: social media
• New common publication appears soon.
• In November a short research visit of Fredrik Erlandsson
• BTH is a partner in National Science Center grant proposal submitted by Piotr Bródka.
WT2.8. University of Salamanca, Spain, (USAL)
Area of cooperation: application of hybrid artificial intelligence methods to pollution monitoring.
• plans to organize the staff exchange sponsored by Erasmus+ and statutory founds of both institution.
• Plans for the common scientific events – conferences HAIS and SOCO
WT2.9. University of Bradford, Bradford (UBRA)
Area of cooperation: personalised healthcare, smart cities, data sharing, open and big data challenges.
• Plans referring to H2020 research projects were abandoned because of BREXIT. We still work to improve our joint paper.
WT2.10. Ecole Supérieure d’Ingénieur en Informatique et Génie des Télécommunications, Fontainebleau, France (ESIGETEL)
Area of cooperation: tweet analysis (especially for flu propagation prediction).
WT2.11 Uppsala University, Sweden (UU)
Area of cooperation: multilayer network
• Preparation of a new publication.
• UU is a partner in National Science Center grant proposal submitted by Piotr Bródka.
WT17. The Informatics & Telematics Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece (ITI)
Area of cooperation: Image based patent recognition
• Research on various segmentation accuracy criterions and integration of caption-based and DBSCAN-based approaches.
• Preparation of a new publication from the research.
WT2.18b University of Granada, Spain
Area of cooperation: prototype selection methods for distributed computing systems, imbalance data classification;
• The cost of one visit from the group of Prof. Herrera covered by the research project “Classification methods of imbalance data for multi-class classification task” financed by Polish National Science Center;
• Prof. Herrera supports a few visits of Prof. Wozniak’s team members in Granada;
• The submitted proposal “Analysis and Proposals to Deal with Noisy Data in Non-Standard Classification Paradigms ” includes 2 years stay of Dr. Jose Antonio Saez Munoz at WUST).
WT2.18c University of Birmingham, UK (UBi)
Area of cooperation: Imbalance data classification for streaming data and ensemble learning for streaming data
• Cooperation with Prof. Yao but now with Dr. Leandro Minku (has been moved to University of Leicester)
• Research project “Classification methods of imbalance data for multi-class classification task” financed by Polish National Science Center will cover one of the visits from the group of Prof. Yao or Dr. Minku.
• In preparation: invited survey on ensemble classification of streaming data. Plans for the future cooperation refer to joint research, joint publication and bilateral visits
Summary
Although we encountered some problems in implementation the planned numbers of middle and long-term visits, all the crucial objectives in the ENGINE project have been achieved. We early performed repairing actions and we allocated financial resources to new tasks. In total, we carried out 109 visits. The cooperation with our partners enables the ENGINE team to strengthen its scientific position in the European research mainstream. We benefited from twinning actions by learning new techniques, methods and knowledge sharing. 25 joint research papers, 5 joint project proposals and organization of joint scientific events prognosticate well for the long-lasting scientific relationship with our partners. Thanks of the ENGINE project, the visibility of WUST has increased a lot in particular in the partnering institutions.
Work Package 3 Enhancing expertise and exchanging know-how through international workshops and conferences
Objectives
The main objective of Work Package 3 are defined as follows:
• Providing comprehensive knowledge to the ENGINE staff about the state-of-the-art and methodology in Network Intelligence.
• Identifying potential ENGINE expertise in a crucial area of global scientific interest
• Identifying what skills and knowledge available at the ENGINE can be used for providing new industrial applications.
• Identifying the links between current research projects at the ENGINE and their potential applications in the industry.
• Establishing relationships with industrial and scientific partners for future cooperation
• Establishing collaboration between the ENGINE and the international teams and institutions working within the Network Intelligence area.
Execution
The WP3 consists of the following Work Tasks:
• Work Task 3.1 - Top international Conference related to Network Science/Social Networks (Task Leader: Przemysław Kazienko)
• Work Task 3.2 – The 9th International Conference on Computer Recognition Systems CORES 2015 (Task Leader: Robert Burduk)
• Work Task 3.3 – European Workshop on Network Intelligence (Task Leader: Przemysław Kazienko)
• Work Task 3.4 – Workshop on Complex Network Mining and Analysis (Task Leader: Radosław Michalski)
• Work Task 3.5 – Workshop on Advances in Machine Learning (Task Leader: Tomasz Kajdanowicz)
• Work Task 3.6 – Workshop on Interdisciplinary Network Intelligence in Applications (Task Leader: Tomasz Kajdanowicz)
• Work Task 3.7 – Workshop on Nonstationary Models of Pattern Recognition and Classifier Combinations (Task Leader: Michał Woźniak)
• Work Task 3.8 – Workshop on Machine Learning in Life Sciences (Task Leader: Bartosz Krawczyk)
• Work Task 3.9 – Workshop on Solving Classification Problems Embedded in the Nature of Data (Task Leader: Bartosz Krawczyk)
• Work Task 3.10 – Workshop on Survivable Content Oriented Networking (Task Leader: Krzysztof Walkowiak)
• Work Task 3.11 – Workshop on Application of Gaze tracking Methods in Mobile Applications Usability Verification (Task Leader: Janusz Sobecki)
• Work Task 3.12 – Workshop on Machine Vision and Graphics (MaViG) (Task Leader: Halina Kwaśnicka)
• Work Task 3.13 – Workshop on Soft Computing Methods and Application - Deep Learning Methods (SoCMA) (Task Leader: Urszula Markowska-Kaczmar)
• Work Task 3.14 – Enhancing knowledge exchange and ENGINE Centre staff expertise, through participation in the international workshops and conferences (Task Leader: Elżbieta Kukla)
• Work Task 3.15 – Workshop on Social Network Analysis in Applications (SNAA) (Task Leader: Piotr Bródka)
• Work Task 3.16 – Symposium on Multiple Network Modeling, Analysis and Mining (MNMAM) (Task Leader: Przemysław Kazienko)
• Work Task 3.17 – Other Workshops.
The major results following from implementation of WP3 can be summarized as follows:
• Organization of 5 large conferences supported by ENGINE with about 420 participants considering all events including:
o NetSci-X Wroclaw, International School and Conference on Network Science 2016, Wrocław, Poland.
o The 9 International Conference on Computer Recognition Systems CORES 2015, Wrocław, Poland.
o The First European Network Intelligence Conference ENIC 2014, Wrocław, Poland.
o The Second European Network Intelligence Conference ENIC 2015, Karlskrona, Sweden.
o The Third European Network Intelligence Conference ENIC 2016, Wrocław, Poland.
• Organization of 12 workshops supported by ENGINE and co-located with other well-known conferences with about 300 participants considering all events.
• Organization of 6 training workshops supported by ENGINE with about 375 participants considering all events:
o Advances in Machine Learning for Social Media Analysis 2014 (MLSMA 2014), Wrocław, Poland.
o NetSciX School of Code 2016, Wrocław, Poland.
o Workshop on Complex Network Mining and Analysis: Diffusion Processes in Complex Networks (DPCN 2016), Wrocław, Poland.
o Big Data meets Machine Learning 2015 (BDML 2015), Wrocław, Poland.
o Deep Architectures for Vision and Natural Language Processing (DArViN2015) Wrocław, Poland.
o Training Workshop on Machine Vision and Graphics (MaViG 2015), Wrocław, Poland.
• 56 participations of ENGINE staff members in European conferences/workshops.
• 54 participations of ENGINE staff members in conferences/workshops outside Europe.
• 12 participations of ENGINE staff members in international conferences/workshops in Poland.
• 111 presentations given by the ENGINE staff members at international scientific conferences (only supported by ENGINE).
• 14 invited/keynote speeches given by the ENGINE staff members.
• 9 conferences/workshops organized with technical sponsorship of ENGINE Centre:
o Multiple Network Modeling, Analysis and Mining 2nd Edition - Satellite Symposium at NetSci2014, Berkeley, California, US, June 2-6, 2014.
o 4th Workshop on Social Network Analysis in Applications (SNAA 2014), Beijing, China August 17-20, 2014.
o MISNC 2014, The 1st Multidiciplinary International Social Networks Conference, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, September 13-14, 2014.
o EuroPython 2015, Bilbao, Spain, July 20-26, 2015.
o IDEAL 2015 16th International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, Wroclaw, Poland, October 14-16, 2015.
o HAIS 2016 11th International Conference on Hybrid Artificial Intelligence Systems, Seville, Spain, April 18-20, 2016.
o MLLS 4th Workshop on Machine Learning in Life Sciences, September 23, 2016, Riva del Garda, Italy.
o NMRPC 2nd Workshop on Nonstationary Models of Pattern Recognition and Classifier Combinations, ICCS 2016 conference, June 6-8, 2016, in San Diego, California, US.
o AAIA 2016 11th International Symposium Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, FedCSIS 2016 conference, 11-14 September, 2016, Gdansk, Poland.
Future Plans
We would like underline that there are many plans to continue activities related to WP3, i.e. organization of workshops and conferences and participation at workshops and conferences. In particular, the future plans are as follows:
• 10th edition of CORES conference is planned for 2017 year (continuation of WT3.2).
• ENIC 2017 will be organized in September 2017 at University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany (continuation of WT3.3).
• ENIC 2018 is planned to be a co-located event together with ASONAM 2018, initial agreement was reached with Prof Reda Alhajj (continuation of WT3.2).
• Workshop Nonstationary Models of Pattern Recognition and Classifier Combinations is planned to be submitted to the ICCS 2017 confernece (continuation of WT3.7).
• Workshop on Machine Learning in Life Scien is planned to be submitted to ECML/PKDD 2017 conference (continuation of WT3.8).
• MNMAM as a joint NetOnets workshop will be also probably organized at NetSci 2017 in the USA (continuation of WT3.16).
• ENGINE stuff plans to continue active participation at workshops and conferences including presenting research papers, giving keynote talks, participation in panel discussion, etc.
Summary
Over the 40 months of the ENGINE project duration, we have performed all project activities foreseen in the Annex I to Grant Agreement. During this period, the management of the ENGINE project including leader of the Work Package 3 and leaders of particular Work Tasks has required additional efforts and a significant commitment to implement the project. All conferences/workshops planned in individual WTs were implemented except the second edition of the WT3.5 workshop.
The scientific impact following from implementation of WP3 can be summarized as follows:
• Facilitation of knowledge sharing as well as raising the visibility of the ENGINE Centre in the scientific environment.
• Knowledge enhancement of the ENGINE researchers achieved through the active participation at international scientific conferences including presentations of the most recent research results or chairing of the conference, workshop or specific session.
• Providing comprehensive knowledge to the ENGINE staff about the state-of-the-art and methodology in network intelligence.
• Presenting the results of ENGINE staff research at the international forums of specialists in the given fields.
• Identifying potential ENGINE expertise in a crucial area of global scientific interest.
• Identifying key skills and knowledge available at the ENGINE that can be used for providing new industrial applications.
• Identifying the links between current research projects at the ENGINE and their potential applications in the industry.
• Establishing relationships with industrial and scientific partners for future cooperation.
• Establishing collaboration between the ENGINE and the international teams and institutions working within the Network Intelligence area.
Work Package 4 Reinforcing the ENGINE research potential by the recruitment of experienced researchers
Objectives
The main objective of WP4 is to increase research potential of ENGINE Centre and kknowledge enhancement of the ENGINE researchers by employing experienced researchers. More detailed objectives of WP4 include:
• increasing the capacity for conducting research in the areas of the project
• increasing the capacity of the permanent ENGINE researchers through cooperation as well as fair competition with new researchers;
• using the existing potential to develop entirely new lines of research at the ENGINE, which will orient the research towards the current European priorities: environment, global change and industrial applications;
• integrating within the ENGINE staff one of the incoming researchers, currently working in the Canada, and to give the possibility for the Polish scientist currently working e.g. in the UK or USA to reintegrate;
• establishing new and reinforce existing ties with foreign researchers.
• increasing the ENGINE Centre participation in FP7, H2020 and similar programs in future
• providing maintenance for the newly acquired equipment by employment of experienced engineers and technicians
The worpackage was divided into 9 worktasks:
• Work Task 4.1 – Employment of Prof. Reda Alhajj
• Work Task 4.2 – Employment of Prof. Bolesław Szymański - Social and Cognitive Network Analysis Researcher
• Work Task 4.3 – Employment of Computer Network Optimization Researcher
• Work Task 4.4 – Employment of Complex Networks Analysis Researcher
• Work Task 4.5 – Employment of Machine Learning for Complex Structures Researcher
• Work Task 4.6 – Employment of Compound Pattern Recognition Researcher
• Work Task 4.7 – Employment of Human-Computer Interaction Researcher
• Work Task 4.8 – Employment of Experienced Laboratory Technician
• Work Task 4.9 – Employment of Experienced Laboratory Technician
Execution
Unfortunately, many experienced and desirable researchers did not want to join the ENGINE because of WUST rank, some of them were not able join WUST because of the internal regulations of their own institutes which do not allow to work for the another research institute and some valuable researchers who ENGINE is interested in are usually very busy, they lead their own teams, and they were not able to spend so long (12 months) period in Poland. Most of the candidates agreed to work in ENGINE only if their stay could be divided into several short periods. Therefore the chosen WTs were reformulated (more short term positions instead of long ones and open postdoc position). Finally, 10 experienced professors and 4 postdocs were hired for 169.93 months in total. The short summary of the each work task is presented below.
WT4.1 – Employment of Prof. Reda Alhajj
Prof. Alhajj was hired, his employment has been divided into several short periods (4 PMs have been used till now). We were informed that due to personal reasons the employment of prof. Alhajj may not be fully accomplished. The appropriate corrective actions were performed. Prof. Adam Wierzbicki (computer scientist) from Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology, Poland and Prof. Omar Lizardo (sociologist) from University of Notre Dame have been hired in 2015. As the outcome of this task so far, we may enumerate 14 publications (7 in JCR journals) and organizing International School and Conference on Networks Science
WT4.2 – Employment of Social and Semantic Network Analysis Researcher
Prof. Boleslaw Szymanski was hired, his employment has been divided into several short periods. As the outcome of this task we may enumerate publishing 9 articles in JCR journals, 13 conference papers, submitting 3 grant proposals (one for H2020 - granted, 2 for Polish National Science Center), organizing conference NetSci-X 2016 Wrocław, Poland, 11-13.01.2016 co-supervising of Łukasz Augustyniak, PhD student and the ENGINE staff member, having 6 keynote talks and participating 2 expert panels. Additionally, thanks to help of Prof. Boleslaw Szymanski the agreement between RPI and WrUT on double diploma for PhD students was signed.
WT4.3 Computer Network Optimization Researcher
Two visiting professors: Prof. Arunabha Sen from Arizona State University, USA (two periods in 2015 and 2016) and Prof. Mirosław Klinkowski, National Institute of Telecommunication, Warsaw have been hired. As the outcome of this task we may enumerate publishing 3 articles in journal indexed by JCR, 5 conference papers, presenting 5 seminars, having 1 keynote talk, 1 conference presentation, organizing 3 special sessions, preparing 1 common grant proposal.
WT4.4 Computer Network Analysis Researcher
1 postdoc Dr. Jaroslaw Jankowski from West Pomeranian University of Technology and one visiting professor Prof. Mikolaj Morzy from Poznan University of Technology have been hired. As the outcome of this task we may enumerate publishing 13 articles in JCR journals, 26 conference papers, having 2 keynote talks and 1 conference presentations, organizing NetSciX School of Code, a workshop on tools, programming interfaces and libraries for graph and network analysis and mining collocated with the NetSciX Conference.
WT4.5 Machine Learning for Complex Structures Researcher
Visiting professors Prof. Nitesh Chawla from University of Notre Dame, USA and Prof. Boguslaw Cyganek from AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland and one postdoc Dr. Alexandre Manhaes Savio from University of the Basque Country, Spain , have been hired. As the outcome of this task we may enumerate publishing 11 JCR papers and 23 conference papers. Having 2 seminars, 8 conference presentation, preparing 4 project proposals (AECC Spanish Association Against Cancer and Polish National Center for Research and Development), organizing 4 scientific events, having 10 keynote talks.
WT4.6 Compound Pattern Recognition Researcher
One visiting professor Prof. Manuel Grana Romay from Universidad del Pais Vasco, Spain and one postdoc Dr. Jose Antonio Saez Munoz from University of Granada, Spain have been hired. As the outcome of this task we may enumerate having 3 keynote talks, 2 seminars (WrUT and Jagiellonian Univ.), publishing 20 JCR journal papers and 20 conference papers, organizing 2 special issues, preparing 3 grant proposals (MINECO, Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitivity, AECC Spanish Association Against Cancer and Polish National Center for Research and Development), having 4 keynote talks and 10 conference presentations. Additionally, Prof. Grana served as reviewer for PhD thesis of Dr. Krawczyk (ENGINE team member) and grant proposals submitted to NCN.
WT4.7 Human-Computer Interaction Researcher
Dr. Cezary Sieluzycki from Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris VI, Sorbonne), Paris has been hired. As the outcome of this task we may enumerate publishing 1 JCR journal paper (under review) and 3 conference papers, preparing 3 grant proposals for Polish National Center for Research and Development and Polish National Science Center, co-organizing one scientific event under the framework of ENGINE project and having 2 conference presentations. Additionally 1 popular science article is under preparation.
WT4.8 Experienced laboratory Technician (30M)
One technician (Roman Bartusiak) has been hired for three months.
