Elegance of a full stop

So I am back to Louvain-la-Neuve once more. Ever since I left Belgium on the 22nd of August, I kept returning. First, on my way back home (Lisboa) from Munich, I had a transit in Brussels. I had some administrative things to do in Louvain-la-Neuve. I was contemplating whether I should just skip the second half of the trip and come to Louvain-la-Neuve from Brussels airport. However, since I had lots of luggage, I decided to continue the journey to Lisboa. Then I came to Brussels for the third time in a last minute flight that would cost me a lot. I thought I had finished my tasks, and returned in an equally expensive flight. However, I was wrong. I still had many more things left to do. I came back to Brussels the forth time! This time, it is colder - and it is autumn here now. Unlike in winter, the heater is still not on yet. Freezing in the apartment in the early morning. Autumn make you feel the end of life. I prefer a stable temperature - first summer, then stable winters with proper heating inside. Springs give hope - so I can accept them too!

This is not winter here yet. However, the temperature here now reaches the winter temperature of Lisboa. Also the feels-like temperature varies a lot too. In my lab, it feels colder than it is outside. I am not even sure how is it even possible.

Receiving the Books that I Reviewed!

This year has become the year that I have traveled most. Probably this will remain to be the year with most number of travels for quite some time for me. Sometimes it gets a bit too much with too many flights. Not to mention how expensive a flight can get when it is a last minute flight. All my one-way flights cost me almost 200 Euro (FAO/Faro/Portugal -> CRL/Chareloi/Belgium and BRU/Brussels/Belgium -> LIS/Lisboa/Portugal). My favorites are border crossings by land. Had one more chance to cross into the south of the Netherlands from Belgium. It was amazing.

Finally, returned to Portugal once more from Belgium. By this time, I also received my reviewer copies for the 2 books that I reviewed recently. These books discuss OpenDaylight. The last year of my PhD is going so eventful.

Belgium Almost Autumn

I had to go to Belgium once more from Lisboa to sign the contracts, since my EMJD-DC funding comes to an end. It was already getting colder compared to Lisboa. Summer is officially over for Belgium!

I also received the hard-copies of my recently published book, "Python Network Programming Cookbook - Second Edition", during my short time in Lisboa.

On-Demand Service-Based Big Data Integration: Optimized for Research Collaboration

Today I presented my paper "Obidos" at the VLDB DMAH workshop in Munich. The abstract and the presentation of the paper are given below:

Abstract: Biomedical research requires distributed access, analysis, and sharing of data from various disperse sources in the Internet scale. Due to the volume and variety of big data, materialized data integration is often infeasible or too expensive including the costs of bandwidth, storage, maintenance, and management. Óbidos (On-demand Big Data Integration, Distribution, and Orchestration System) provides a novel on-demand integration approach for heterogeneous distributed data. Instead of integrating data from the data sources to build a complete data warehouse as the initial step, Óbidos employs a hybrid approach of virtual and materialized data integrations. By allocating unique identifiers as pointers to virtually integrated data sets, Óbidos supports efficient data sharing among data consumers. We design Óbidos as a generic service-based data integration system, and implement and evaluate a prototype for multimodal medical data.

Please find the full text of the paper here and the presentation below:

On-Demand Service-Based Big Data Integration: Optimized for Research Collaboration from Pradeeban Kathiravelu
 

I mostly worked on this paper while I was doing my internship at Emory University. This is also my first paper to get accepted from UCLouvain/Belgium, under the supervision of Prof. Van Roy. In this presentation, I have also included "A tale of Ana, Abdul, Viktoria, Pereira, Chen, and Raj", a subtle message I wanted to include in my presentation for quite some time.