Thursday 9^th of February, the staff at the Department of Computer and Information Science gathered to celebrate Roger Midtstraum's 50 years birthday.

Photos from the event (Flickr)

30^th of January, João Batista Rocha-Junior completed his trial lecture and thesis defense. He will eventually be awarded the PhD degree. Professor Kjetil Nørvåg supervised João's PhD work at the Data and Information Management research group. Professor Jon Atle Gulla,  Adjunct Associate Professor Jon Olav Hauglid, Research Scientist Akrivi Vlachou og Post Doctoral Fellow Christos Doulkeridis have co-supervised the PhD work.

João's trial lecture was titled: Quering and Managing Social Data (pdf)

He defended his PhD thesis:
Efficient Processing of Preference Queries in Distributed and Spatial Databases (pdf)

Photos from the event (Flickr) by Heri Ramampiaro, Naimdjon Takhirov and Kai T. Dragland

Friday 27^th of January, the Water! Social Change through New Media village presented their experts in teamwork projects related to global water challenges. The village has co-operated with Liv Arnesen, to aid the Access Water 2012 project.

The students in the village presented five water related projects:

• Trå for vann (a bicycle driven interactive computer game)
• Water ownership (a short video and web page)
• I India drikker alle saltvann (an e-book aimed a children)
• Vill etter vann (a web-based computer game for elementary school)
• Kompetansedråper for rent vann (an interactiv web page with videos and photos)

Professor Letizia Jaccheri was the leader of the village. The village focused on the use of new media as a tool for increasing the awareness of global water issues among school children.

Photos from the EiT presentation (Flickr)

Read more about it in Universitetsavisa (in Norwegian).

6^th of January, one of our former master students, David Svånå, and his video of Virtual Nidaros were featured in Adressa. David Svånå's master thesis work was supervised by Assistant Professor Torbjørn Hallgren and Associate Professor Jo Skjermo.

Read more about Virtual Nidaros in the Bli med 700 år tilbake i tid article at Adressa.

More videos about Virtual Nidaros (YouTube).

Wednesday 4^th of January, the staff at the department (IDI) gathered to celebrate Torbjørn Hallgren's 70 years birthday. Hallgren is signing off after 44 years at the university and SINTEF, but he still wish to contribute with graphic research at the department through his colleagues.

After graduating in 1966 from the Technical Physics programme of study at Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH), Hallgren started working at Regnesenteret (RNTH). At RNTH he worked with technical/mathematical programming and taught the SIMULA programming language. Later he joined the Academic Administration at NTH, and pioneered the development of software for their academic needs.

In 1986 Hallgren joined our department, and started lecturing the major subjects in programming. His main responsibility has been computer graphics.

Hallgren was one of the initiators of the Distributed Visualization Laboratory (DVL). DVL began as a collaboration between departments and faculties at the university, since computer graphics and visualization required expensive equipment. Hallgren was crucial in establishing the cooperation - he has been a pioneer for computer graphics and visualization at the university.

Photos from the event (Flickr).