The following outcome of this task have been achieved:
• Host management for web site system (Engine, ENIC conference, MLSMA workshop)
• Participation in the infrastructure planning in the procurement procedures.
• Improvements related to the existing environment maintenance.
• Established and implemented policies to ensure existing server security.
• Support in capacity planning and the development of long-term strategic goals for systems, software, and storage in conjunction with ENGINE research team members while preparing new project proposals.
WT4.9 Experienced Laboratory Technician
Piotr Chynał has been hired, who has been assisting in upgrading of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (WT 5.5). Additionally he has participate in preparation 2 project proposals, organizing 3 workshops, and preparing one 1 conference presentation.
The main contributions into increasing the ENGINE research potential and research center visibility may be presented in the following KPIs (key performance indicators):
• Number of scientific papers authored by hired researchers with WrUT affiliation or with acknowledgement for ENGINE project: 67 including 29 papers published in journals indexed in JCR and 8 forthcoming works.
• Number of scientific papers authored by hired researchers with WrUT affiliation and in collaboration with other ENGINE staff members: 61 including 23 papers published in journals indexed in JCR and 6 forthcoming works.
• Number of plenary/invited/keynote talks presented by authored by hired researchers 29.
• Number of grants proposals written together with hired researchers: 14.
• The number of (co-)organized international scientific events: 15.
Future plans
During the work periods of the researchers employed under the framework of WP4 the strong scientific cooperation was established and the ENGINE team plans to continue common activities which may be summarized as follows:
1. Nitesh Chawla
a. new research projects to be submitted in 2017, possible employment at WUST
b. new collaborative papers to be submitted after September 2016
c. collaboration with other staff members from University of Notre Dame
d. exchange with data sets
e. request to add University of Notre Dame to the RENOIR project (H2020) is in preparation
2. Piotr Chynał
a. Employment in WUST as a research assistant
b. Cooperation in realization of research and development grants, i.e. ongoing grant BIWiSS.
3. Bogusław Cyganek
a. Organizing common scientific events as CORES 2017, HAIS 2018 (it is planned to organized in cooperation with AGH and WrUT), workshop during JICNN 2017 (proposal was submitted)
b. Common research on tensor representation, image analysis with the special attention to underwater vision, compound classification methods.
c. Submitting the common grant proposals (proposal entitled “Development of methods and algorithms for abnormal event detection for underwater object recognition and scene analysis” was submitted to Polish National Science Center and it passed the first stage of evaluation). New grant proposals were submitted in 2016 and further are under preparation and will be submitted in 2017.
4. Prof. Manuel Grana
a. The future research collaboration on medical data analysis, hyperspectral image classification, electronics health record.
b. Prof. Woźniak and Prof. Grana are working on the invited paper “Big Data for Healthcare and Medicine” which will be submitted to Proceedings of IEEE (IF=6.81)
c. Organizing common scientific events as CORES 2017 or SOCO 2016 (Prof. Wozniak has been invited as keynote speaker there)
d. Submitting the common grant proposals to Polish and Spanish agencies (several proposals have been already submitted – see description of WT4.6).
5. Jarosław Jankowski
a. It is planned to either implementation of submitted projects or preparation of new ones in 2017 and 2018
b. possible further employment of J.Jankowski in the following years (subject of consideration due to personal reasons)
c. several new collaborative papers to be submitted after September 2016
d. exchange of post-docs
6. Mirosław Klinkowski
The collaboration between prof. Mirosław Klinkowski and prof. Krzysztof Walkowiak and his team is planned to be continued in the future. In particular:
a. It is planned to collaborate on the topic of optimization of Elastic Optical Networks, it is planned to write together research papers and submit them to the following conferences: OFC2017, ICTON2017.
b. It is planned to collaborate on the topic of optimization of SDM (Space Division Multiplexing) optical networks. Prof. Mirosław Klinkowski will be employed in the research project “Advanced methods for optimization of optical networks with spatial flexibility” financed by National Science Center and headed by prof. Krzysztof Walkowiak. Moreover, in the topic of SDM network optimization, it is planned to write together research papers and submit them to conferences OFC2017, ICC2017 as well as to JCR journals.
7. Omar Lizardo
a. new papers to be submitted
b. exchange with data sets
c. consultation at new research on social network analysis (based on Prof. Lizardo sociological expertise)
d. request to add University of Notre Dame to the RENOIR project (H2020) is in preparation
8. Mikołaj Morzy
a. It is planned preparation of a collaborative grant to National Science Foundation,
b. further research on entropy usage in learning and inference in graphs as well as Benford Law application to fraud discovery in graphs
9. Jose Antonio Saez Munoz
a. Future research collaboration on multiclass imbalance data and noisy data analysis
b. Possibility of 2 year employment in WrUT –the grant proposal was submitted to Polish National Science Center under POLONEZ program (it passed the first stage of evaluation).
10. Alexander Savio
a. Future research collaboration on medical image analysis.
b. Organizing common events related to Python programing languages, probably in 2017 or 2018 the second biggest conference of Python’s programmers (EuroPython) will be organized in WrUT.
11. Arunabha Sen
The collaboration between prof. Arunabha Sen and prof. Krzysztof Walkowiak and his team is planned to be continued in the future. In particular:
a. It is planned to collaborate on the topic of Steiner trees problems, it is planned to write together research papers and submit them to JCR journal and to the ICC2017 conference.
b. It is planned to collaborate on the topic of optimization of SDM (Space Division Multiplexing) optical networks.
12. Cezary Sielużycki
Dr Sielużycki is now employed in WUST and continues cooperation within the framework of the Polish National Science Centre (grant no. 0011/RS3/2015/53) in the area of Augmented Reality application in Judo Training.
13. Bolesław Szymanski
a. It is planned to prepare of new international and national research projects to be submitted in 2017 and 2018 and employment of B.Szymanski at WUST
b. The Porf. Kazienko’s team is going to carry out the further collaborative research supported by RENOIR project (H2020)
i. collaborative supervision of PhD students
ii. new common papers to be submitted to highly impacted journals after September 2016 (still in 2016 and in 2017)
iii. collaboration with other RPI staff members, incl. Prof. Gyorgy Korniss, Prof. Christopher D. Carothers and Dr. Konstantin Kuzmin
- support with collaboration with other US scientists from other universities incl. MIT and Northeastern University
14. Adam Wierzbicki
It is planned a further research on link prediction methods in open source developer networks for appropriate recommendation
Summary
Several problems appeared in the first period of the project, but reformulation of some tasks and adding new tasks caused that all positions were fulfilled and ENGINE project gained valuable results, increasing number of publications, boost cooperation with international research team, and highly increase worldwide visibility of the research group related with ENGINE project.
Work Package 5 Capacity building through acquisition, development and upgrading of research equipment
Objectives
The main goal of Work Package 5 was to assure innovation increase in ENGINE through the upgrade the old and acquiring new laboratories equipment. WP 5 was focused on the acquisition, development and upgrading equipment, which will constitute laboratory background of ENGINE Centre. The main objective of upgrading the equipment for the project is to provide a base to support the research and innovation potential of the centre as a whole. The development of infrastructure, and therefore the scope of the research activities undertaken by ENGINE will enable closer cooperation with the industrial partners. The work package was divided into five work tasks:
• WT 5.1 - Establishment of a New Complex Networks and Massive Data Analysis Laboratory
• WT 5.2 - Upgrade of Distributed Computing and Data Mining Laboratory
• WT 5.3 - Upgrade of Teleinformatics and Computer Network Laboratory
• WT 5.4 - Upgrade of Intelligent Biomedical Signal Analysis Laboratory – that was changed to Extension of Distributed Computing and Data Mining Laboratory
• WT 5.5 - Upgrade of Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory
Execution
The main tasks of the laboratory built within WT 5.1 are complex networks analysis and massive data analysis. The scientific methods that support these two goals are (but not limited to): graph analysis, machine learning, data mining, statistics and natural language processing. The laboratory purchases has been divided into 3 parts: computational nodes, utility servers and storage and network switches. The computational nodes are built from Scientific Linux blade servers combined into a computing cluster for general purpose high-performance computing (in total 42 Actina Solar 820 servers). The utility servers (9 TYP-144-FC servers) and storage provide specialized on-demand services for the research that cannot use standardized computing nodes, delivers high-end storage for both kinds of servers (118 TB of RAW storage). The network infrastructure consisted of two 40-port switches. This infrastructure was integrated into our University supercomputer called BEM. The current research that is carried out in the laboratory is concentrated in the following fields: processing large complex networks, sentiment analysis, diffusion of information, group evolution prediction, machine learning and temporal social networks. In the years 2015 and 2016 we have used 1 652 131 and 4 519 895 processor hours accordingly. This infrastructure enabled to prepare 5 publications that were accepted to the scientific journals. The ongoing research involves 6 partners (national and international) within the ENGINE project. Nowadays, the hardware of W5.1 apart from supporting the research in the ENGINE project, is also used for other research purposes within 3 grants (Horizon 2020 and NCN).
The main goal of WT 5.2 was to enable support of works focused on designing efficient computer systems applied in the following areas: the database systems, data warehouses, decision support and data mining systems. The upgrade of the laboratory was completed in 2014 and it was the first completed task within WP5. The server that have been bought within WT 5.2 realization consisted of the following elements: chassis with dedicated control modules, 2 dedicated converged switches, management system, 9 autonomic processing units, 2 specialized parallel computing nodes, dedicated software for chassis and storage management, dedicated software supporting management and virtualization external, equipped mass storage device, local management console, server rack with required additional equipment, required cabling set and virtualization software system. Currently the system is hosting a number of virtual machines that are running scientific works. This infrastructure enabled to prepare 3 publications in the scientific journals and conference proceedings and it is used for other research purposes within 11 grants (mainly NCN).
The laboratory upgrade within WT 5.3 was aimed at conducting research in the scope of Software Defined Networks (SDN). The planned purchases have been changed and these changes was accepted in the amendment. The SDN research station consists of the following equipment: hardware network analyser and traffic generator tool (Fluke OPTIVIEW XG), Two SDN-ready core routers, supporting OpenFlow 1.3 (Juniper MX104), and offering possibility of implementing virtual systems and virtual networks inside, Two SDN-ready switches, supporting OpenFlow 1.3 (HP 3800), Four networks servers, equipped with 4 network interface cards. Servers will be used as SDN controllers (SuperServer 6018R-TDW), virtual network devices (routers, switches) and/or traffic generators. The purchases for the laboratory was finished in 2016 so there was not too much time to use the purchased equipment. So far it enabled to prepare materials for one conference publication. Currently the laboratory is used in several grants and ongoing research carried out by Ph.D. students.
Also the WT 5.4 has been redefined as Extension of The Distributed Computing and data Mining Laboratory resources that have been built within WT 5.2. The purpose of the task is to extend laboratory resources by purchase of additional storage server system. It consisted of the following elements: 99TB storage space net (RAID 5) build of 12 x SSD (eMLC or SLC) 800GB, 36 x HDD 15krpm 600GB and 24 x HDD 10krpm 1TB. After the installation it has become an integral part of the upgraded Distributed Computing and Data Mining Laboratory (DCDML)(Task 5.2) increasing its potential and capabilities. In consequence, the research results are indistinguishable.
The main goal of WT 5.5 was to enable support of works focused on different research areas in Huma-Computer Interaction, in particular: usability studies with enhanced with eye tracking and EEG, natural user interfaces, image and voice processing, 3D modelling and animation. WT 5.5 has resulted in upgrading HCI laboratory with the following devices and software: Mobile eyetracker Tobii X-2 60, Stationary eyetracker Tobii TX-300, SMI 3D Eye Tracking Glasses 2W, VarioLab EEG, Interactive wall and virtual person presentation system, Infrared camera PI OPTRIS 400, System for concurrent calculations involving server and two workstations with four GP-GPU cards 3D modelling system – Autodesk 3ds MAX 2016NML. This infrastructure is used in two ongoing grants, it enabled to prepare 6 scientific publications in conference proceedings.
Future plans and summary
The equipment within WP 5 enabled to start new research areas as well as to improve the ones that were already present within the Engine researchers. The new equipment enabled also to improve our future research plans that can be found in our research grant proposals. We are able to plan our research more efficient taking into account both time and money. It is obvious that the purchase procedure in Poland is very time consuming, so effectively to buy new equipment we need at least 6 months. This time is usually lost in the realization of any research grant, and is usually unacceptable in any cooperation with the industry.
We are convinced that we have achieved our Work Package goals, The main objective of upgrading the equipment for the project was to provide a base to support the research and innovation potential of the center as a whole. We are now able to establish closer cooperation with industrial partners. We have created one new laboratory that serves as a core laboratory for the Engine centre and upgrade four other laboratories. The main laboratory created within WT 5.1 delivers basic computational and storage capabilities and the rest more specified laboratories are concentrated
Work Package 6 Increasing the ENGINE Centre visibility and activity directed towards collaboration and innovations
Objectives
The main objective of WP6 is to increase collaboration of academia with the industrial partners. More detailed objectives of WP6 include:
• To popularize Network Intelligence among enterprises
• To establish methods of patenting programs and algorithms in Europe
• To increase the number of patents submitted by the ENGINE Centre
• To promote and develop innovative solution in research carried out in the ENGINE Centre
• To promote and commercialize results of the ENGINE Centre and WrUT researches among companies
• To increase the number of ENGINE projects realized with industrial partners
• To improve transfer of knowledge, know-how exchange and adequate support of innovative activities between the ENGINE Centre and industrial partners;
• To improve mutual awareness of technological demands (on the ENGINE side) and scientific capabilities of ENGINE (on the industry side);
• To raise awareness of the advantages associated with the innovation activity, Individual Property Rights (IPR) and patents on the personal and institutional (or private company) level;
• To achieve the recognition as a centre of significant meaning
• To increase the visibility and recognition of the ENGINE Centre and the ENGINE Project
• To facilitate communication between the ENGINE Centre and research centres in Europe
• To popularize scientific achievements
• To popularize Network Intelligence in the society.
Execution
Work Tasks included in Work Package 6 were following:
• Work Task 6.1 - Increasing ENGINE visibility through Web 2.0
• Work Task 6.2 - Workshops ‘Smart patenting – how to protect, not to confine’
• Work Task 6.3 - Workshops ‘Transfer of ideas – together is always better than on your own’
• Work Task 6.4 - Open twining industry days
• Work Task 6.5 - Establishment of the new Research and Industrial Cooperation Office
• Work Task 6.6 - Publications and promotion
• Work Task 6.7 - Preparation of popular materials for dissemination
• Work Task 6.8 - Popular science lectures
• Work Task 6.9 - Organization of open days
• Work Task 6.10 - Promotion of ENGINE scientific achievements via movie
• Work Task 6.11 – Collaboration and Research Platform for Network Intelligence
All these work tasks have been motivated by the following assumptions:
• Visibility of the WUST as well as knowledge regarding the Network Intelligence in Poland have to be extended.
• To ensure the increased promotion of Network Intelligence and the ENGINE Centre, certain dissemination and promotional activities should be undertaken.
• We should address our promotion to various target groups: researchers, students, the society (incl. schools), local/regional/state authorities as well as industry.
• Promotion activities will aim at better integration in the EU research disseminating and transferring project as well as research results in and to other European countries.
• The essential task is to attract students and young scientists to develop their academic career and conduct interdisciplinary research in WUST.
• Delivering platform for collaboration and research that will enhance ENGINE Centre in the areas of collaboration and interdisciplinary research between ENGINE staff, ENGINE staff and ENGINE partners as well as ENGINE staff and other partners including industrial.
Within WT 6.1 we have launched and maintained the ENGINE Centre website (two language versions Polish and English). The website is used as a platform for general promotional activities. It is continuously updated with rich multimedia content, from different scientific and promotional events. Since the launch of the website there had been published more than 220 news. The website have over 50k separate views by about 17k users. We also maintained Engine profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ were created and continuously updated. The promotion activities are also carried out at web services such as Youtube, Flickr and Slideshare. We have also sent 8 newsletters, with news regarding whole Engine project. It was regularly distributed via email. There were more than 600 recipients of newsletters from academia and business.
The WT 6.2 aimed at learning the best practices of IPR by organizing two workshops for both scientific and industrial partners on the problem of good patent practices. It is worth noticing that in Poland there is a lack of paths to protect the intellectual property originating from network intelligence – such as algorithms, programs and methods. Therefore, in the ENGINE Centre we would like to raise awareness about this problem by organizing at least two events on that topic. We have organized two workshops entitled ‘Smart patenting – how to protect, not to confine’ one in May 2015 and the second in June 2016. The workshops topics concerned: copyrights, patents, corporate confidential information, patent practices in EU, protection of IPR in gaming industry, commercializing and patenting of scientific work. We had 9 speakers from academia, industry and IPR experts and 60 participants both from industry and academia.
The main objective of the WT 6.3 was organization of the two workshops promoting the joint research between universities and industrial companies, to distribute the good practices coming from such joint projects. The first workshop was organized in 15-16 October 2014 and the second in 15-16 November 2015. The main topic of the first workshop was methods of collaborative, creative problem solving and the second – crowdfunding. During the workshops we have organized had both presentations and practical exercises. There were 10 presentations and 50 participants in these two workshop. The participants were coming from academia, industry, R&D units, external organizations involved in research and innovations and local press representatives.
