 Bram Vandeputte |
I was very pleased to hear that my STELLAR Doctoral Mobility Programme application was accepted in february 2010. The Doctoral Advisory Board had decided to accept my application to the Doctoral Mobility Programme and offer my a scholarship of 1,000 Euros. My host institute would be my first preference, namely the Open University UK. The visit would be for two months, so I decided to organize my stay in june and july 2010. |
sten govaerts |
In October and November 2010, I was very lucky to go to l’Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland on a research stay with a grant of the STELLAR Mobility Programme. This was a very interesting experience and I learned and gained a lot of knowledge and many new insights both on scientific and cultural level.
At EPFL, I worked on the same proposal as I submitted for the grant. I developed a federated media search and recommendation widget. Through the collaboration with the group at EPFL, we adapted the proposal to include more social recommendation features and to include some of the at EPFL developed recommendation technologies. A first version of the widget is available here: http:/
The operation of the research lab at EPFL differs in some interesting ways from my computer science lab at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, http:/
Laboratoire d'Automatique has a strong background in recommendations and web 2.0 technologies (cfr. http:/
We are currently writing a collaborative conference paper and doing an evaluation study of the widget. Through the research stay, I had the great opportunity to closely collaborate with some people I already knew from conferences and project meetings, but I also met many new people and friends. So next time, I am in Switzerland I will definitely visit them again! It is also an outstanding chance to experience a different culture and mentality, because in 2 months you have much more opportunities to experience and understand life in a foreign country, than when you are just there for say a conference.
An most important, I would like to thank all the people at EPFL for the outstanding visit, helping me find an apartment in Lausanne and the many fun weekend and evening activities we did! In short, I recommend everybody who is doing a PhD to use the STELLAR Mobility Programme to travel to another research lab to broaden your horizon!
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