Oana Tifrea, former European Master in Computational Logic student @UniBZ, is one of 29 recipients of Google PhD-Fellowship! Congrats! Read the interview from some months ago when she had just arrived in Oxford: Why did you choose to study here at the UniBz and why did you come all the way from Romania? It started at the end of my bachelor in Romania, when I received an e-mail that promoted the European Master program of Computational Logic. I applied and chose the University of Vienna for the first year of the program and the UniBz for the second year. I chose the UniBz because the second-year students from Vienna, who spend their first year in Bolzano, told me that they had really enjoyed the university and the surroundings. They also told me that there were really good researchers in my field at the UniBz. What were you prior research experiences? I wrote my bachelor thesis about recognizing humor in written texts. I developed an algorithm that could detect if a text was humorous or not using machine learning techniques. I was quite satisfied with the result, but I also wanted to see a more logic-oriented approach. That’s why I chose the Computational Logic course. Could you describe the research focus of the Erasmus Mundus Master you attended? The course was divided into modules, some compulsory and some optional. I’d recommend taking a look at the program’s website (emcl-study.eu/modules.html). In each of the four universities, there are local and European projects in which students can collaborate for their projects and thesis. I chose to work for my internship project in Sydney, Australia. I worked on detecting symmetrical solutions for the shop-scheduling problem. For my master thesis I then worked under the supervision of Rosella Gennari in the EU project TERENCE. The project’s focus was on developing an adaptive learning system for children between the ages of 7 and 11 who have comprehension problems, i.e. reading and understanding texts. What exactly did you do for this project? I focused on creating the domain model of the system. That meant reading literature from different research fields i.e. psychological articles related to poor comprehenders, and structuring all the information. Based on that, I constructed the formal requirements and a common vocabulary for all the experts involved in the project. I am very grateful for having gotten the opportunity to work in such a project, where different experts – logicians, psychologists, educators, linguists, computers scientist – work for a common goal. The cliché of a typical computer scientist is that they program all the time…but you didn’t do that in this project, did you? It wasn’t so much about programming; I did what is called ontology engineering. That means I had to meet with the experts, read their material, discuss with them and extract all the important information for our project. Besides this project, you also worked for the ICT (Internet & Communication Technologies Department) of the UniBz? Yes. I was in the team that developed the new professor portal in which professors submit their teaching registers. Up till then it was a paper-based register, but now the faculties use the electronic version of it. Isn’t it cool that you got the chance to develop something like that as a former student? Yes, it was very cool. I got to learn a lot about the university, about all the regulations and so on. I learned a lot of new concepts while developing – learning by doing! For instance, I had to organize meetings with the administrative staff to collect their needs and requirements. And when the system was released, I organized some training sessions for the professors. I also contributed to the new enrollment systems for students, which was implemented last year. Using this system, students can now enroll on a paperless basis, which makes submitting applications more convenient e.g. for students from abroad. How would you summarize your experience in Bolzano? It was really exciting. First of all, I liked that I met people from so many different countries such as Russia, Georgia and Pakistan. For example, one of my new best friends is from Vietnam. Before getting to know her, I didn’t know anything about Vietnam except Good Morning Vietnam and the American-Vietnam war… I got to learn a lot about their culture, religion and politics. Having all these international students and hearing about each other’s perspectives, our different truths, made us all more open-minded. We had a lot of fun together. And I learned so many things in Bolzano…I learned how to ride a bike! I had never done that before. I learned how to ski, slackline, windsurf… I wasn’t really a sporty person before, but to me it seemed like everyone in Bolzano is so enthusiastic about sports. Now I think, what did I miss? All in all, would you recommend the Erasmus Mundus program? Yes, definitely! It’s a good experience not only from the point of view of computer science –getting to know how research and teaching is done in two different universities – but also spending time in two different countries, plus getting to know people from other countries is great. I’d especially recommend the University of Bolzano: they have a lot of young and enthusiastic people at the faculty and administration. Also, it’s small, which is good for lectures and there are a lot of scholarships available – I got one from the province. In most other countries, scholarships aren’t that big.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 15:47:24 +0000
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