The main objective of the WT 6.4 was to organize workshops that will present a potential of the university in realisation of research and commercial projects, in particular with cooperation with business partners. To achieve the goal, five teams from two departments prepared and updated presentations of their research scope, realized research and commercial projects, and review of their offer for business partners. The first workshop organized on 26th March 2016 was held at Wroclaw University of Science and Technology. There were 69 Participants who represented 30 companies and Engine team members. There were 10 bilateral meetings held at the workshop. The second workshop on 21st April 2015 was held at Wroclaw Technology Park – There were 32 Participants who represented 19 companies and Engine team members. There were 17 bilateral meetings. The third and fourth workshops were organized on 11th and 19th of May 2016 accordingly. They were held at Wroclaw Technology Park and WUST. There were 41 participants. They represented variety of companies of different branches and demands. Both events ended up with extensive discussion on urgent and important aspects of business demands and problems reported by guests.
The goal of WT 6.5 was establishment of the new Research and Industrial Cooperation Office. Innovation and Industrial cooperation Manager had a contract from 2.12.2013 to 31.05.2016. The manager and the other RICO staff gave the continuous support of Engine Center in fostering the cooperation with industry, knowledge transfer, supporting the innovation development, intellectual property rights, potential applications to Horizon 2020 and other funds/programmes, project realization and management and support for different organizational and marketing activities supporting above mentioned areas. The main outcome of RICO activities is establishing new collaboration with industry, especially SME, new commercial and R&D projects and increasing visibility of ENGINE Centre. The main outcomes of the RICO are following: intense collaboration with local SMEs and authorities, 67 business meetings (SME’s, UM, Town Hall, BCC, DIG), 2 international projects received (H2020, H2020-MSC-RISE), 7 national projects (PO IR 1.1.1 RID, STRATEGMED, HARMONIA, MOZART, RPO WD 1.5.1) 5 industrial projects (AlfaNet, TIM, RBO, Columb, Controling Systems, TopyFi, TAURON), organisation of and participation in conferences and workshops organized by ENGINE and preparation of the report on Creation of new paths for patenting the algorithms and innovative methods by dr Lidia Żurawowicz.
The goal of WT 6.6 was ENGINE promotion through popular science publications that was addressed to various groups of the non-scientific environment. We informed the national and regional media (newspapers, radio, TV, news websites) about all the events organized within the project. Promotion of the ENGINE project is done mainly through the University media, as PRYZMAT press (news of WrUT) or the Academic Radio LUZ. Some events organized by ENGINE team are promoted in the local press and local, or even nationwide TV. The most attractive for media was NetSci-X 2016 conference. There were 3 minutes presentation of the conference in the nationwide TVP 3 program TIME FOR WORK, WORK AT TIME, section INNOVATION, on 01/25/2016 at 16:60. Also our university TV STYK published over a two-minutes video about ENGINE NetSci-X conference. The conference was also presented in seven articles in six different local newspapers and magazines. The ENGINE researchers also presented their achievements concerning their NCN grants in local TV ECHO 24 program.
The goal of the WT 6.7 was providing popular dissemination materials that can be used to propagate effectively knowledge about the Engine Centre and increase its visibility. We have prepared the following materials:
• Conference/workshop logos, leaflets, badges, attendance certificates, and website banners: ASONAM 2015, DArViN 2015, ENIC 2016, DPCN 2016, NetSciX 2016, SNAA 2016, InTViDo, MaViG, AIMaViG;
• Engine website banners;
• Updated project information materials (rollup, posters, leaflets);
• Additional promotional materials (candy packing, pens, pendrives, laser pointers, notebooks, folders);
• Several holiday cards.
The goal of WT 6.8 was organization of popular science lectures. They were organized during different university events such as Wrocław University of Science and Technology Open Days 2014 and special vents organized in Junior High Schools in Wrocław. On 13.03.2014 we organized the lecture "Information Systems - Pragmatism and Intelligence" for 30 pupils. The second lecture "Virtualization in computer networks" that took place at WUST attracted over 50 pupils from technical school no 6 im. Króla Jana III Sobieskiego from Jastrzębie Zdrój. The third lecture „Is data visualization interesting?" took place on 10.12.2015 in The Junior High School No 9 in Wroclaw and was directed to 30 students from this junior high school.
The goal of WT 6.9 is organization of open days.The events was aimed at familiarizing potential students with educational offer of the university in order to attract skilled and motivated young people and encourage them to join us with hope that in a future they can strengthen potential of our research teams. There were two editions of Open Days in March 2015 and March 2016. The lectures were given on the following topics: Practical application of intelligent machine learning systems, Natural User Interface and “We connected human to computer – tomorrow is today”. All presentation attracted about 50-70 participants each.
The aim of WT 6.10 was promotion of ENGINE scientific achievements via movie. Within this work task the following actions have been taken:
• All lectures during MLSMA workshop and ENIC conference were also recorded and published in the Engine’s YouTube channel as private videos.
• We have also recorded the whole workshop on ‘Transfer of ideas – together is always better than on your own’
• The visiting professors’ lectures were recorded and published in the Engine’s YouTube channel
• The keynote talks and the Global Discussion Panel during the NetSciX conference were recorded and published to the Engine’s YouTube channel (together over 7 hours of talks)
• The whole DArVin workshop was recorded and stored in the Engine repository
• Most of the talks during DPCN workshop were recorded and published to the Engine’s YouTube channel (about 8 hours of talks)
• All lectures during ENIC 2015 conference were also recorded and stored in the Engine repository
• We prepared three videos about the project, two in the beginning in Polish and English and one summing up the ENGINE results (in English). WT 6.10 - videos
Within the WT 6.11 we have built the Collaboration and Research Platform for which will enhance ENGINE Centre in the areas of collaboration and interdisciplinary research between ENGINE staff, ENGINE staff and ENGINE partners. Using the equipment bought within WP5 the platform gathers several collaborative services that are able to make the research more efficient. These includes open source services such as:
• Gitlab - a collaborative platform for code base sharing as well as the repository for experimental scenarios
Sharelatex - collaborative tool for scientific papers preparation in latex
• OwnCloud - file sharing repository
• Ckan - dataset sharing repository
• Mattermoust - communication portal for subject based collaboration
• HunHub - social networking site to manage contacts, communication, and ongoing organizational activity
Additionally we also implemented the tool for facilitating the cooperation between ENGINE staff and industrial partners. It enables the possibility to solve corporate problems related to data analysis in the way of challenges that will be published online to gather data scientists interested in solving these problems. This tool is available under the name SciCup (https://scicup.com). The idea of the platform is to publish the data-driven challenges in which interested parties have the opportunity to participate. In November 2016 the first contest was organized - based on Slovenian Press Agency data. The idea of the contest is to classify articles based on the metadata or content of the articles.
Future plans and summary
The main goal of WP 6 aimed to increase the visibility of the ENGINE Centre at the European and regional level. We applied innovative solutions of disseminating knowledge by innovative interactive web portal and social networking sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Youtube, Flickr and Slideshare). We have increased the Engine visibility by publication of articles and newsletters, and organization of workshops on priority areas of innovation policy and funding schemes for commercialization and brokerage events between representatives of the research and industry. We have also prepared the events addressed to the public audience such as open days and popular lectures.
Work Package 7 Evaluation of the ENGINE research potential
Objectives
WP 7 is dedicated to the independent assessment of the ENGINE research potential performed by experts appointed by the European Commission. They should evaluate the research capacity of the ENGINE Centre and assess its scientific expertise and the potential for the future growth. Within this Work Package two meetings with the ENGINE Centre staff members were planned to be held. The first one organised at the beginning of this WP will aim at presentation of the ENGINE human resources, research infrastructure and scientific achievements. Experts will have the possibility to precise the role of the ENGINE Centre during the process of evaluation. As a summary of the meeting a list of information on the ENGINE Centre required by experts will be prepared. The evaluation report including not only the evaluation of the state-of-art but also a set of recommendations concerning the selection of the most important research areas, a list of necessary equipment as well as the identification of employment needs will be provided to the Project Coordinator at the end of the 42nd month of the project.
Execution
According to the Amendment to DoW accepted in 2015, the duration of WP7 was reduced to 4 months, and the work package started in August 2016 and ended in November 2017. Additionally, the number of evaluators’ visit in the ENGINE Centre was reduced from two to one but its duration was extended from two to three days.
In cooperation with the EU Project Officer, a suitable “Terms of Reference for the Ex-Post Evaluation of the Engine Project” was prepared in June 2016. The recruitment of external experts performed by the EU Project Officer started in May 2016 but unfortunately it lasted by the beginning of September 2016 due to several refusals.
Finally, the following three expert evaluators were gained:
1. Professor Bogdan Gabrys, Chair of Computational Intelligence, Faculty of Science and Technology, Bournemouth University, UK
2. Professor Natasa Milic-Frayling, Chair of Data Science, School of Data Science, University of Nottingham, UK
3. Professor Dino Pedreschi, Director of the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Lab, University of Pisa, Italy
Professor Bogdan Gabrys was simultaneously the rapporteur.
The experts have analysed the whole project documentation including Description of Work, deliverables, minutes and draft reports (some were in preparation stage). They have also spent three intensive days (November 2-4, 2016) on face-to-face meetings with the ENGINE staff, WUST authorities (Vice-Rector, Deans, internal auditor, administrative staff, etc.), local policy makers, advisors from the International Advisory Board, recruited researchers, representatives of the project partners and industrial partners.
Finally, the experts provided their report containing strengths, weaknesses and challenges of the ENGINE as a research centre. It was provided in the form of deliverable D7.1.
The experts focused on three main aspects
1. Assets and strengths of the ENGINE Centre
• The ENGINE Project has become a beacon of research excellence at the international level through a significantly expanded professional network that comprises active collaborators on joint projects, co-mentored students, co-organizers of conferences, workshops, and seminars, and co-authors of journal and conference publications
• The staff involved in the project has increased visibility through publications with a three times larger number of reference count when compared with previous time periods of same duration.
• The team has established deep collaboration and links with academics at leading US and EU Universities that are now the basis for further international and national collaboration and funding.
• The team has expanded capacity in terms of graduating doctorate students, expanding the experience of young researchers, and establishing a practice of visitors who contributed to the local projects in the involved groups.
• The project has enabled the involved groups and the University to acquire additional computational resources and establish new efforts in the field of HCI that are supported with the equipment for eye tracking and body tracking.
• The team has already been successful in securing national funding and is actively pursuing EU project proposals with stronger ties with the rest of the EU and US research community.
The ENGINE Project did not have specific provisions for promotion and visibility beyond the organization of academic events and scholarly activities. This was reflected in a sub-optimal online presence that would require investment of time and resources. While individual events were organized and executed at a high standard, thanks to the highly professional and effective event organization team, the ENGINE portal is lacking in several aspects:
• Internationalization. Only selected content has been translated into English, thus limiting the information that is accessible to a broad community.
• Purposeful design. The Web site does not have a clear focus and purpose to accomplish. That is reflected in the difficulty of finding basic information about the team and partners, organizational structure, and accomplishments.
2. Aspirations and visions
Not surprisingly, after a long and intense engagement on the EU project, the team is reaching a cross-road, having to decide which direction to take things forward. The team is realizing that inaction, i.e. a lack of plan and explicit decision may lead to a decline in the value that has been realized for the individuals, the team, the involved Faculties, and the University.
At this point there is no unified vision. However, the members of the team have expressed their preference and that can be summarized into two main options:
− Create an umbrella activity that would continue to build on the identity of ENGINE to transform further as the local, national, and international opportunities transpire
− Continue independently with individual members of the team returning to their research and teaching duties, now with a better portfolio of publications, increased visibility, and stronger international connections.
3. Support and barriers
The ENGINE project team and Wroclaw University of Science and Technology are well positioned with regards to the demand for expertise in computing. However, the local industry is short-term orientated and industry projects are not conducive to innovative and long term research agenda.
At the University level there is expressed interest to support activities that would leverage ENGINE reputation and reshape it to fit the needs and opportunities that local, national and European research scene supports.
The experts provided their recommendations regarding the ENGINE web portal: “Create a strong Web presence that unifies the information on the past and new projects and activities, possibly expanding to other Departments and Groups within the involved Faculties.”
Future plans and summary
The remarks related to web portal are recently being respected, since a new ENGINE Centre portal is just being developed and should accomplished by May 2017.
After a longer internal discussion, we have decided to change the name of the Centre to: “ENIGNE – European Centre for Data Science” in order to cover wide range of research topics and gather more relevant research groups.
Summary
All the work packages achieved their goals and the general aim of the project – establishing the ENGINE research centre – was successfully reached. The greatest progress was observable in quality and interdisciplinary of research carried out in the centre as well as much stronger international collaboration resulting in visible external recognition. The vision and strategy developed during the project runtime enable to continue the development of the centre in the future.
Potential Impact:
The ENGINE project has fully used its opportunity to to increase research potential in network intelligence at Wroclaw University of Science and Technology (WUST).
The technological expertise and scientific background of all recruits fitted ENGINE effort to strengthen the existing areas of excellence in network intelligence research. Moreover, each individual has brought in know-how and experience in network intelligence work, helped to bridge the gaps and created links among research groups working at WUST and Partners. The purchased research equipment has been extensively used throughout the project and forms the basis for collaborative initiatives of the ENGINE research teams for the future. Public relations specialists have developed on-line and off-line tools to increase the project recognizability, developed promotional activities to facilitate dissemination of information on the research achievements and to increase the awareness of decision makers, stakeholders and general public on the importance of basic research in network intelligence.
The newly hired Innovation and Industrial cooperation Manager has helped to developed new ways of patent protection, enriched the collaboration with industry by knowledge transfer and activities to ensure that the ENGINE innovation character is properly visible. Organized several types of workshops aimed at raising awareness on IP issues and knowledge transfer, organized Twinning Days featuring cooperation Business and Academia. Was prepared a report on intellectual property rights in software development based on newest knowledge. The project allowed to build WUST research capacity by transferring key scientific knowledge between the partnering institutions . This enabled the WUST to widen the scope of their work, beyond what was available within their own home institutions and merge the available technologies.
There were 26 WUST active researchers. Altogether, ENGINE researchers have published:
1. Papers in JCR journals – planned: 54, achieved: 106
2. Papers with authors out of WUST – planned 50, achieved: 177
3. Papers with authors out of WUST (JCR) – planned: 18, achieved: 59
4. Papers in collaboration with recruited researchers – planned: 19, achieved: 53
5. Papers in collaboration with recruited researchers (JCR journals) – planned: 10, achieved: 13
6. Number of any scientific publications in collaboration with members of partnering institutions – planned: 20, achieved: 29
7. Number of scientific publications in collaboration with members of partnering institutions (JCR journals only) – planned: 8, achieved: 24
8. Number of any scientific publications in collaboration with industry – planned: 7, achieved: 3
9. Number of scientific publications in collaboration with industry (JCR journals only) – planned: 3, achieved: 3
10. Number of ENGINE scientists authored articles published in JCR-listed journals – planned: 19, achieved: 21
Number of citations:
1. Citations of the ENGINE researchers based on Scopus (excl. autocitations) – planned: 430, achieved: 2322
2. Number of citation according to google scholar - achieved: 7162
ENGINE researchers participated in numerous prestigious international conferences with posters or oral presentations:
1. Number of participations of the ENGINE scientists in program committees of international conferences – planned: 157, achieved: 310
2. Number of invited talks given by the ENGINE researchers – planned: 12, achieved: 19
3. Number of the ENGINE researchers serving as reviewers for JCR-listed journals – planned: 12, achieved: 17
4. Number of participations of ENGINE researchers in conferences or workshops – planned: 98, achieved: 229
5. Number of visits of ENGINE researchers to other research organizations abroad except conferences and ENGINE partners – planned: 18, achieved: 21
6. Number of visits of foreign scientists at the ENGINE Centre in Wrocław not related with conferences hosted by ENGINE – planned: 53, achieved: 67
7. Number of visits of foreign scientists at the ENGINE Centre in Wrocław (incl. conferences hosted by ENGINE) – planned: 352, achieved: 636
8. Participations of ext. researchers in our events – planned: 400, achieved: 569
9. Number of foreign scientists (outside WUST) employed by ENGINE – planned: 7, achieved: 13
10. The number of participants in conferences organized through the project - achieved: 607
Moreover, ENGINE researchers have acquired 21 new research grants from national and international funding agencies that will expand the research started within ENGINE.
1. Number of projects with industrial financing or co-financing – planned: 6, achieved: 15
2. Number of European projects – planned: 4, achieved: 6
3. Number of meetings with industry representatives (no. of organizations/companies) not related to project realization – planned: 16, achieved: 149
Apart from these activities, ENGINE was also visible for general public not only by means of the project website, but also by active participation in social media, such as Facebook or Twitter. Moreover, on the ENGINE youtube account there are videos of selected talks and events published as a mean of disseminating the results of the ENGINE project.
Another important aspect of the ENGINE project is the ENGINE Scientific Collabortive Research Platform. It is a web-based platform that has been created within WP6. Its main purpose is to amplify the scientific collaboration between researchers spread across multiple institutions but also for those who are located at the same university. It offers unified tools that support: collaboration on joint articles, sharing the code and datasets, managing projects and issues as well as internal collaboration. Moreover, this platform offers the industry an easy way of test-driving their ideas based on data-driven collaboration with ENGINE Centre researchers, partnering universities and general public (data science specialists). The expected impact covers saving time and costs for establishing or continuing scientific collaboration and collaboration between industry and academia. This integrated platform shall help in solving the technical problems that researchers and partners have to overcome in order to start working on joint articles/papers, project proposals etc. leading to focusing on work, not on technical difficulties.
