10^th of May, Stig Ole Johnsen completed his trial lecture and thesis defense. He will eventually be awarded the PhD degree. Professor Torbjørn Skramstad supervised Stig's PhD work at the Information Systems research group. Professor Eric Monteiro, Professor Britt-Marie Drottz Sjøberg and Professor Jørn Vatn have co-supervised the PhD work.

Stig's trial lecture was titled: Communicating Risk on individual-, system- and societal level to an entire population.

He defended his PhD thesis:
An Investigation of Resilience in Complex Socio-Technical Systems to Improve Safety and Continuity in Integrated Operations (pdf)

11^th of May marked the opening of the new GEMINI center for Applied Artificial Intelligence. Staff and partners from both the SINTEF and the department gathered to celebrate the opening. This center is one of the four new SINTEF GEMINI centers for the 2012 - 2015 period.

The aim of GEMINI centers is for parallel research communities to build larger research communities of higher quality. Research topics within the center will be:

• Knowledge Based Systems (KBS)
• Language Technology
• Self Organizing Systems

The center will apply artificial intelligence within the fields of:

• Intelligent Traffic Systems
• Medical Decision Support Systems
• Real Time Analysis of Streamed Data
• Data Analysis and Decision Support for Oil Drilling

People from left to right: Agnar Aamodt (NTNU), Anders Kofod-Petersen (SINTEF / NTNU), Helge Langseth (NTNU) and Marius Mikalsen (SINTEF ICT)

Thursday 10th of May, the Computer Museum at our department officially opened. A 140+ persons participated in the opening ceremony, and many a computer story were shared among the visitors.

The computer museum is unique in Norway, and has on display many of the first computers used at NTH and in Norway. GIER is one of the many historically important computers displayed. You also can play computer games on Commodore 64 and other old computers. Space Invaders anyone? :-) 

Computer Historian Ola Nordal, and Chief Engineer Anders Christensen have devoted a lot of time and energy in collecting, organizing and documenting the computer history. The students Espen Olsen and Terje Hoås has helped in finalizing the museum.

Next time you visit NTNU - take the time to visit the Computer Museum!

Photos from the opening (Flickr).

Springer has published a new book on Peer-to-Peer Query Processing over Multidimensional Data, coauthored by Professor Kjetil Nørvåg and Researcher Scientists Akrivi Vlachou and Christos Doulkeridis from the Data and Information Management Group at NTNU.

Wednesday 25^th of April, the Mubil village presented their experts in teamwork (EiT) projects. The projects developed software which will be used to create an interactive library experience at the Gunnerus Library at NTNU.

The four groups in the village presented their projects:

• Gamle Tangenter - an interactive computer game where you learn to play the keyboard.
• Hans Lilienskiolds reisejournal - software for tweeting and recreating events from the past on Twitter and blog. The tweets can link to blog entries which eleborate the story.
• Mubil gjestebok - a digital guestbook for the library.
• Dirigent Helt - an interactive computer game where you are the conductor of an orchestra.

Lecturer Roberta Proto has been the leader of Professor Letizia Jaccheri's EiT village. The Mubil village focused on development of software for a digital laboratory at Gunnerus. The library wishes to present library content in an engaging and interactive way to school childeren.

The Gamle Tangenter and Dirigent Helt computer games used ancient music scores from the Gunnerus Library for all of the music in the games. The projects' design also tried to capture "that Gunnerus feeling", according to one of the students.

Photos from the EiT presentation (Flickr)