Alberto Lluch Lafuente

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that DBLP, the computer science bibliography site, provides a nice visual feature called DBLPVis.

The feature is accessible from the main link or from the publication records, for instance following the Vis link besides the author’s name.

Various kinds of diagrams are offered but those I like most are person-to-person (co-authors) and person-to-word (keywords).

The person-to-person diagram offers a bird’s eye on co-authorship. You can see a round node for each co-author. The larger the distance from the center representing the main author, the more articles have been co-authored. The size of the node of each co-author represents its publication record size and the co-authored articles are represented as a pie piece. Colors are also used to denote the years of collaboration.

coauthor diagram in dblpvis

The person-to-word diagram offers a nice perspective on the keywords touched by an author along a certain period. Each keyword node (rounded boxes) also denotes its popularity with its size.

Keywords diagram in dblpvis

All in all, it provides a nice picture of part of your research activities.

“How did you build your (great?!) site?“. That’s a typical question by my friends and colleagues. The answer? Wordpress.

After years of writing my own code (made of a mess of html, css, php, javascritpt, etc.) I decided to switch to a content management system. I came into Wordpress and I can now say it was a good choice: it works.

Its requirements are rather standard: a server with a MySql database and php capabilities. And, if everything runs fine, the installation takes about 5 minutes.

The site management is very flexible: from a very simple and intuitive (including a wysiwyg/html editor) dashboard to the possibility to write you own code, either personalising your own wordpress version (Wordpress is an open-source project) or in the more elegant form of plugins. All you need is some basic knowledge of php, html and css.

One of the main advantages is that I can now update my site from any computer with internet access. This means for me to not depend on the local version residing on my laptop. In addition, Wordpress offers export and import features. This way one can easily create site backups or move the site to another server (or have local version for testing purposes, as I do).

Wordpress naturally supports a pages+blog structure. After all, it was originally conceived as a blog-supporting system. Indeed, at the time of writing, wordpress is the most used system among the top 100 blogs. A pages+blog structure is important for me: I can put fundamental well-established information in the pages and all-the-rest (news, posts, miscellaneous) in form of blog posts.

Another advantage is that I have no more to care about producing standard-compliant code. Wordpress will care for that. Well, that’ts not exactly the truth, as I have written my own stylesheet (css and php, again!) but the amount of effort in that regards has diminished substantially.

A nice thing is that Wordpress is extensible. There are lots of plugins. For example, I use some plugins to enhance my site’s management, namely sitemaps (for seo-optimization) and google analytics (for statistics). There also many themes (official and non-offiicial) to layout your site or blog at will.

Wordpress offers me also a standard site management: my own site, the blog I co-author, my wife’s site and blog, the website of a friend… they are all wordpress-supported.

Best of all, Wordpress is open-source and free, and it comes in two forms: you can host a blog in the wordpress platform, or install your own version in your server.

A last note: Wordpress (and blogging in general) was introduced to me by my wife, an excellent translator and stupendous blogosphere star. A computer expert learning technology from a profane?! The magic of love.

Un elenco di aziende di informatica, con sede in (o vicino alla) Toscana.
A list of software companies, with headquarters in (or near) the Tuscany.

La lista viene generata dinamicamente dal mio bookmark delicious. The list is dynamically generated from my delicious bookmark.

I had recently the honour to assist to the Colloquium in occasion of the retirement of Thomas Ottman.

During the last years Ottmann has been a full professor at the Institute fur Informatik of the University of Freiburg. He has been one of the main founders and promoters of the institute and the faculty of angewandte wissenchaft.

His most relevant scientific contribution is probably the Bentley-Ottmann algorithm, which solves the line segment intersection problem. The algorithm is another evidence of the importance of considering output-sensitive complexity and the convenience of using so-called sweep-line techniques, also applied to other fundamental computational geometry problems (Voronoi diagrams, Delaunay triangulation, etc.). That was impressive for me but he used to said: “I was just the right man and the right moment, that’s all.” Always modest, always professional.

The colloquium had also very interesting invited talks by Amitava Datta (on data-parallel dynamic programing on gpus) and Rolf Klein (on geometric neighborhoods). Both talks had a perfect balance between technical contribution, abstraction level and connection to Ottmann’s contribution.

This post is just my modest way to express my gratitude for giving me the opportunity to get a PhD, and to render honour to one of the most professional persons I have ever encountered.

I just finished the preliminary versions of two very simple visualiser for

• our algebra of hierarchical graphs;
• caspis, a service oriented calculus.

Both are available at http://www.albertolluch.com/adr2graphs/ as companions of the pi-calculus visualiser I posted some days ago.

These are just small steps towards the implementation of the technique described in the draft available at http://www.albertolluch.com/papers/adr.caspis.pdf.

The visualiser is based on adr, graphviz and maude.