One of the visible societal outcomes is the focus on innovation in many areas of the cooperation between business and academia. Instead of trying to find a cost-effective way to implement known ideas, the joint collaborations with industry focus now on the unexplored areas that can lead to major breakthrough in understanding and exploiting the power of data and this can be attributed to the ENGINE project and the mindset shared project participants.
The ENGINE project also increased the visibility of good research groups in the international community what already results in joint collaboration, not only in joint papers but also in many different areas, such as co-organization of events or guest editorialship of journals. One prominent example is that the ENIC conference, firstly organized in Wrocław, is now growing and becoming an established event in a conference roadmap for network intelligence experts.
List of Websites:
http://engine.pwr.edu.pl/en/
The ENGINE project supported by The European Framework Programme Horizon 2020 in order to establish a national and international leadership of the ENGINE Centre, an integral part of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology (WUST), in research and innovation around core expertise in Network Intelligence and a broader areas of model driven data analytics. These competencies are primary located within computer science but they also foster interdisciplinary research boosting the progress in physics, social sciences, medicine, management sciences and many others. Additionally, the idea of ENGINE was to become a driving force for cooperation between academic researchers and other various institutions, including industrial and governmental ones and first of all SMEs.
The ENGINE Centre potential was built upon (1) development of the ENGINE staff through specialized trainings and through bilateral exchange with twenty leading European research centres, (2) recruitment of over a dozen of experienced researchers, (3) organizing international courses, training days, seminars, workshops and conferences, becoming a considerable centre for professional traineeship and life-long learning, (4) upgrading and establishing new research laboratories, (5) fostering cooperation with industry through the organization of workshops on IPR-related topics, legal aspects of technology transfer, priority areas of innovation policy and funding schemes for commercialization and brokerage events. All these initialized new perspectives for advanced and innovative research on network intelligence and its deployment in industry.
The ENGINE Project has become a beacon of research excellence at the international level through a significantly expanded professional network that comprises active collaborators on joint projects, co-mentored students, co-organizers of conferences, workshops, and seminars, and co-authors of journal and conference publications. Now, it is an innovative institution of prior interest for Polish end-users, however, fully integrated with the European Research Area.
The staff involved in the project has increased visibility through reputable publications with a three times larger number of reference count when compared with previous time periods of same duration. It has also established deep collaboration and links with academics at leading US and EU Universities that are now the basis for further international and national collaboration and funding. The team has expanded its capacity in terms of graduating doctorate students, expanding the experience of young researchers, and establishing a practice of visitors who contributed to the local projects in the involved groups.
Recently, the ENGINE project team and Wroclaw University of Science and Technology are well positioned with regards to the demand for expertise in computing. It became a strong forum for sharing knowledge, tools, and infrastructure for joint interdisciplinary research projects providing the reliable and effective support for coordination of conferences, visits, and exchanges enabling fostering of professional growth of junior researchers to build the capacity for future research initiatives.
The team has already been successful in securing national funding and is actively pursuing EU project proposals with stronger ties with the rest of the EU and US research community.
Project Context and Objectives:
Contemporary man is surrounded by information. In 2009, Ganz et al. reported that we produced 487 exabytes in 2008 and in 2012 we will create five times more data as in 2008. The collected huge amount of data, e.g. by projects devoted to high energy physics, bioinformatics, astronomy and earth observation, climate modelling, etc. cannot be analysed effectively by human beings. The growing amount of the distributed data has triggered a rapid development of effective, distributed methods of smart analytics. The mentioned above methods are usually applied to many practical areas like credit approval, prediction of customer behaviour, fraud detection, designing of IPS/IDS, medical diagnosis, to name only a few.
Gartner, Inc. defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote such significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt. Among the top 10 strategic technologies for 2012 Cloud Computing, Contextual and Social User Experience, and Next Generation Analytics are worth mentioning
Taking into consideration the hottest technologies mentioned above, we should realize that present-day problems are in a need of new, innovative solutions which use effective computing systems and flexible, non-standard method of data acquisition and user communication to make smart decisions on compound practical tasks. Such an approach we called Network Intelligence; it groups versatile methods of effective computing using distributed computer network environment, intelligent human-computer interaction (HCI) and smart decision making smart decision making especially achieved by means of intelligent processing and analysis and of associations and connections within networked, complex, distributed and dynamic data sets and streams.
Researchers from the ENGINE Centre have detected the needs mentioned above and recognised Network Intelligence as a promising research area, but it could be developed according to the needs formulated by the industry, especially by SMEs. Such companies usually do not have enough technical and human resources at their disposal to carry out research and adapt innovative solutions alone. Simultaneously, academic scientists need new acknowledged procedures, experience transfer and even new research directions to adjust their studies to industry requirements. Therefore, the main objective of the ENGINE Centre is to bridge the gap between academia and industry and develop together effective solutions for the practical applications.
The main goal of the project was to enhance the research potential of the ENGINE Centre, an integral part of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology, by know-how exchange, upgrading the laboratories, initializing new perspectives for advanced and innovative research on network intelligence and its deployment in industry, with particular emphasis on SMEs. The idea of ENGINE was to become a driving force for cooperation between academic researchers and other various institutions, including industrial and governmental ones and first of all SMEs.
The ENGINE project objectives
- Training and development of the staff through specialized trainings and through bilateral exchange with leading European research centres.
- Recruitment of experienced researchers.
- Updating and improving the research equipment and organization in the ENGINE Centre.
- Becoming an innovative institution of prior interest for Polish end-users, fully integrated with the European Research Area.
- Improvement of the competence in the development of new, innovative technologies related to network intelligence.
- Organizing courses, training days, seminars, workshops and conferences. Becoming a considerable centre for professional traineeship and life-long learning for ICT companies, researchers, governmental officials and politicians.
- Developing Polish and European procedures for patenting and IPR management in computer science
- Reinforcing links, cooperation and innovation transfer to the industry, in particular to SMEs.
- Increasing participation in the EU collaborative research projects resulting in the joint grant proposals for national and international research projects, especially FP7 and Horizon 2020.
- Increasing contribution to the economic and social sustainable development of the Dolny Slask (Lower Silesia) region and The European Union.
To achieve the objectives of the ENGINE Project 7 Work Packages were designed and executed:
Work Package 1 Project Management
WP 1 served for coordination and management activities performed within the entire project. All individual work tasks within this work package was carefully supervised by the ENGINE Project Manager. For the purpose of WP 1, three periodic reports to the European Commission was prepared. In each reporting period, the external auditors certified the incurred costs. The Steering Committee meetings was organized on a monthly basis to summarize activities performed within all work packages and to make strategic decisions. An International Advisory Board (IAB) meet three times: at the beginning of the project, after the midterm review and at the end of the project to assess the most promising research directions in Network Intelligence and to recommend improvements in the project implementation.
Work Package 2 Enhancing expertise and exchanging know-how through twinning activities with partnering organizations
WP 2 reinforced the cooperation with 20 leading research institutes spanning over 11 European Union countries. Foreign researchers were invited to Poland for (i) the short-term (up to 2 weeks), (ii) mid-term (2 weeks-2 months) and (iii) long-term (2-6 months) visits. The ENGINE researchers had the opportunity to learn new techniques and methods as well as to create a lasting network of contacts during their visits with the partnering organizations. In total, 109 visits were carried out within over 3 years of the project duration. As a result of this cooperation, 5 research projects proposals, and 25 papers were prepared.
Work Package 3 Enhancing expertise and exchanging know-how through international workshops and conferences
WP 3 increased the ENGINE Centre visibility in the scientific environment through organization of 5 large conferences supported by ENGINE with about 420 participants considering all events; organization of 12 workshops supported by ENGINE and co-located with other well-known conferences with about 300 participants considering all events; organization of 6 training workshops supported by ENGINE with about 375 participants considering all events. The next key part of WP 3 was to increase the ENGINE Centre research potential by participation of the ENGINE in the key European and international conferences on Network Intelligence during which the ENGINE Centre also will be promoted, i.e. 111 presentations were given by the ENGINE staff members at international scientific conferences including 14 invited/keynote speeches. Finally, 9 conferences/workshops were organized with technical sponsorship of ENGINE Centre.
Work Package 4 Reinforcing the ENGINE research potential by the recruitment of experienced researchers
The goal of WP 4 was the enhancement of human resources of the ENGINE Centre through recruitment of 7 experienced researchers for 108 months in total. Additionally, one experienced Engineer (WT 4.8) was planned to take care for new laboratory equipment (lab WT 5.1 and WT 5.2). Unfortunately, many experienced and desirable researchers did not want to join the ENGINE because of WUST rank, some of them were not able join WUST because of the internal regulations of their own institutes which do not allow them to work for another research institute; some valuable researchers, who ENGINE is interested in, were usually very busy, they led their own stable teams, and they were not able to spend so long (12 months) period in Poland. Most of the candidates agreed to work in ENGINE only if their stay could be divided into several short periods. Therefore, the chosen WTs were reformulated (more short term positions instead of long ones and open postdoc position). Finally, 10 experienced professors and 4 postdocs were hired for 169.93 months in total.
Work Package 5 Capacity building through acquisition, development and upgrading of research equipment
The main objective of WP 5 was to upgrade the old and acquire the new research specialized equipment and software. Specialized units of the research infrastructure were purchased to improve the quality of research carried out in the existing laboratories. In total, one new laboratory was created, and three other ones were significantly upgraded.
Work Package 6 Increasing the ENGINE Centre visibility and activity directed towards collaboration and innovations
WP 6 aimed to increase the visibility of the centre at the European and regional level. ENGINE continued its actions of raising the awareness regarding the importance of the Network Intelligence, focusing mostly on regional and national authorities as well as on industrial partners, including SMEs. Innovative solutions developed for the purpose of disseminating knowledge as an interactive HCI lab were developed. The Centre also promoted its areas of research through very innovative interactive web portal and social networking sites. WP 6 increased the ENGINE capacity to support innovation and foster cooperation with industry through the organization of workshops on IPR-related topics, legal aspects of technology transfer, priority areas of innovation policy and funding schemes for commercialization, brokerage events between representatives of the research and industry, preparation of a catalogue with the offer for industry.
Work Package 7 Evaluation of the ENGINE research potential
WP 7 was dedicated to the independent assessment of the ENGINE research potential performed by three experts appointed by the European Commission. The evaluation started on the 1st October 2016 and ended on the 30th November 2016. The main outcome of this WP is an Evaluation Report (D7.1) which contains the summary of the ENGINE Centre research potential increase and the future directions for ENGINE Centre development.
Project Results:
Wrocław University of Science and Technology
Wroclaw University of Science and Technology (WUST) is one of the largest academic schools in Poland. In Polish rankings of universities, WUST ranks the high second place among Polish technical universities (according to the Ranking of Higher Education Perspectives 2016). WUST is a member of many associations, among others European University Association in the European Society for Engineering Education. According to the Patent Office report 2016, WUST was ranked the first in the number of granted patents and proprietary rights, and the second in terms of number of applications. A team from WUST has won a gold medal at the innovation fair in Brussels. They received the award for innovative solutions applied in a mobile land platform they developed – a versatile new generation vehicle.
WUST is active in internal co-operation by involvement in such international research programs as: EUREKA, COST, ARISS, The Coal And Steel Fund, structural funds. The University also participates in international students exchange programs Erasmus+, Erasmus-Mundus, Student Exchange Programme, T.I.M.E. It also participates in double diploma programs.
WUST is the largest employer in Wroclaw: over 4 000 employees, including about 2 000 research and teaching staff. WUST occupies 184 buildings with modern laboratories, libraries, Internet access, multimedia-fitted lecture rooms, etc.
The University educates over 34,000 students, at 16 Faculties (including three outside Faculties). WUT researchers published 12,195 publications in journals on the ISI Master Journal List, and 11,345 publications in JCRI indexed journals. 8 languages are taught in the School of Foreign Languages at WUST (English, Czech, French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Russian, Italian). There are 17 student culture agencies at WUST. Two WUST faculties were involved in the ENGINE project: The Faculty of Computer Science and Management and The Faculty of Electronics.
The Faculty of Computer Science and Management combines technical and economic sciences. It began its activities in 1968 as the Engineering-Economics Faculty. The present name has been used since 1972. It means that the Faculty has more than 40 years of tradition, and 17,000 graduates throughout its history. Each year 4.000 students study at the Faculty and more than 1,000 graduate annually. It employs about 170 academic staff involved in two disciplines: computer science and management. Students can chose one of three fields of study: Computer Science, Systems Engineering, and Management. The structure of the Faculty is departments and divisions. There are four Computer Science Departments: Department of Information Systems, Department of Computational Intelligence, Department of Informatics, Department of Software Engineering, and three departments and one division in Management part: Department of Operations Research, Finance and Applications of Computer Science, Department of Infrastructure Management, Department of Management Systems, Division of Management and Development of Organization.
The PhD study is in two disciplines: Management (economic sciences) and Computer Science (technical sciences).
• The 1st level, full-time study: Computer Science, Systems Engineering, Management, and new one, starts in February 2017 – Engineering of management.
• The 1st level, part-time study: Computer Science.
• The 2nd level (Master), full-time study: Computer Science, Systems Engineering, Management.
• The 2nd level (Master), part-time study: Computer Science, Management.
• Additionally, studies in English are provided: 1st level full-time in Computer Science, 2nd level full-time – specialization in Computer Engineering, 1st level in Business Management, 1st level at the Neisse University, in Information and Communication.
The Faculty supports its students to participate in international exchange and in internships with potential employers.
The advisory board of the Faculty, called the Convent, consists of representatives of locally settled companies: VOLVO IT, Capgemini, InsERT, CCC Factory, Dozamel, etc.. It plays an important advisory role in shaping the curriculum.
The staff of the Faculty was and is still involved in many research projects, among others: ICT COST Action IC1302: Semantic Keyword-based Search on Structured Data Sources (KEYSTONE); Słowosieć (Polish WordNet); CLARIN-PL; RENOIR – Reverse EngiNeering of sOcial Information pRocessing, H2020; Machine learning methods for complex networks, research project funded by National Science Centre, 2014-17; TRANSFoRm – Translational Research and Patient Safety in Europe; Analysis of the wholesale electricity market using a structural vector autoregression models SVAR: Evaluation of the impact of renewable energy on the level and volatility of prices; Analysis and modeling of processing visual information in a human-machine.
The Faculty of Electronics is the biggest faculty both at the University and in Poland, dealing with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) including Control Engineering, Robotics and Electronics. The Faculty has over 60 year experience in education and scientific research. The Faculty of Electronics is one of few faculties in Poland, which has the right to confer doctoral degrees in 4 disciplines: electronics, computer science, telecommunications, control engineering and robotics. The number of students at the Faculty is about 6,000, the academic staff is about 240 professors, associated professors and doctors. Within the last 5 years, the Faculty staff realized 86 grants from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, 12 EU grants, developed 40 patents, organized 29 conferences. It maintains 58 research and education laboratories, including general computer laboratories and work-labs with specialist equipment. The Faculty cooperates with industry, among others with: IBM Polska; Volvo Polska, KGHM Polska Miedź S.A. WHIRLPOOL, Siemens, Dolby Poland Sp. z o.o. Polkomtel Sp. z o.o. Cisco Systems Poland Sp. z o.o. LG Electronics Polska Sp. z o.o. Orange Labs, Nokia Siemens Networks Sp. z o.o.
The students can chose one of the six courses of study: Control Engineering and Robotics; Computer Science; Teleinformatics; Electronics; Telecommunications, Electronic and Computer Engineering (1st level of studies – in English). The Faculty has wide international cooperation within bilateral agreements.
Work Packages
Work Package 1 Project Management
Objectives
The objectives of WP1 were:
1. To effectively implement the management structure of the ENGINE Centre;
2. To ensure the successful performance of the project and fulfilment of all tasks on the schedule;
3. To ensure the reasonable use of resources and adequate allocation of the budget according to the activity plan;
4. To adjust activities of the Centre to international standards;
5. To ensure the efficient and adequate reporting and communication with the European Commission due to the schedule;
Execution
Successful performance of the ENGINE Project, reaching its objectives and achieving the desired impact was possible thanks to the proper management structure. The most important element of that structure was the Steering Committee (SC), which has overseen the project execution. The SC consisted of:
1. Project Coordinator (PC) and Work Package 7 Leader – Przemysław Kazienko
2. Project Manager (PM) and Work Package 1 Leader – Piotr Bródka
3. Scientific Coordinator – Halina Kwaśnicka
4. Work Package 2 Leader – Urszula Markowska – Kaczmar
5. Work Package 3 Leader – Krzysztof Walkowiak
6. Work Package 4 Leader – Michał Woźniak
7. Work Packages 5 & 6 Leader – Janusz Sobecki
According to DoW, SC should gather 4 times a year and prepare the Action Plan twice a year. However, at the beginning of project The Project Coordinator (PC) together with Project Manager (PM) have decided to change that model to enable the project’s smooth implementation and react faster on project changes. The Steering Committee has gathered more or less every month, less often during summer time and more often close to important events like end of reporting periods, deliverables deadlines, big events like NetSciX or ENIC conferences. Overall there were 35 Steering Committee meetings. Minutes from every meeting can be found in Deliverable D1.1 Scheduling meeting so relatively often allowed us to continuously track the project progress, react very fast and deal with all problems and issues, which have occurred during project execution.
