Early Stage Researchers

The following Early Stage Researchers have been hired in GEOCROWD so far.

Host Institution: Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
Name: Qiang Qu Nationality: Chinese Start date: 01 October 2011	QU Qiang completed his master degree in 2011 at Peking University under supervision of Prof. Hongyan Li. He received his B.S.degree in School of Management from Dalian University of Technology in 2008. During December 2009 to December 2010, he worked as a research fellow at Singapore Management University under the supervision of Assistant Prof. Feida Zhu. Before that, he once worked as an intern at IBM China Research Laboratory, IBM China Development Laboratory, and Sun China Engineering & Research Institute respectively.

Host Institution: Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
Name: Laura Radaelli Nationality: Italian Start date: 1 August 2011	I got my BSc (2008) and MSc (2010) from the University of Milano. For my BSc Thesis I studied transaction recovery techniques for commercial DBMS, and for my MSc Thesis I worked on activity recognition systems, using both probabilistic and semantic techniques. After my MSc I worked as a Business Intelligence Consultant for an Italian company. In August 2011 I started my PhD in the Data-Intensive Systems Group at Aarhus University, supervised by Prof. Christian Jensen. My research will be focused on indoor positioning systems and indoor mobile services.

Host Institution: Universitaet Bremen, Germany
Name: Chunyuan Cai Nationality: Chinese Start date: 1 September 2011	Currently PhD Student at University of Bremen, Germany. Employed by ESRI China (Beijing), Technical Marketing as an engineer, 2010-2011. Erasmus Mundus Master, Geospatial Technologies, 2008-2010. SCWCD (Sun Certificated Web Component Developer) 2007. J2EE Programmer employed by local Company 2005-2008. Recently interested in spatial reasoning, Grails, Scrum, NoSQL, and Android developing.

Host Institution: Universitaet Bremen, Germany
Name: Rami Al-Salman Nationality: Jordanian Start date: 1 July 2011	Rami Al-Salman was born in Irbid, Jordan in 1986. He received his B.S. in computer information systems from Jordan University of Science in 2008. He received his M.S. degree in computer engineering in 2011. He is currently working on his PhD in Hybrid qualitative and quantitative spatial reasoning and analysis in the computer science department (Cognitive Systems group) at the University of Bremen, Germany. He has three publications in AI and security areas. He received a three months research scholarship at the Heinrich-Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany during the summer of 2010. His research interests include security, data mining, information assurance and data reasoning. Rami Al-Salman is in the editorial board of the International Journal of Web Applications. Additionally, he was a committee member of the International Conference on Informatics, Cybernetics, and Computer Applications (ICICCA2010).

Host Institution: Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule Zuerich, Switzerland
Name: Pratanu ROY Nationality: Bangladeshi Start date: 27 April 2011	Since May 2011, Pratanu is working as a Research Assistant (Ph.D. student) in the Systems Group at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Gustavo Alonso. Before that, he completed an European Master in Informatics, a joint master program by University of Edinburgh, UK and RWTH Aachen University, Germany. He received his Bachelor in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Host Institution: Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule Zuerich, Switzerland
Name: Dimitris Karampinas Nationality: Greek Start date: 1 September 2012	Dimitris currently works as a Ph.D student in Systems Group at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Gustavo Alonso. His research interests span across modern database architectures and multicore systems. Prior to that, he completed his master and bachelor studies at Computer Engineering and Informatics Department at University of Patras. Dimitris has also worked as an assistant at NetCINS lab (Univ. of Patras) doing research on crowdsourcing and websearching and as research intern in DIAS lab at University of EPFL in Switzerland.

Host Institution:  National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Name: Christodoulos Efstathiades Nationality: Cypriot Start date: 01 April 2011	Christodoulos is a PhD student at the National Technical University of Athens and Marie Curie fellow working at the Marie Curie ITN project Geocrowd. Christodoulos holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Cyprus in 2009 and an MSc in Networked Computer Systems from University College London (UCL) in 2010. During his BSc degree he worked at the High Performance Computing Systems Lab (HPCL) at the University of Cyprus as a research intern in the areas of Grid computing and Vehicular networks (VANETs), under the supervision of Prof. Marios Dikaiakos. In his MSc thesis at UCL he designed and implemented a distributed, P2P file system for Wireless Sensor Networks, under the supervision of Prof. Stephen Hailes. Finishing his MSc degree, and after a short period of research in VANET graph visualization at HPCL in Cyprus, he joined the Geoinformatics group at IMIS/RC Athena and the National Technical University of Athens as a PhD student under the supervision of Prof Timos Sellis and Dr Dieter Pfoser. His current research interests lie in the area of database systems, geographic information systems and geo-spatial data management of user-generated content in the web.

