UMBC ebiquity
Looking back at the ebiquity research group's 2006
January 1, 2007
Maybe it's a bit of a cliché, but this is the traditional time to look back on the past year and reflect on how things are going. It has been an active productive year. Here's a rundown of our past year by the numbers.
205,000 is the number of visits to the Ebiquity web site. Our monthly page visits increased five fold over the year and we currently receive about 25,000 visits a month.
743 people have registered as users of the Swoogle semantic web search system. By the end of 2006, Swoogle has discovered 1,950,785 semantic web documents
512 photos were posted on the ebiquity Flickr site.
352 blog posts were made in 2006. We identified the most popular posts last week.
306 is the number of FOAF profiles hosted by Ebiquity.
47 papers were published, including papers in journals, conferences, workshops and theses and dissertations. I'm not sure to count this due to the lag between when a paper is completed and when it is published. So I am being generous and including papers that appeared in 2006 and the four accepted in 2006 but that will appear in 2007.
10 Ebiquity students did internships in industry in 2006. Patti Ordonez went to IBM's Almaden Research Center. Anubhav Kale spent the summer at ITA Software. Pranam Kolari spent time at the IBM Center for Advanced Study in Toronto. Olga Ratismore did an internship at GE Research. Anand Patwardhan worked for NASA. Palanivel Kodeswaran worked at Cougaar Software. An army of Ebiquity students spent the summer at Microsoft, including Sandeep Balijepalli, Amit Karandikar, Onkar Walavalkar and Andriy Parafiynyk.
6 new Master of Science degrees were awarded. Sandor Dornbush completed a thesis on Mobile Peer-to-Peer Traffic Monitoring. Sheetal Agarwal wrote a thesis on Context-Aware System to Create Electronic Medical Encounter Records. Nimish Vartak did his thesis on Protecting the privacy of RFID tags. Yang Yu's thesis was on Learning the Semantic Meaning of a Concept from the Web. Pavan Reddivari completed his thesis on A policy-based system to determine access control in RDF stores. Balaji Vishwanathan's thesis was MISSION: Multiagent Institutions for Sensor Networks.
3 Ebiquity students received their Ph.D. degrees and found good jobs. Li Ding finished his dissertation on semantic web search in April and joined Stanford University as a postdoc in September. Zhongli Ding finished her dissertation on BayesOWL in May and joined Amazon's Alexa. Rong Pan defended and submitted his dissertation on Semantically-Linked Bayesian Networks: A Framework for Probabilistic Inference Over Multiple Bayesian Networks.
3 students were admitted to candidacy after defending their dissertation proposals. Pranam Kolari presented his proposal on The Multi-Relational Blogosphere: Empirical Characterization and Spam Protection. In November, Akshay Java become a candidate after presenting his proposal on Tracking influence and opinions in social media. Tom Briggs defended his proposal in April on Using Information Extraction to Automatically Generate Probabilistic Ontologies.
2 visting research students spent the fall in our lab. Davide Guidi visited from the University of Bologna and David Vallet from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
2 faculty were appointed or promoted. Promotions: Yun Peng was promoted to Full Professor and Cynthia Sims Parr was appointed as a Research Assistant Professor.
For more information, please contact UMBC ebiquity.