Management Tasks of SC:
• WT 1.1 The communication and decision-making in the project
• WT 1.2 Financial and administrative management
• WT 1.3 Monitoring of the project phase
• WT 1.4 Project coordination – Annual meetings with International Advisory Board
• WT 1.5 Communication and reporting to EC
• WT 1.6 Scientific Coordinator – overseeing the scientific progress of the Project
Successful performance of the ENGINE Project, reaching its objectives and achieving the desired impact was possible only because the decision making process was effectively coordinated and supported by external advisors gathered in the International Advisory Board (IAB). The IAB meetings were organized three times: at the beginning of the project together with kick-off meeting in September 2013, at project midterm in November 2014 as well as close to the project end in April 2016. The IAB recommendations and suggestions allowed to adjust the ENGINE project during its runtime, to prepare the Amendment in 2015 (incl. e.g. employment of post-docs and Polish researchers out of Wroclaw) as well as identify promising but not in initially planned activities. Minutes from IAB meetings as well as the IAB recommendations can be found in Deliverable D1.2
During the project runtime the fallowing main elements were prepared:
1. Nineteen deliverables
2. Three periodic reports
3. The final report
4. The amendment
5. Three milestones
6. Thirty five steering committee meetings
7. Three international advisory board meetings
Summary
The management of such a big project was a challenge. We have encountered many obstacles (the most important were enumerated in the periodic reports), but we were able to overcome them and successfully complete the project. Since all objectives of WP2-WP7 were achieved, we can assume that all objectives of WP1 were met as well. Of course, this can be confirmed only if this and the Third Periodic Report are accepted.
Work Package 2 Enhancing expertise and exchanging know-how through twinning activities with partnering organizations
Objectives
The main objectives in WP2 were as follows:
• To exchange know-how and expertise within the ENGINE strategic research directions;
• To learn new research methods and techniques;
• To integrate with the European mainstream research;
• To boost ENGINE collaboration with industry, especially with SMEs, including non-Polish ones;
• To establish long term cooperation;
• To increase WUST’s (the ENGINE Centre) participation in FP7 and similar programs in the future (Horizon 2020);
• To increase ENGINE visibility in partnering institutions and the EU countries.
Execution
After the last Amendment, the number of partnering institutions grew from 17 to 20. The cooperation with one partner is described as one task in WP2, so together there are 20 tasks called from WT2.1 to WT2.17. The cooperation with the new partners is included in task WT2.18 (from a to d).
The objectives of WP2 were implemented as twinning actions – incoming and outgoing visits. They gave us occasion to perform joint research with our partners, to know new methods and well-equipped labs. Collaborative discussions with partners, writing joint papers and grant proposals integrated us with partners. It prognosticates well for future cooperation. Scientific seminars given by the members of partnering institutions during incoming visits enhanced knowledge of the Engine staff but also other members of the faculty. During the outgoing visits, each visitor presented, apart from scientific problems, information about WUST. It boosts the WUST visibility growth at the partnering institutions.
We have planned 107 visits in total: 27 short-term, 19 middle-term, 8 long-term outgoing visits and 31 short-term, 14 middle-term, 8 long-term incoming visits. We have carried out in total 109 visits: 37 short-term, 11 middle-term outgoing visits and 48 short-term, 12 middle-term, 1 long-term incoming visits.
Unfortunately, it was not possible to implement all middle-term and long-term visits. As a result of our correcting actions, some financial resources from WP2 were allocated to new tasks. Nevertheless, the main objectives of WP2 have been achieved. The results of cooperation with partnering institutions in WP2 measured by joint papers and project proposals can be described as follows: there are 25 papers from the cooperation submitted or accepted for publications and 5 project proposals. Moreover, there are also many unmeasurable benefits that cannot be expressed by numbers as for instance: new knowledge acquisition in the area of ENGINE center expertise or getting to know other academic institutions to organize joint research in future.
Apart from scientific benefits, during our visits at the partnering institutions, we tried to recognize the collaboration of our partners with industry – the way how the partnering institutions acquire funding for such cooperation and how this cooperation is organized.
The detailed description of WP2 execution in reference to each task is described below.
WT2.1. King’s College London, Department of Informatics, London, UK (KCL)
The collaboration with Kings College London concentrated mainly around joint research related to social networks and decision support systems in medicine, which resulted in five articles, research dissemination (SNAA2015 workshop) and writing grant proposals (1).
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 3 - short-term visit, 2 - middle-term visit,1 - long-term visit
carried out : 5 - short-term visit, 0 - middle-term visit, 0 - long-term visit
incoming planned : 3 - short-term visit, 2 - middle-term visit,1 - long-term visit
carried out : 1 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit, 0 - long-term visit
WT2.2. University of Piraeus, The Department of Digital Systems Piraeus, Greece (UPIR)
The partner had some potential but unfortunately, we failed with intensification of collaboration with the main Greek representative - prof. Demetrios G. Sampson. We found some other cooperation domains and researchers working on operational research (Data Envelopment Analysis ), especially using fuzzy approach: prof. Dorota Kuchta (WRUT) and prof. Dimitrios Despotis (Piraeus). The link between them is promising but was established relatively late (autumn 2015). Hence, so far the real outcome of the cooperation with this partner is below our expectations.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 1 short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 2 short-term visits.
incoming planned : 1 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 1 short-term visit.
WT2.3. Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS, Sankt Augustin, Germany (FHI)
Due to the fact that the collaboration was initiated with Prof. Kersting that at the beginning of the Engine project moved to TU Dortmund all the performed visits were accounted to WT 2.18a with new partner – Technical University Dortmund.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 1 - short-term visit, 2 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 0
incoming planned : 1 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit, 1 - long-term visit
carried out : 0 short
WT2.4. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Due to lack of any contact from prof. David Tax or any of his team members it was impossible to coordinate any outgoing visit. Communication with prof. Tax was suddenly cut-off. We have no information what caused this situation. This however made carrying out the planned tasks and joint research impossible. Cooperation with prof. Patrick Dewilde was initiated, which was the most fruitful one. During his stay prof. Dewilde attended several meetings with ENGINE members, during which the plans for future collaborations were established.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 1 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit, 1 - long-term visit
carried out : 0
incoming planned : 1 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit, 1 - long-term visit
carried out : 2 - short-term visit
WT2.5. Politecnico di Milano, Department of Electronics and Information, Milan, Italy (PMIL)
The most important added value gained by cooperation with prof. Massimo Tornatore from Politecnico di Milano is new knowledge in the field of modelling and optimization of optical networks with a special focus on elastic optical networks, content oriented networking, cloud computing services. Prof. Massimo Tornatore is a world class researcher with a great number of good publications and research experience from both Politecnico di Milano in Italy and UC Davis in California, US.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 3 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 4 - short-term visits
WT2.6. European Centre for Soft Computing, Mieres, Spain (ECSC)
The collaboration with European Center of Soft Computing was developed from very premature prior relations. The collaboration might be summarized as diversified, with promising research collaboration plan and significant expected outcome. Due to the fact that European Centre for Soft Computing was suddenly suppressed and by the end of January 2016 operationally liquidated all the achieved insights and developments in research collaboration in the Engine project became a subject to individual involvement of particular researchers formerly worked in ECSC.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2 - middle-term visits, 1 - long-term visit,
carried out : 1 - middle-term visit
incoming planned : 1 - middle-term visit, 1 - long-term visit,
carried out : 7 - short-term visits, 5 - middle-term visits
WT2.7. Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden, (BTH)
The scientific collaboration between BTH and WrUT was tighten by Piotr Bródka, Henric Johnson and Fredrik Erlandsson. They focused their research on social media. The main outcomes are 2 scientific papers and one more in preparation (Smart Crawling in Online Social Media), the ENIC 2015 conference hosted by BTH and Piotr Bródka becoming the co-advisor to Fredrik Erlandsson PhD thesis.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 5 - short-term visits
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 5 - short-term visits
WT2.8. University of Salamanca, Spain, (USAL)
Both partners are going to continue the joint research and organize the scientific events in the future. The number of visits from USal was reduced, because Prof. Corchado declared to sponsor visits of his workers from his department founds, so some resources were reallocate to boost the cooperation with partners under the frameworks of WT2.18.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2 - short-term visits, 2 - middle-term visits, 1 - long-term visit,
carried out :1 short-term visit, 3 - middle-term visits
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit, 1 - long-term visit,
carried out : 1 short-term visit
WT2.9. University of Bradford, Bradford (UBRA)
The cooperation with University of Bradford proceeded with groups: one led by prof. Daniel Neagu and the second one led by prof. Rahmi Qahwaji. It concentrated on model assessment for new data and image processing. The result of cooperation are two joint papers and one grant proposal. The last visit of prof. Neagu identified as a potential collaboration H2020 Public Private Partnership calls for applications of big data to personalised and efficient patient healthcare.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2 - short-term visits,
carried out : 3 - short-term visits, 2 - middle-term visits
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visits.
carried out : 3 - short-term visits, 1 –middle-term visit.
WT2.10. Ecole Supérieure d’Ingénieur en Informatique et Génie des Télécommunications, Fontainebleau, France (ESIGETEL)
Initial results of cooperation were encouraging, but because of some life problems of the partner the cooperation is almost stopped now. We hope it will be continued in the future, especially in the area of tweet’s analysis.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 3- short-term visit, 1- middle-term visit,
carried out : 1 - short-term visit
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 3 - short-term visits
WT2.11. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden(UU)
The scientific collaboration between Wrocław University of Technology and Uppsala University in Sweden focuses mostly on collaboration with Dr. Matteo Magnani and his team there. Dr. Matteo Magnani is a renowned expert on multilayer networks. Thanks to a number of visits a link between those two teams has been established and is currently heavily used in order to study the diffusion processes in multilayer networks. It is expected that the collaboration will lead to a number of conference papers and journal articles. Teams are also considering writing joint grant proposal.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2- long-term visits,
carried out : 2 - short-term visits
incoming planned : 2 - long-term visits,
carried out : 2 - short-term visits
WT2.12. The Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research, Utrecht, The Netherlands (NIVEL)
In general, the collaboration with NIVEL focused on how to analyse medical data that NIVEL is processing in order to introduce new quality in inference. WUST team shared their experience gained in other projects with NIVEL and there was initial interest in further collaboration. Yet, since one of crucial NIVEL employees left NIVEL, the joint activities were suspended until another expert will be recruited there.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 1 short-term visit, 1- middle-term visit,
carried out : 0
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visit,
carried out : 2 - short-term visits, 1 middle-term visit
WT2.13. Tampere University of Technology, Department of Signal Processing, Tampere, Finland (TUT)
The visits implemented in this task helped to establish new scientific research subject concerning application of eye tracking in 3d video coding. They also cover works on saliency estimation and Foveated Video Compression and their applications to 3D video processing and compression.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2- short-term visits, 1- middle-term visit,
carried out : 1- short-term visit, 1- middle-term visit,
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 1 short-term, 1 - middle-term visit, 1-long-term visit
WT2.14. Universidad Carlos, ÍII de Madrid, Computer Science Department, Madrid, Spain (UC3M)
In general, the collaboration with UC3M focuses on three areas: social network analysis, sentiment analysis and the research on ontologies. In each of them there are parties at both sides interested in collaboration and the willingness to progress together. The research on social network analysis will lead to writing PhD thesis by Stanisław Saganowski, moreover the work on sentiment analysis will lead to faster progress of Łukasz Augustyniak’s PhD. Yet, WUST can also offer their competences to UC3M in many areas, such as information diffusion and ontologies.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 3- short-term visits, 1- middle-term visit,
carried out : 2 - short-term visits, 1- middle-term visits
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 3 - short-term visits, 1 - middle-term visit
WT2.15. University of Turin, Turin, Italy (UTUR)
The cooperation with the partner fails just after the good starting point. After the visits in November 2014, in the period December 2014 – March 2015 we focused on preparing the proposal on working title “Pilot Research for the Development of Personalised Medicine Health and Care Strategy, based on Big Data Information Technology Solutions”, Call: H2020-PHC-2015-two-stage. We stated some most important things, as our new potential partners, the main goal of the projects, deliverables, etc. We have cooperated by Skype and emails. We had planned incoming visits to February/March 2015, but due to obligations and one of the collaborators left the University in meantime, the partners cancelled their visits.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 1- short-term visit, 2- middle-term visits,
carried out : 2- short-term visits, 0 –middle-term, 0-long-term
incoming planned : 1 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 1 - short-term visit, 0 –middle-term, 0-long-term
WT2.16. Trinity College Dublin, Distributed Systems Group, Dublin, Ireland (TCD)
Two short visits were performed in the first period of the project. The cooperation was not very fruitful. The reason for that was that actually the research groups directly involved in the project didn’t find so many common areas of research and the TCD team had too many obligations at that time. However, based on previous visits, WUST team still intensively collaborates with other Dublin-based institutions, e.g. RCSI.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2- short-term visit, 1- middle-term visit,
carried out : 1 - short-term visit, 0- middle-term visit,
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 1- short-term visit, 0- middle-term visit,
WT2.17. The Informatics & Telematics Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece (ITI)
The collaboration with ITI made it possible to extend our experiences related to methods of diagrams and chart analysis previously developed in other projects carried out in WUST (especially in NEKST project). The main result of the collaboration is the novel method of multi-part captioned image segmentation that we called “caption-based image segmentation”. Primarily it was applied to patent image segmentation but can be also used in case of any multi part diagram, scheme and chart images where it is necessary to split it into captioned subimages. Currently the method is still being improved. One joint paper from this study was published.
Visits in numbers:
outgoing planned: 2- short-term visit, 1- middle-term visit,
carried out : 3 - short-term visit, 1 middle-term visit
incoming planned : 2 - short-term visit, 1 - middle-term visit,
carried out : 2 - short-term visit
New partners introduced from May 2014
WT2.18a. Technical University of Dortmund, Germany (TUD)
The joint work with this partner concentrated on random walks in multiplexes and relational classification. Latent Dirichlet Allocation methods for multiplex networks partitioning were also discussed. Prof. Kersting, the coordinator of the task at TU Dortmund, was available for the visiting activity only once due to his internal commitments. Therefore many collaborative actions were performed remotely.
Visits in numbers:
carried out : 2 short-term - outgoing visit
1 short-term - incoming visit
WT2.18b University of Granada, Spain (UG)
This cooperation is the most fruitful among twining activities managed by Prof. Wozniak. Several papers have been already published and submitted to the prestigious journals. Additionally, we boost the cooperation with Prof. Herrera’s teams and open new topics as instance/prototype selection which was not enumerated among topics of ENGINE team previously. The members of the both teams support the events organized by partners and serve as program committee members and/or plenary speakers. We plan to supervised new PhD by persons from WUT and UG.
Visits in numbers:
carried out : 4 - short-term visit, 2 - middle-term incoming visit
1- Short-term outgoing visit
WT2.18c University of Birmingham, UK (UBi)
The cooperation was very fruitful. The joint research and organizing the scientific events will be continued in the future. Future research cooperation will be focused on topics mostly related to data stream classification and on ensemble techniques for data stream classification.
Visits in numbers:
carried out: 2 short-term incoming visits, 2 short-term outgoing visit
New partner introduced from October 2015
WT2.18d. Max-Planck Institute for Informatics
The collaboration between Max-Planck Institute and WUST involves the partners in the research on epidemic processes in temporal networks. Radosław Michalski and Marcin Kulisiewicz from WrUT work on how to implement the expected force measure introduced by Glenn Lawyer in the temporal setting. The scientific collaboration introduced new and fast approach to predict the epidemic power of a node. The collaboration in this field enables the researchers from the ENGINE team to work on epidemic processes – the field in which their knowledge on complex networks can have an application In the public health domain.
Visits in numbers:
carried out: 1 short-term incoming visits
Future plans
WT 2.1 Kings College London, Department of Informatics, London, UK (KCL)
Area of cooperation: social networks and decision support systems in medicine
• Currently, new publication is in preparation.
WT 2.4 – Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands (DUT)
Area of cooperation: intelligent signal processing
• New cooperation between the team led by Prof. Zarzycki with Prof. Dewilde
WT 2.5 Politecnico di Milano, Department of Electronics and Information, Milan, Italy (PMIL)
Area of cooperation: optical communication network
• Expected new visit of the group of Massimo Tornatore. The cost will be covered by research project “Advanced methods for optimization of optical networks with spatial flexibility” financed by National Science Center
• Cooperation on Network Function Virtualization (plans to submit a project proposal to the National Science Center in the next call
WT2.7 Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden (BTH)
Area of cooperation: social media
• New common publication appears soon.
• In November a short research visit of Fredrik Erlandsson
• BTH is a partner in National Science Center grant proposal submitted by Piotr Bródka.
WT2.8. University of Salamanca, Spain, (USAL)
Area of cooperation: application of hybrid artificial intelligence methods to pollution monitoring.
• plans to organize the staff exchange sponsored by Erasmus+ and statutory founds of both institution.
• Plans for the common scientific events – conferences HAIS and SOCO
WT2.9. University of Bradford, Bradford (UBRA)
Area of cooperation: personalised healthcare, smart cities, data sharing, open and big data challenges.
• Plans referring to H2020 research projects were abandoned because of BREXIT. We still work to improve our joint paper.
WT2.10. Ecole Supérieure d’Ingénieur en Informatique et Génie des Télécommunications, Fontainebleau, France (ESIGETEL)
Area of cooperation: tweet analysis (especially for flu propagation prediction).