Host Institution: National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Name: Georgios Skoumas Nationality: Greek Start date: 01 October 2011	Georgios Skoumas is a Phd candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens under the supervision of Professor Timos Sellis and Senior Researcher Dr Dieter Pfoser. In the scope of his doctoral research he is currently working on the GEOCROWD project in collaboration with the Institute for the Management of Information Systems(IMIS). In 2010 he received his Master of Philosophy(MPhil) from the Faculty of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. He carried out his MPhil thesis at Toshiba Research Laboratory in Cambridge, under the supervision of Professor Mark Gales and Senior Researcher Dr Heiga Zen. From 2008 he holds a Diploma from the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the Technical University of Crete. His undergraduate thesis focused on multi-modal video event detection algorithms and was held under the supervision of Professor Alexandros Potamianos. From January 2011 to July 2011 he was an intern at IDIAP research institute in Switzerland, where he pursued research on uncertainty decoding for noise robust automatic speech recognition under the supervision of Senior Researcher Philip Garner. His main research interests lie in the general areas of machine learning, pattern recognition and probability theory, and their applications.

Host Institution: National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Name: Alkyoni Baglatzi Nationality: Greek Start date: 01 September 2012	Alkyoni Baglatzi obtained a diploma in Rural and Surveying Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 2010. Her diploma thesis entitled “Development of an Ontology of Geographic Semantic Dimensions” specialized in the area of geographic information formalization and semantic representation. She also obtained a MSc (2012) in Geoinformatics from the Institute for Geoinformatics of the Westfälische Wilhelms University of Münster in Germany with a thesis on “Semantic transformations between land cover classification systems” Her master studies have been funded by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) with a scholarship for graduate students and the Eugenides Foundation. She has worked as a research assistant in the EU funded project, ENVISION (Environmental Services Infrastructure with Ontologies). She started her Phd in September 2012 at the School of Rural and Surveying Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens. Her research aims at developing a multidimensional semantic space for the elicitation and constructive association of diverse user generated geospatial knowledge. Her doctoral studies are being funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme – Marie Curie Actions, Initial Training Network GEOCROWD. Her research interests include ontologies, geospatial semantics, semantic integration, linked data, user generated geospatial content and natural language processing.

Host Institution: National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland
Name: Felix Kling Nationality: German Start date: 01 November 2011	I started my three year BSc at the TU Kaiserslautern (Germany) in 2005 with database systems as my specialization. My dissertation was about structure-based classification of XML documents. After graduation in 2008, I did an internship at BASF IT Service in the telecommunication department with focus on Voice-over-IP. In 2009 I started the Erasmus Mundus program European Master in Informatics. Within this program I studied at the RWTH Aachen (Germany) and the University of Trento (Italy). The main focus was on data, media and knowledge, giving me insights into data mining and machine learning. I am currently working on domain specific mashups for my Master thesis. After graduation in September 2011, I will commence my work at the National Center for Geocomputing in Maynooth, Ireland, as a PhD student. I’m an avid programer and interested in a broad range of topics, including web technologies, usability, data processing and security, among others.

Host Institution: National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland
Name: Katarzyna Sila-Nowicka Nationality: Polish Start date: 01 September 2011	I completed a Bachelor of Science degree in Geodesy and Cartography at Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences, Poland, in 2007. I then undertook a 2 year Master of Science degree in Geodesy and Cartography at the same University. During this period I focused mainly on photogrammetry and remote sensing. My master’s thesis concerned developing methodology which allowed the tracking and detection of settlement remains based on changes in high vegetation and soil structures. Identification of the remains for the whole study area was carried out using supervised classification and photointerpretation. In the meantime, I also completed a Bachelor of Science degree in spatial planning which gave me an opportunity to focus on GIS analysis. For last year I have been focused on environmental geospatial data (Land use classification data, diversity in the description of data – class definitions – in different databases, geometrical incompatibility, data integration, data quality, mapping quality and the resulting uncertainties).

Host Institution: Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany
Name: Paras Mehta Nationality: Indian Start date: 07 October 2011	Paras Mehta is Marie Curie fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin pursuing PhD in the domain of geospatial data and applications in the Geocrowd project. Paras is an Electronics and Communication engineer and an alumnus of Erasmus Mundus MSc in Network and e-Business Centred Computing. His research interests include geospatial data access through mobile and web based applications, NFC, location based services and web services. Over the past years he has accumulated research and industry experience through work and study in the UK, Greece, Spain and India.

Host Institution: Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany
Name: To Tu Cuong Nationality: Vietnamese Start date: 13 October 2011	Cuong received his Master in Computer Science at University of Trento and RWTH Aachen, where he was supported by Erasmus Mundus scholarship. For his master thesis, he developed a visualization algorithm of large business process models at IBM Laboratory, Zurich. His research interest includes information visualization and data mining.