WT2.11 Uppsala University, Sweden (UU)
Area of cooperation: multilayer network
• Preparation of a new publication.
• UU is a partner in National Science Center grant proposal submitted by Piotr Bródka.
WT17. The Informatics & Telematics Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece (ITI)
Area of cooperation: Image based patent recognition
• Research on various segmentation accuracy criterions and integration of caption-based and DBSCAN-based approaches.
• Preparation of a new publication from the research.
WT2.18b University of Granada, Spain
Area of cooperation: prototype selection methods for distributed computing systems, imbalance data classification;
• The cost of one visit from the group of Prof. Herrera covered by the research project “Classification methods of imbalance data for multi-class classification task” financed by Polish National Science Center;
• Prof. Herrera supports a few visits of Prof. Wozniak’s team members in Granada;
• The submitted proposal “Analysis and Proposals to Deal with Noisy Data in Non-Standard Classification Paradigms ” includes 2 years stay of Dr. Jose Antonio Saez Munoz at WUST).
WT2.18c University of Birmingham, UK (UBi)
Area of cooperation: Imbalance data classification for streaming data and ensemble learning for streaming data
• Cooperation with Prof. Yao but now with Dr. Leandro Minku (has been moved to University of Leicester)
• Research project “Classification methods of imbalance data for multi-class classification task” financed by Polish National Science Center will cover one of the visits from the group of Prof. Yao or Dr. Minku.
• In preparation: invited survey on ensemble classification of streaming data. Plans for the future cooperation refer to joint research, joint publication and bilateral visits
Summary
Although we encountered some problems in implementation the planned numbers of middle and long-term visits, all the crucial objectives in the ENGINE project have been achieved. We early performed repairing actions and we allocated financial resources to new tasks. In total, we carried out 109 visits. The cooperation with our partners enables the ENGINE team to strengthen its scientific position in the European research mainstream. We benefited from twinning actions by learning new techniques, methods and knowledge sharing. 25 joint research papers, 5 joint project proposals and organization of joint scientific events prognosticate well for the long-lasting scientific relationship with our partners. Thanks of the ENGINE project, the visibility of WUST has increased a lot in particular in the partnering institutions.
Work Package 3 Enhancing expertise and exchanging know-how through international workshops and conferences
Objectives
The main objective of Work Package 3 are defined as follows:
• Providing comprehensive knowledge to the ENGINE staff about the state-of-the-art and methodology in Network Intelligence.
• Identifying potential ENGINE expertise in a crucial area of global scientific interest
• Identifying what skills and knowledge available at the ENGINE can be used for providing new industrial applications.
• Identifying the links between current research projects at the ENGINE and their potential applications in the industry.
• Establishing relationships with industrial and scientific partners for future cooperation
• Establishing collaboration between the ENGINE and the international teams and institutions working within the Network Intelligence area.
Execution
The WP3 consists of the following Work Tasks:
• Work Task 3.1 - Top international Conference related to Network Science/Social Networks (Task Leader: Przemysław Kazienko)
• Work Task 3.2 – The 9th International Conference on Computer Recognition Systems CORES 2015 (Task Leader: Robert Burduk)
• Work Task 3.3 – European Workshop on Network Intelligence (Task Leader: Przemysław Kazienko)
• Work Task 3.4 – Workshop on Complex Network Mining and Analysis (Task Leader: Radosław Michalski)
• Work Task 3.5 – Workshop on Advances in Machine Learning (Task Leader: Tomasz Kajdanowicz)
• Work Task 3.6 – Workshop on Interdisciplinary Network Intelligence in Applications (Task Leader: Tomasz Kajdanowicz)
• Work Task 3.7 – Workshop on Nonstationary Models of Pattern Recognition and Classifier Combinations (Task Leader: Michał Woźniak)
• Work Task 3.8 – Workshop on Machine Learning in Life Sciences (Task Leader: Bartosz Krawczyk)
• Work Task 3.9 – Workshop on Solving Classification Problems Embedded in the Nature of Data (Task Leader: Bartosz Krawczyk)
• Work Task 3.10 – Workshop on Survivable Content Oriented Networking (Task Leader: Krzysztof Walkowiak)
• Work Task 3.11 – Workshop on Application of Gaze tracking Methods in Mobile Applications Usability Verification (Task Leader: Janusz Sobecki)
• Work Task 3.12 – Workshop on Machine Vision and Graphics (MaViG) (Task Leader: Halina Kwaśnicka)
• Work Task 3.13 – Workshop on Soft Computing Methods and Application - Deep Learning Methods (SoCMA) (Task Leader: Urszula Markowska-Kaczmar)
• Work Task 3.14 – Enhancing knowledge exchange and ENGINE Centre staff expertise, through participation in the international workshops and conferences (Task Leader: Elżbieta Kukla)
• Work Task 3.15 – Workshop on Social Network Analysis in Applications (SNAA) (Task Leader: Piotr Bródka)
• Work Task 3.16 – Symposium on Multiple Network Modeling, Analysis and Mining (MNMAM) (Task Leader: Przemysław Kazienko)
• Work Task 3.17 – Other Workshops.
The major results following from implementation of WP3 can be summarized as follows:
• Organization of 5 large conferences supported by ENGINE with about 420 participants considering all events including:
o NetSci-X Wroclaw, International School and Conference on Network Science 2016, Wrocław, Poland.
o The 9 International Conference on Computer Recognition Systems CORES 2015, Wrocław, Poland.
o The First European Network Intelligence Conference ENIC 2014, Wrocław, Poland.
o The Second European Network Intelligence Conference ENIC 2015, Karlskrona, Sweden.
o The Third European Network Intelligence Conference ENIC 2016, Wrocław, Poland.
• Organization of 12 workshops supported by ENGINE and co-located with other well-known conferences with about 300 participants considering all events.
• Organization of 6 training workshops supported by ENGINE with about 375 participants considering all events:
o Advances in Machine Learning for Social Media Analysis 2014 (MLSMA 2014), Wrocław, Poland.
o NetSciX School of Code 2016, Wrocław, Poland.
o Workshop on Complex Network Mining and Analysis: Diffusion Processes in Complex Networks (DPCN 2016), Wrocław, Poland.
o Big Data meets Machine Learning 2015 (BDML 2015), Wrocław, Poland.
o Deep Architectures for Vision and Natural Language Processing (DArViN2015) Wrocław, Poland.
o Training Workshop on Machine Vision and Graphics (MaViG 2015), Wrocław, Poland.
• 56 participations of ENGINE staff members in European conferences/workshops.
• 54 participations of ENGINE staff members in conferences/workshops outside Europe.
• 12 participations of ENGINE staff members in international conferences/workshops in Poland.
• 111 presentations given by the ENGINE staff members at international scientific conferences (only supported by ENGINE).
• 14 invited/keynote speeches given by the ENGINE staff members.
• 9 conferences/workshops organized with technical sponsorship of ENGINE Centre:
o Multiple Network Modeling, Analysis and Mining 2nd Edition - Satellite Symposium at NetSci2014, Berkeley, California, US, June 2-6, 2014.
o 4th Workshop on Social Network Analysis in Applications (SNAA 2014), Beijing, China August 17-20, 2014.
o MISNC 2014, The 1st Multidiciplinary International Social Networks Conference, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, September 13-14, 2014.
o EuroPython 2015, Bilbao, Spain, July 20-26, 2015.
o IDEAL 2015 16th International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, Wroclaw, Poland, October 14-16, 2015.
o HAIS 2016 11th International Conference on Hybrid Artificial Intelligence Systems, Seville, Spain, April 18-20, 2016.
o MLLS 4th Workshop on Machine Learning in Life Sciences, September 23, 2016, Riva del Garda, Italy.
o NMRPC 2nd Workshop on Nonstationary Models of Pattern Recognition and Classifier Combinations, ICCS 2016 conference, June 6-8, 2016, in San Diego, California, US.
o AAIA 2016 11th International Symposium Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, FedCSIS 2016 conference, 11-14 September, 2016, Gdansk, Poland.
Future Plans
We would like underline that there are many plans to continue activities related to WP3, i.e. organization of workshops and conferences and participation at workshops and conferences. In particular, the future plans are as follows:
• 10th edition of CORES conference is planned for 2017 year (continuation of WT3.2).
• ENIC 2017 will be organized in September 2017 at University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany (continuation of WT3.3).
• ENIC 2018 is planned to be a co-located event together with ASONAM 2018, initial agreement was reached with Prof Reda Alhajj (continuation of WT3.2).
• Workshop Nonstationary Models of Pattern Recognition and Classifier Combinations is planned to be submitted to the ICCS 2017 confernece (continuation of WT3.7).
• Workshop on Machine Learning in Life Scien is planned to be submitted to ECML/PKDD 2017 conference (continuation of WT3.8).
• MNMAM as a joint NetOnets workshop will be also probably organized at NetSci 2017 in the USA (continuation of WT3.16).
• ENGINE stuff plans to continue active participation at workshops and conferences including presenting research papers, giving keynote talks, participation in panel discussion, etc.
Summary
Over the 40 months of the ENGINE project duration, we have performed all project activities foreseen in the Annex I to Grant Agreement. During this period, the management of the ENGINE project including leader of the Work Package 3 and leaders of particular Work Tasks has required additional efforts and a significant commitment to implement the project. All conferences/workshops planned in individual WTs were implemented except the second edition of the WT3.5 workshop.
The scientific impact following from implementation of WP3 can be summarized as follows:
• Facilitation of knowledge sharing as well as raising the visibility of the ENGINE Centre in the scientific environment.
• Knowledge enhancement of the ENGINE researchers achieved through the active participation at international scientific conferences including presentations of the most recent research results or chairing of the conference, workshop or specific session.
• Providing comprehensive knowledge to the ENGINE staff about the state-of-the-art and methodology in network intelligence.
• Presenting the results of ENGINE staff research at the international forums of specialists in the given fields.
• Identifying potential ENGINE expertise in a crucial area of global scientific interest.
• Identifying key skills and knowledge available at the ENGINE that can be used for providing new industrial applications.
• Identifying the links between current research projects at the ENGINE and their potential applications in the industry.
• Establishing relationships with industrial and scientific partners for future cooperation.
• Establishing collaboration between the ENGINE and the international teams and institutions working within the Network Intelligence area.
Work Package 4 Reinforcing the ENGINE research potential by the recruitment of experienced researchers
Objectives
The main objective of WP4 is to increase research potential of ENGINE Centre and kknowledge enhancement of the ENGINE researchers by employing experienced researchers. More detailed objectives of WP4 include:
• increasing the capacity for conducting research in the areas of the project
• increasing the capacity of the permanent ENGINE researchers through cooperation as well as fair competition with new researchers;
• using the existing potential to develop entirely new lines of research at the ENGINE, which will orient the research towards the current European priorities: environment, global change and industrial applications;
• integrating within the ENGINE staff one of the incoming researchers, currently working in the Canada, and to give the possibility for the Polish scientist currently working e.g. in the UK or USA to reintegrate;
• establishing new and reinforce existing ties with foreign researchers.
• increasing the ENGINE Centre participation in FP7, H2020 and similar programs in future
• providing maintenance for the newly acquired equipment by employment of experienced engineers and technicians
The worpackage was divided into 9 worktasks:
• Work Task 4.1 – Employment of Prof. Reda Alhajj
• Work Task 4.2 – Employment of Prof. Bolesław Szymański - Social and Cognitive Network Analysis Researcher
• Work Task 4.3 – Employment of Computer Network Optimization Researcher
• Work Task 4.4 – Employment of Complex Networks Analysis Researcher
• Work Task 4.5 – Employment of Machine Learning for Complex Structures Researcher
• Work Task 4.6 – Employment of Compound Pattern Recognition Researcher
• Work Task 4.7 – Employment of Human-Computer Interaction Researcher
• Work Task 4.8 – Employment of Experienced Laboratory Technician
• Work Task 4.9 – Employment of Experienced Laboratory Technician
Execution
Unfortunately, many experienced and desirable researchers did not want to join the ENGINE because of WUST rank, some of them were not able join WUST because of the internal regulations of their own institutes which do not allow to work for the another research institute and some valuable researchers who ENGINE is interested in are usually very busy, they lead their own teams, and they were not able to spend so long (12 months) period in Poland. Most of the candidates agreed to work in ENGINE only if their stay could be divided into several short periods. Therefore the chosen WTs were reformulated (more short term positions instead of long ones and open postdoc position). Finally, 10 experienced professors and 4 postdocs were hired for 169.93 months in total. The short summary of the each work task is presented below.
WT4.1 – Employment of Prof. Reda Alhajj
Prof. Alhajj was hired, his employment has been divided into several short periods (4 PMs have been used till now). We were informed that due to personal reasons the employment of prof. Alhajj may not be fully accomplished. The appropriate corrective actions were performed. Prof. Adam Wierzbicki (computer scientist) from Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology, Poland and Prof. Omar Lizardo (sociologist) from University of Notre Dame have been hired in 2015. As the outcome of this task so far, we may enumerate 14 publications (7 in JCR journals) and organizing International School and Conference on Networks Science
WT4.2 – Employment of Social and Semantic Network Analysis Researcher
Prof. Boleslaw Szymanski was hired, his employment has been divided into several short periods. As the outcome of this task we may enumerate publishing 9 articles in JCR journals, 13 conference papers, submitting 3 grant proposals (one for H2020 - granted, 2 for Polish National Science Center), organizing conference NetSci-X 2016 Wrocław, Poland, 11-13.01.2016 co-supervising of Łukasz Augustyniak, PhD student and the ENGINE staff member, having 6 keynote talks and participating 2 expert panels. Additionally, thanks to help of Prof. Boleslaw Szymanski the agreement between RPI and WrUT on double diploma for PhD students was signed.
WT4.3 Computer Network Optimization Researcher
Two visiting professors: Prof. Arunabha Sen from Arizona State University, USA (two periods in 2015 and 2016) and Prof. Mirosław Klinkowski, National Institute of Telecommunication, Warsaw have been hired. As the outcome of this task we may enumerate publishing 3 articles in journal indexed by JCR, 5 conference papers, presenting 5 seminars, having 1 keynote talk, 1 conference presentation, organizing 3 special sessions, preparing 1 common grant proposal.
WT4.4 Computer Network Analysis Researcher
1 postdoc Dr. Jaroslaw Jankowski from West Pomeranian University of Technology and one visiting professor Prof. Mikolaj Morzy from Poznan University of Technology have been hired. As the outcome of this task we may enumerate publishing 13 articles in JCR journals, 26 conference papers, having 2 keynote talks and 1 conference presentations, organizing NetSciX School of Code, a workshop on tools, programming interfaces and libraries for graph and network analysis and mining collocated with the NetSciX Conference.
WT4.5 Machine Learning for Complex Structures Researcher
Visiting professors Prof. Nitesh Chawla from University of Notre Dame, USA and Prof. Boguslaw Cyganek from AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland and one postdoc Dr. Alexandre Manhaes Savio from University of the Basque Country, Spain , have been hired. As the outcome of this task we may enumerate publishing 11 JCR papers and 23 conference papers. Having 2 seminars, 8 conference presentation, preparing 4 project proposals (AECC Spanish Association Against Cancer and Polish National Center for Research and Development), organizing 4 scientific events, having 10 keynote talks.
WT4.6 Compound Pattern Recognition Researcher
One visiting professor Prof. Manuel Grana Romay from Universidad del Pais Vasco, Spain and one postdoc Dr. Jose Antonio Saez Munoz from University of Granada, Spain have been hired. As the outcome of this task we may enumerate having 3 keynote talks, 2 seminars (WrUT and Jagiellonian Univ.), publishing 20 JCR journal papers and 20 conference papers, organizing 2 special issues, preparing 3 grant proposals (MINECO, Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitivity, AECC Spanish Association Against Cancer and Polish National Center for Research and Development), having 4 keynote talks and 10 conference presentations. Additionally, Prof. Grana served as reviewer for PhD thesis of Dr. Krawczyk (ENGINE team member) and grant proposals submitted to NCN.
WT4.7 Human-Computer Interaction Researcher
Dr. Cezary Sieluzycki from Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris VI, Sorbonne), Paris has been hired. As the outcome of this task we may enumerate publishing 1 JCR journal paper (under review) and 3 conference papers, preparing 3 grant proposals for Polish National Center for Research and Development and Polish National Science Center, co-organizing one scientific event under the framework of ENGINE project and having 2 conference presentations. Additionally 1 popular science article is under preparation.
WT4.8 Experienced laboratory Technician (30M)
One technician (Roman Bartusiak) has been hired for three months.
The following outcome of this task have been achieved:
• Host management for web site system (Engine, ENIC conference, MLSMA workshop)
• Participation in the infrastructure planning in the procurement procedures.
• Improvements related to the existing environment maintenance.
• Established and implemented policies to ensure existing server security.
• Support in capacity planning and the development of long-term strategic goals for systems, software, and storage in conjunction with ENGINE research team members while preparing new project proposals.
WT4.9 Experienced Laboratory Technician
Piotr Chynał has been hired, who has been assisting in upgrading of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (WT 5.5). Additionally he has participate in preparation 2 project proposals, organizing 3 workshops, and preparing one 1 conference presentation.
The main contributions into increasing the ENGINE research potential and research center visibility may be presented in the following KPIs (key performance indicators):
• Number of scientific papers authored by hired researchers with WrUT affiliation or with acknowledgement for ENGINE project: 67 including 29 papers published in journals indexed in JCR and 8 forthcoming works.
• Number of scientific papers authored by hired researchers with WrUT affiliation and in collaboration with other ENGINE staff members: 61 including 23 papers published in journals indexed in JCR and 6 forthcoming works.
• Number of plenary/invited/keynote talks presented by authored by hired researchers 29.
• Number of grants proposals written together with hired researchers: 14.
• The number of (co-)organized international scientific events: 15.
Future plans
During the work periods of the researchers employed under the framework of WP4 the strong scientific cooperation was established and the ENGINE team plans to continue common activities which may be summarized as follows:
1. Nitesh Chawla
a. new research projects to be submitted in 2017, possible employment at WUST
b. new collaborative papers to be submitted after September 2016
c. collaboration with other staff members from University of Notre Dame
d. exchange with data sets
e. request to add University of Notre Dame to the RENOIR project (H2020) is in preparation
2. Piotr Chynał
a. Employment in WUST as a research assistant
b. Cooperation in realization of research and development grants, i.e. ongoing grant BIWiSS.
3. Bogusław Cyganek
a. Organizing common scientific events as CORES 2017, HAIS 2018 (it is planned to organized in cooperation with AGH and WrUT), workshop during JICNN 2017 (proposal was submitted)
b. Common research on tensor representation, image analysis with the special attention to underwater vision, compound classification methods.
c. Submitting the common grant proposals (proposal entitled “Development of methods and algorithms for abnormal event detection for underwater object recognition and scene analysis” was submitted to Polish National Science Center and it passed the first stage of evaluation). New grant proposals were submitted in 2016 and further are under preparation and will be submitted in 2017.
4. Prof. Manuel Grana
a. The future research collaboration on medical data analysis, hyperspectral image classification, electronics health record.
b. Prof. Woźniak and Prof. Grana are working on the invited paper “Big Data for Healthcare and Medicine” which will be submitted to Proceedings of IEEE (IF=6.81)
c. Organizing common scientific events as CORES 2017 or SOCO 2016 (Prof. Wozniak has been invited as keynote speaker there)
d. Submitting the common grant proposals to Polish and Spanish agencies (several proposals have been already submitted – see description of WT4.6).
5. Jarosław Jankowski
a. It is planned to either implementation of submitted projects or preparation of new ones in 2017 and 2018
b. possible further employment of J.Jankowski in the following years (subject of consideration due to personal reasons)
c. several new collaborative papers to be submitted after September 2016
d. exchange of post-docs
6. Mirosław Klinkowski
The collaboration between prof. Mirosław Klinkowski and prof. Krzysztof Walkowiak and his team is planned to be continued in the future. In particular:
a. It is planned to collaborate on the topic of optimization of Elastic Optical Networks, it is planned to write together research papers and submit them to the following conferences: OFC2017, ICTON2017.
b. It is planned to collaborate on the topic of optimization of SDM (Space Division Multiplexing) optical networks. Prof. Mirosław Klinkowski will be employed in the research project “Advanced methods for optimization of optical networks with spatial flexibility” financed by National Science Center and headed by prof. Krzysztof Walkowiak. Moreover, in the topic of SDM network optimization, it is planned to write together research papers and submit them to conferences OFC2017, ICC2017 as well as to JCR journals.
7. Omar Lizardo
a. new papers to be submitted
b. exchange with data sets
c. consultation at new research on social network analysis (based on Prof. Lizardo sociological expertise)
d. request to add University of Notre Dame to the RENOIR project (H2020) is in preparation
8. Mikołaj Morzy
a. It is planned preparation of a collaborative grant to National Science Foundation,
b. further research on entropy usage in learning and inference in graphs as well as Benford Law application to fraud discovery in graphs
9. Jose Antonio Saez Munoz
a. Future research collaboration on multiclass imbalance data and noisy data analysis
b. Possibility of 2 year employment in WrUT –the grant proposal was submitted to Polish National Science Center under POLONEZ program (it passed the first stage of evaluation).
10. Alexander Savio
a. Future research collaboration on medical image analysis.
b. Organizing common events related to Python programing languages, probably in 2017 or 2018 the second biggest conference of Python’s programmers (EuroPython) will be organized in WrUT.
11. Arunabha Sen
The collaboration between prof. Arunabha Sen and prof. Krzysztof Walkowiak and his team is planned to be continued in the future. In particular:
a. It is planned to collaborate on the topic of Steiner trees problems, it is planned to write together research papers and submit them to JCR journal and to the ICC2017 conference.
b. It is planned to collaborate on the topic of optimization of SDM (Space Division Multiplexing) optical networks.
12. Cezary Sielużycki
Dr Sielużycki is now employed in WUST and continues cooperation within the framework of the Polish National Science Centre (grant no. 0011/RS3/2015/53) in the area of Augmented Reality application in Judo Training.
13. Bolesław Szymanski
a. It is planned to prepare of new international and national research projects to be submitted in 2017 and 2018 and employment of B.Szymanski at WUST
b. The Porf. Kazienko’s team is going to carry out the further collaborative research supported by RENOIR project (H2020)
i. collaborative supervision of PhD students
ii. new common papers to be submitted to highly impacted journals after September 2016 (still in 2016 and in 2017)
iii. collaboration with other RPI staff members, incl. Prof. Gyorgy Korniss, Prof. Christopher D. Carothers and Dr. Konstantin Kuzmin
- support with collaboration with other US scientists from other universities incl. MIT and Northeastern University
14. Adam Wierzbicki
It is planned a further research on link prediction methods in open source developer networks for appropriate recommendation
Summary
Several problems appeared in the first period of the project, but reformulation of some tasks and adding new tasks caused that all positions were fulfilled and ENGINE project gained valuable results, increasing number of publications, boost cooperation with international research team, and highly increase worldwide visibility of the research group related with ENGINE project.
Work Package 5 Capacity building through acquisition, development and upgrading of research equipment
Objectives
The main goal of Work Package 5 was to assure innovation increase in ENGINE through the upgrade the old and acquiring new laboratories equipment. WP 5 was focused on the acquisition, development and upgrading equipment, which will constitute laboratory background of ENGINE Centre. The main objective of upgrading the equipment for the project is to provide a base to support the research and innovation potential of the centre as a whole. The development of infrastructure, and therefore the scope of the research activities undertaken by ENGINE will enable closer cooperation with the industrial partners. The work package was divided into five work tasks:
• WT 5.1 - Establishment of a New Complex Networks and Massive Data Analysis Laboratory
• WT 5.2 - Upgrade of Distributed Computing and Data Mining Laboratory
• WT 5.3 - Upgrade of Teleinformatics and Computer Network Laboratory
• WT 5.4 - Upgrade of Intelligent Biomedical Signal Analysis Laboratory – that was changed to Extension of Distributed Computing and Data Mining Laboratory
• WT 5.5 - Upgrade of Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory
Execution
The main tasks of the laboratory built within WT 5.1 are complex networks analysis and massive data analysis. The scientific methods that support these two goals are (but not limited to): graph analysis, machine learning, data mining, statistics and natural language processing. The laboratory purchases has been divided into 3 parts: computational nodes, utility servers and storage and network switches. The computational nodes are built from Scientific Linux blade servers combined into a computing cluster for general purpose high-performance computing (in total 42 Actina Solar 820 servers). The utility servers (9 TYP-144-FC servers) and storage provide specialized on-demand services for the research that cannot use standardized computing nodes, delivers high-end storage for both kinds of servers (118 TB of RAW storage). The network infrastructure consisted of two 40-port switches. This infrastructure was integrated into our University supercomputer called BEM. The current research that is carried out in the laboratory is concentrated in the following fields: processing large complex networks, sentiment analysis, diffusion of information, group evolution prediction, machine learning and temporal social networks. In the years 2015 and 2016 we have used 1 652 131 and 4 519 895 processor hours accordingly. This infrastructure enabled to prepare 5 publications that were accepted to the scientific journals. The ongoing research involves 6 partners (national and international) within the ENGINE project. Nowadays, the hardware of W5.1 apart from supporting the research in the ENGINE project, is also used for other research purposes within 3 grants (Horizon 2020 and NCN).
The main goal of WT 5.2 was to enable support of works focused on designing efficient computer systems applied in the following areas: the database systems, data warehouses, decision support and data mining systems. The upgrade of the laboratory was completed in 2014 and it was the first completed task within WP5. The server that have been bought within WT 5.2 realization consisted of the following elements: chassis with dedicated control modules, 2 dedicated converged switches, management system, 9 autonomic processing units, 2 specialized parallel computing nodes, dedicated software for chassis and storage management, dedicated software supporting management and virtualization external, equipped mass storage device, local management console, server rack with required additional equipment, required cabling set and virtualization software system. Currently the system is hosting a number of virtual machines that are running scientific works. This infrastructure enabled to prepare 3 publications in the scientific journals and conference proceedings and it is used for other research purposes within 11 grants (mainly NCN).
The laboratory upgrade within WT 5.3 was aimed at conducting research in the scope of Software Defined Networks (SDN). The planned purchases have been changed and these changes was accepted in the amendment. The SDN research station consists of the following equipment: hardware network analyser and traffic generator tool (Fluke OPTIVIEW XG), Two SDN-ready core routers, supporting OpenFlow 1.3 (Juniper MX104), and offering possibility of implementing virtual systems and virtual networks inside, Two SDN-ready switches, supporting OpenFlow 1.3 (HP 3800), Four networks servers, equipped with 4 network interface cards. Servers will be used as SDN controllers (SuperServer 6018R-TDW), virtual network devices (routers, switches) and/or traffic generators. The purchases for the laboratory was finished in 2016 so there was not too much time to use the purchased equipment. So far it enabled to prepare materials for one conference publication. Currently the laboratory is used in several grants and ongoing research carried out by Ph.D. students.
Also the WT 5.4 has been redefined as Extension of The Distributed Computing and data Mining Laboratory resources that have been built within WT 5.2. The purpose of the task is to extend laboratory resources by purchase of additional storage server system. It consisted of the following elements: 99TB storage space net (RAID 5) build of 12 x SSD (eMLC or SLC) 800GB, 36 x HDD 15krpm 600GB and 24 x HDD 10krpm 1TB. After the installation it has become an integral part of the upgraded Distributed Computing and Data Mining Laboratory (DCDML)(Task 5.2) increasing its potential and capabilities. In consequence, the research results are indistinguishable.
The main goal of WT 5.5 was to enable support of works focused on different research areas in Huma-Computer Interaction, in particular: usability studies with enhanced with eye tracking and EEG, natural user interfaces, image and voice processing, 3D modelling and animation. WT 5.5 has resulted in upgrading HCI laboratory with the following devices and software: Mobile eyetracker Tobii X-2 60, Stationary eyetracker Tobii TX-300, SMI 3D Eye Tracking Glasses 2W, VarioLab EEG, Interactive wall and virtual person presentation system, Infrared camera PI OPTRIS 400, System for concurrent calculations involving server and two workstations with four GP-GPU cards 3D modelling system – Autodesk 3ds MAX 2016NML. This infrastructure is used in two ongoing grants, it enabled to prepare 6 scientific publications in conference proceedings.
Future plans and summary
The equipment within WP 5 enabled to start new research areas as well as to improve the ones that were already present within the Engine researchers. The new equipment enabled also to improve our future research plans that can be found in our research grant proposals. We are able to plan our research more efficient taking into account both time and money. It is obvious that the purchase procedure in Poland is very time consuming, so effectively to buy new equipment we need at least 6 months. This time is usually lost in the realization of any research grant, and is usually unacceptable in any cooperation with the industry.
We are convinced that we have achieved our Work Package goals, The main objective of upgrading the equipment for the project was to provide a base to support the research and innovation potential of the center as a whole. We are now able to establish closer cooperation with industrial partners. We have created one new laboratory that serves as a core laboratory for the Engine centre and upgrade four other laboratories. The main laboratory created within WT 5.1 delivers basic computational and storage capabilities and the rest more specified laboratories are concentrated
Work Package 6 Increasing the ENGINE Centre visibility and activity directed towards collaboration and innovations
Objectives
The main objective of WP6 is to increase collaboration of academia with the industrial partners. More detailed objectives of WP6 include:
• To popularize Network Intelligence among enterprises
• To establish methods of patenting programs and algorithms in Europe
• To increase the number of patents submitted by the ENGINE Centre
• To promote and develop innovative solution in research carried out in the ENGINE Centre
• To promote and commercialize results of the ENGINE Centre and WrUT researches among companies
• To increase the number of ENGINE projects realized with industrial partners
• To improve transfer of knowledge, know-how exchange and adequate support of innovative activities between the ENGINE Centre and industrial partners;
• To improve mutual awareness of technological demands (on the ENGINE side) and scientific capabilities of ENGINE (on the industry side);
• To raise awareness of the advantages associated with the innovation activity, Individual Property Rights (IPR) and patents on the personal and institutional (or private company) level;
• To achieve the recognition as a centre of significant meaning
• To increase the visibility and recognition of the ENGINE Centre and the ENGINE Project
• To facilitate communication between the ENGINE Centre and research centres in Europe
• To popularize scientific achievements
• To popularize Network Intelligence in the society.
Execution
Work Tasks included in Work Package 6 were following:
• Work Task 6.1 - Increasing ENGINE visibility through Web 2.0
• Work Task 6.2 - Workshops ‘Smart patenting – how to protect, not to confine’
• Work Task 6.3 - Workshops ‘Transfer of ideas – together is always better than on your own’
• Work Task 6.4 - Open twining industry days
• Work Task 6.5 - Establishment of the new Research and Industrial Cooperation Office
• Work Task 6.6 - Publications and promotion
• Work Task 6.7 - Preparation of popular materials for dissemination
• Work Task 6.8 - Popular science lectures
• Work Task 6.9 - Organization of open days
• Work Task 6.10 - Promotion of ENGINE scientific achievements via movie
• Work Task 6.11 – Collaboration and Research Platform for Network Intelligence
All these work tasks have been motivated by the following assumptions:
• Visibility of the WUST as well as knowledge regarding the Network Intelligence in Poland have to be extended.
• To ensure the increased promotion of Network Intelligence and the ENGINE Centre, certain dissemination and promotional activities should be undertaken.
• We should address our promotion to various target groups: researchers, students, the society (incl. schools), local/regional/state authorities as well as industry.
• Promotion activities will aim at better integration in the EU research disseminating and transferring project as well as research results in and to other European countries.
• The essential task is to attract students and young scientists to develop their academic career and conduct interdisciplinary research in WUST.
• Delivering platform for collaboration and research that will enhance ENGINE Centre in the areas of collaboration and interdisciplinary research between ENGINE staff, ENGINE staff and ENGINE partners as well as ENGINE staff and other partners including industrial.
Within WT 6.1 we have launched and maintained the ENGINE Centre website (two language versions Polish and English). The website is used as a platform for general promotional activities. It is continuously updated with rich multimedia content, from different scientific and promotional events. Since the launch of the website there had been published more than 220 news. The website have over 50k separate views by about 17k users. We also maintained Engine profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ were created and continuously updated. The promotion activities are also carried out at web services such as Youtube, Flickr and Slideshare. We have also sent 8 newsletters, with news regarding whole Engine project. It was regularly distributed via email. There were more than 600 recipients of newsletters from academia and business.
The WT 6.2 aimed at learning the best practices of IPR by organizing two workshops for both scientific and industrial partners on the problem of good patent practices. It is worth noticing that in Poland there is a lack of paths to protect the intellectual property originating from network intelligence – such as algorithms, programs and methods. Therefore, in the ENGINE Centre we would like to raise awareness about this problem by organizing at least two events on that topic. We have organized two workshops entitled ‘Smart patenting – how to protect, not to confine’ one in May 2015 and the second in June 2016. The workshops topics concerned: copyrights, patents, corporate confidential information, patent practices in EU, protection of IPR in gaming industry, commercializing and patenting of scientific work. We had 9 speakers from academia, industry and IPR experts and 60 participants both from industry and academia.
The main objective of the WT 6.3 was organization of the two workshops promoting the joint research between universities and industrial companies, to distribute the good practices coming from such joint projects. The first workshop was organized in 15-16 October 2014 and the second in 15-16 November 2015. The main topic of the first workshop was methods of collaborative, creative problem solving and the second – crowdfunding. During the workshops we have organized had both presentations and practical exercises. There were 10 presentations and 50 participants in these two workshop. The participants were coming from academia, industry, R&D units, external organizations involved in research and innovations and local press representatives.
The main objective of the WT 6.4 was to organize workshops that will present a potential of the university in realisation of research and commercial projects, in particular with cooperation with business partners. To achieve the goal, five teams from two departments prepared and updated presentations of their research scope, realized research and commercial projects, and review of their offer for business partners. The first workshop organized on 26th March 2016 was held at Wroclaw University of Science and Technology. There were 69 Participants who represented 30 companies and Engine team members. There were 10 bilateral meetings held at the workshop. The second workshop on 21st April 2015 was held at Wroclaw Technology Park – There were 32 Participants who represented 19 companies and Engine team members. There were 17 bilateral meetings. The third and fourth workshops were organized on 11th and 19th of May 2016 accordingly. They were held at Wroclaw Technology Park and WUST. There were 41 participants. They represented variety of companies of different branches and demands. Both events ended up with extensive discussion on urgent and important aspects of business demands and problems reported by guests.
The goal of WT 6.5 was establishment of the new Research and Industrial Cooperation Office. Innovation and Industrial cooperation Manager had a contract from 2.12.2013 to 31.05.2016. The manager and the other RICO staff gave the continuous support of Engine Center in fostering the cooperation with industry, knowledge transfer, supporting the innovation development, intellectual property rights, potential applications to Horizon 2020 and other funds/programmes, project realization and management and support for different organizational and marketing activities supporting above mentioned areas. The main outcome of RICO activities is establishing new collaboration with industry, especially SME, new commercial and R&D projects and increasing visibility of ENGINE Centre. The main outcomes of the RICO are following: intense collaboration with local SMEs and authorities, 67 business meetings (SME’s, UM, Town Hall, BCC, DIG), 2 international projects received (H2020, H2020-MSC-RISE), 7 national projects (PO IR 1.1.1 RID, STRATEGMED, HARMONIA, MOZART, RPO WD 1.5.1) 5 industrial projects (AlfaNet, TIM, RBO, Columb, Controling Systems, TopyFi, TAURON), organisation of and participation in conferences and workshops organized by ENGINE and preparation of the report on Creation of new paths for patenting the algorithms and innovative methods by dr Lidia Żurawowicz.
The goal of WT 6.6 was ENGINE promotion through popular science publications that was addressed to various groups of the non-scientific environment. We informed the national and regional media (newspapers, radio, TV, news websites) about all the events organized within the project. Promotion of the ENGINE project is done mainly through the University media, as PRYZMAT press (news of WrUT) or the Academic Radio LUZ. Some events organized by ENGINE team are promoted in the local press and local, or even nationwide TV. The most attractive for media was NetSci-X 2016 conference. There were 3 minutes presentation of the conference in the nationwide TVP 3 program TIME FOR WORK, WORK AT TIME, section INNOVATION, on 01/25/2016 at 16:60. Also our university TV STYK published over a two-minutes video about ENGINE NetSci-X conference. The conference was also presented in seven articles in six different local newspapers and magazines. The ENGINE researchers also presented their achievements concerning their NCN grants in local TV ECHO 24 program.
The goal of the WT 6.7 was providing popular dissemination materials that can be used to propagate effectively knowledge about the Engine Centre and increase its visibility. We have prepared the following materials:
• Conference/workshop logos, leaflets, badges, attendance certificates, and website banners: ASONAM 2015, DArViN 2015, ENIC 2016, DPCN 2016, NetSciX 2016, SNAA 2016, InTViDo, MaViG, AIMaViG;
• Engine website banners;
• Updated project information materials (rollup, posters, leaflets);
• Additional promotional materials (candy packing, pens, pendrives, laser pointers, notebooks, folders);
• Several holiday cards.
The goal of WT 6.8 was organization of popular science lectures. They were organized during different university events such as Wrocław University of Science and Technology Open Days 2014 and special vents organized in Junior High Schools in Wrocław. On 13.03.2014 we organized the lecture "Information Systems - Pragmatism and Intelligence" for 30 pupils. The second lecture "Virtualization in computer networks" that took place at WUST attracted over 50 pupils from technical school no 6 im. Króla Jana III Sobieskiego from Jastrzębie Zdrój. The third lecture „Is data visualization interesting?" took place on 10.12.2015 in The Junior High School No 9 in Wroclaw and was directed to 30 students from this junior high school.
The goal of WT 6.9 is organization of open days.The events was aimed at familiarizing potential students with educational offer of the university in order to attract skilled and motivated young people and encourage them to join us with hope that in a future they can strengthen potential of our research teams. There were two editions of Open Days in March 2015 and March 2016. The lectures were given on the following topics: Practical application of intelligent machine learning systems, Natural User Interface and “We connected human to computer – tomorrow is today”. All presentation attracted about 50-70 participants each.
The aim of WT 6.10 was promotion of ENGINE scientific achievements via movie. Within this work task the following actions have been taken:
• All lectures during MLSMA workshop and ENIC conference were also recorded and published in the Engine’s YouTube channel as private videos.
• We have also recorded the whole workshop on ‘Transfer of ideas – together is always better than on your own’
• The visiting professors’ lectures were recorded and published in the Engine’s YouTube channel
• The keynote talks and the Global Discussion Panel during the NetSciX conference were recorded and published to the Engine’s YouTube channel (together over 7 hours of talks)
• The whole DArVin workshop was recorded and stored in the Engine repository
• Most of the talks during DPCN workshop were recorded and published to the Engine’s YouTube channel (about 8 hours of talks)
• All lectures during ENIC 2015 conference were also recorded and stored in the Engine repository
• We prepared three videos about the project, two in the beginning in Polish and English and one summing up the ENGINE results (in English). WT 6.10 - videos
Within the WT 6.11 we have built the Collaboration and Research Platform for which will enhance ENGINE Centre in the areas of collaboration and interdisciplinary research between ENGINE staff, ENGINE staff and ENGINE partners. Using the equipment bought within WP5 the platform gathers several collaborative services that are able to make the research more efficient. These includes open source services such as:
• Gitlab - a collaborative platform for code base sharing as well as the repository for experimental scenarios
Sharelatex - collaborative tool for scientific papers preparation in latex
• OwnCloud - file sharing repository
• Ckan - dataset sharing repository
• Mattermoust - communication portal for subject based collaboration
• HunHub - social networking site to manage contacts, communication, and ongoing organizational activity
Additionally we also implemented the tool for facilitating the cooperation between ENGINE staff and industrial partners. It enables the possibility to solve corporate problems related to data analysis in the way of challenges that will be published online to gather data scientists interested in solving these problems. This tool is available under the name SciCup (https://scicup.com). The idea of the platform is to publish the data-driven challenges in which interested parties have the opportunity to participate. In November 2016 the first contest was organized - based on Slovenian Press Agency data. The idea of the contest is to classify articles based on the metadata or content of the articles.
Future plans and summary
The main goal of WP 6 aimed to increase the visibility of the ENGINE Centre at the European and regional level. We applied innovative solutions of disseminating knowledge by innovative interactive web portal and social networking sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Youtube, Flickr and Slideshare). We have increased the Engine visibility by publication of articles and newsletters, and organization of workshops on priority areas of innovation policy and funding schemes for commercialization and brokerage events between representatives of the research and industry. We have also prepared the events addressed to the public audience such as open days and popular lectures.
Work Package 7 Evaluation of the ENGINE research potential
Objectives
WP 7 is dedicated to the independent assessment of the ENGINE research potential performed by experts appointed by the European Commission. They should evaluate the research capacity of the ENGINE Centre and assess its scientific expertise and the potential for the future growth. Within this Work Package two meetings with the ENGINE Centre staff members were planned to be held. The first one organised at the beginning of this WP will aim at presentation of the ENGINE human resources, research infrastructure and scientific achievements. Experts will have the possibility to precise the role of the ENGINE Centre during the process of evaluation. As a summary of the meeting a list of information on the ENGINE Centre required by experts will be prepared. The evaluation report including not only the evaluation of the state-of-art but also a set of recommendations concerning the selection of the most important research areas, a list of necessary equipment as well as the identification of employment needs will be provided to the Project Coordinator at the end of the 42nd month of the project.
Execution
According to the Amendment to DoW accepted in 2015, the duration of WP7 was reduced to 4 months, and the work package started in August 2016 and ended in November 2017. Additionally, the number of evaluators’ visit in the ENGINE Centre was reduced from two to one but its duration was extended from two to three days.
In cooperation with the EU Project Officer, a suitable “Terms of Reference for the Ex-Post Evaluation of the Engine Project” was prepared in June 2016. The recruitment of external experts performed by the EU Project Officer started in May 2016 but unfortunately it lasted by the beginning of September 2016 due to several refusals.
Finally, the following three expert evaluators were gained:
1. Professor Bogdan Gabrys, Chair of Computational Intelligence, Faculty of Science and Technology, Bournemouth University, UK
2. Professor Natasa Milic-Frayling, Chair of Data Science, School of Data Science, University of Nottingham, UK
3. Professor Dino Pedreschi, Director of the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Lab, University of Pisa, Italy
Professor Bogdan Gabrys was simultaneously the rapporteur.
The experts have analysed the whole project documentation including Description of Work, deliverables, minutes and draft reports (some were in preparation stage). They have also spent three intensive days (November 2-4, 2016) on face-to-face meetings with the ENGINE staff, WUST authorities (Vice-Rector, Deans, internal auditor, administrative staff, etc.), local policy makers, advisors from the International Advisory Board, recruited researchers, representatives of the project partners and industrial partners.
Finally, the experts provided their report containing strengths, weaknesses and challenges of the ENGINE as a research centre. It was provided in the form of deliverable D7.1.
The experts focused on three main aspects
1. Assets and strengths of the ENGINE Centre
• The ENGINE Project has become a beacon of research excellence at the international level through a significantly expanded professional network that comprises active collaborators on joint projects, co-mentored students, co-organizers of conferences, workshops, and seminars, and co-authors of journal and conference publications
• The staff involved in the project has increased visibility through publications with a three times larger number of reference count when compared with previous time periods of same duration.
• The team has established deep collaboration and links with academics at leading US and EU Universities that are now the basis for further international and national collaboration and funding.
• The team has expanded capacity in terms of graduating doctorate students, expanding the experience of young researchers, and establishing a practice of visitors who contributed to the local projects in the involved groups.
• The project has enabled the involved groups and the University to acquire additional computational resources and establish new efforts in the field of HCI that are supported with the equipment for eye tracking and body tracking.
• The team has already been successful in securing national funding and is actively pursuing EU project proposals with stronger ties with the rest of the EU and US research community.
The ENGINE Project did not have specific provisions for promotion and visibility beyond the organization of academic events and scholarly activities. This was reflected in a sub-optimal online presence that would require investment of time and resources. While individual events were organized and executed at a high standard, thanks to the highly professional and effective event organization team, the ENGINE portal is lacking in several aspects:
• Internationalization. Only selected content has been translated into English, thus limiting the information that is accessible to a broad community.
• Purposeful design. The Web site does not have a clear focus and purpose to accomplish. That is reflected in the difficulty of finding basic information about the team and partners, organizational structure, and accomplishments.
2. Aspirations and visions
Not surprisingly, after a long and intense engagement on the EU project, the team is reaching a cross-road, having to decide which direction to take things forward. The team is realizing that inaction, i.e. a lack of plan and explicit decision may lead to a decline in the value that has been realized for the individuals, the team, the involved Faculties, and the University.
At this point there is no unified vision. However, the members of the team have expressed their preference and that can be summarized into two main options:
− Create an umbrella activity that would continue to build on the identity of ENGINE to transform further as the local, national, and international opportunities transpire
− Continue independently with individual members of the team returning to their research and teaching duties, now with a better portfolio of publications, increased visibility, and stronger international connections.
3. Support and barriers
The ENGINE project team and Wroclaw University of Science and Technology are well positioned with regards to the demand for expertise in computing. However, the local industry is short-term orientated and industry projects are not conducive to innovative and long term research agenda.
At the University level there is expressed interest to support activities that would leverage ENGINE reputation and reshape it to fit the needs and opportunities that local, national and European research scene supports.
The experts provided their recommendations regarding the ENGINE web portal: “Create a strong Web presence that unifies the information on the past and new projects and activities, possibly expanding to other Departments and Groups within the involved Faculties.”
Future plans and summary
The remarks related to web portal are recently being respected, since a new ENGINE Centre portal is just being developed and should accomplished by May 2017.
After a longer internal discussion, we have decided to change the name of the Centre to: “ENIGNE – European Centre for Data Science” in order to cover wide range of research topics and gather more relevant research groups.
Summary
All the work packages achieved their goals and the general aim of the project – establishing the ENGINE research centre – was successfully reached. The greatest progress was observable in quality and interdisciplinary of research carried out in the centre as well as much stronger international collaboration resulting in visible external recognition. The vision and strategy developed during the project runtime enable to continue the development of the centre in the future.
Potential Impact:
The ENGINE project has fully used its opportunity to to increase research potential in network intelligence at Wroclaw University of Science and Technology (WUST).
The technological expertise and scientific background of all recruits fitted ENGINE effort to strengthen the existing areas of excellence in network intelligence research. Moreover, each individual has brought in know-how and experience in network intelligence work, helped to bridge the gaps and created links among research groups working at WUST and Partners. The purchased research equipment has been extensively used throughout the project and forms the basis for collaborative initiatives of the ENGINE research teams for the future. Public relations specialists have developed on-line and off-line tools to increase the project recognizability, developed promotional activities to facilitate dissemination of information on the research achievements and to increase the awareness of decision makers, stakeholders and general public on the importance of basic research in network intelligence.
The newly hired Innovation and Industrial cooperation Manager has helped to developed new ways of patent protection, enriched the collaboration with industry by knowledge transfer and activities to ensure that the ENGINE innovation character is properly visible. Organized several types of workshops aimed at raising awareness on IP issues and knowledge transfer, organized Twinning Days featuring cooperation Business and Academia. Was prepared a report on intellectual property rights in software development based on newest knowledge. The project allowed to build WUST research capacity by transferring key scientific knowledge between the partnering institutions . This enabled the WUST to widen the scope of their work, beyond what was available within their own home institutions and merge the available technologies.
There were 26 WUST active researchers. Altogether, ENGINE researchers have published:
1. Papers in JCR journals – planned: 54, achieved: 106
2. Papers with authors out of WUST – planned 50, achieved: 177
3. Papers with authors out of WUST (JCR) – planned: 18, achieved: 59
4. Papers in collaboration with recruited researchers – planned: 19, achieved: 53
5. Papers in collaboration with recruited researchers (JCR journals) – planned: 10, achieved: 13
6. Number of any scientific publications in collaboration with members of partnering institutions – planned: 20, achieved: 29
7. Number of scientific publications in collaboration with members of partnering institutions (JCR journals only) – planned: 8, achieved: 24
8. Number of any scientific publications in collaboration with industry – planned: 7, achieved: 3
9. Number of scientific publications in collaboration with industry (JCR journals only) – planned: 3, achieved: 3
10. Number of ENGINE scientists authored articles published in JCR-listed journals – planned: 19, achieved: 21
Number of citations:
1. Citations of the ENGINE researchers based on Scopus (excl. autocitations) – planned: 430, achieved: 2322
2. Number of citation according to google scholar - achieved: 7162
ENGINE researchers participated in numerous prestigious international conferences with posters or oral presentations:
1. Number of participations of the ENGINE scientists in program committees of international conferences – planned: 157, achieved: 310
2. Number of invited talks given by the ENGINE researchers – planned: 12, achieved: 19
3. Number of the ENGINE researchers serving as reviewers for JCR-listed journals – planned: 12, achieved: 17
4. Number of participations of ENGINE researchers in conferences or workshops – planned: 98, achieved: 229
5. Number of visits of ENGINE researchers to other research organizations abroad except conferences and ENGINE partners – planned: 18, achieved: 21
6. Number of visits of foreign scientists at the ENGINE Centre in Wrocław not related with conferences hosted by ENGINE – planned: 53, achieved: 67
7. Number of visits of foreign scientists at the ENGINE Centre in Wrocław (incl. conferences hosted by ENGINE) – planned: 352, achieved: 636
8. Participations of ext. researchers in our events – planned: 400, achieved: 569
9. Number of foreign scientists (outside WUST) employed by ENGINE – planned: 7, achieved: 13
10. The number of participants in conferences organized through the project - achieved: 607
Moreover, ENGINE researchers have acquired 21 new research grants from national and international funding agencies that will expand the research started within ENGINE.
1. Number of projects with industrial financing or co-financing – planned: 6, achieved: 15
2. Number of European projects – planned: 4, achieved: 6
3. Number of meetings with industry representatives (no. of organizations/companies) not related to project realization – planned: 16, achieved: 149
Apart from these activities, ENGINE was also visible for general public not only by means of the project website, but also by active participation in social media, such as Facebook or Twitter. Moreover, on the ENGINE youtube account there are videos of selected talks and events published as a mean of disseminating the results of the ENGINE project.
Another important aspect of the ENGINE project is the ENGINE Scientific Collabortive Research Platform. It is a web-based platform that has been created within WP6. Its main purpose is to amplify the scientific collaboration between researchers spread across multiple institutions but also for those who are located at the same university. It offers unified tools that support: collaboration on joint articles, sharing the code and datasets, managing projects and issues as well as internal collaboration. Moreover, this platform offers the industry an easy way of test-driving their ideas based on data-driven collaboration with ENGINE Centre researchers, partnering universities and general public (data science specialists). The expected impact covers saving time and costs for establishing or continuing scientific collaboration and collaboration between industry and academia. This integrated platform shall help in solving the technical problems that researchers and partners have to overcome in order to start working on joint articles/papers, project proposals etc. leading to focusing on work, not on technical difficulties.
One of the visible societal outcomes is the focus on innovation in many areas of the cooperation between business and academia. Instead of trying to find a cost-effective way to implement known ideas, the joint collaborations with industry focus now on the unexplored areas that can lead to major breakthrough in understanding and exploiting the power of data and this can be attributed to the ENGINE project and the mindset shared project participants.
The ENGINE project also increased the visibility of good research groups in the international community what already results in joint collaboration, not only in joint papers but also in many different areas, such as co-organization of events or guest editorialship of journals. One prominent example is that the ENIC conference, firstly organized in Wrocław, is now growing and becoming an established event in a conference roadmap for network intelligence experts.
List of Websites:
http://engine.pwr.edu.pl/en/