CAMRA
Post-doc at the Center for Advancing Microbial Risk Assessment (2006-Present).
CAMRA is an interdisciplinary research center established to develop scientific knowledge on the fate and
risk of bioterrorist and other high priority infectious agents. My role in the project -- together with
Dr. James Koopman and Dr. Joseph Eisenberg -- is focused on theoretical modeling in three different areas:
1) Dose-response dynamics. Modeling the interaction between pathogens and immune particles that might
lead to infection. We study the effect of time in the inoculation and how this changes the known
probabilities of infection. 2) Complex transmission dynamics. Modeling the spread of epidemics and
the effect of intervention in socially plausible settings. We extended the basic transmission models
to incorporate heterogeneity of the population, network structure and social behavior. And, 3) Structure
of phenotypes in multi-strain transmission models. Determining plausible network structures of genotype/phenotype
through the epidemiological data of multi-strain diseases (influenza).
@LIS-TECHNET
Research assistant in the TechNET Project
(2004-2005). This project is funded by the EuropeAID @LIS Program. The @LIS
Technology Net
Project aims to create a highly innovative teaching and experimentation
environment spanning across Europe and Latin America. The environment
functions as a continuously live running network – connecting all
partners and populated by autonomous software components able to
dynamically interact with one another and provide services to their
users. My participation in this
project, together with Owen Cliffe and Michele Tomaioulo, is to design
and develop the xnet network
infrastructure,
which provides networks diagnostics information for agents'
platforms.
AGENTCITIES.RTD
Research assistant in the Agentcities.RTD
European Project (2002-2003). The project aims at creating an on-line, distributed testbed to explore
and validate the potential of agent technology for dynamic
service environments. The project goal is to produce the following
outcomes:
1) An open, stable, scalable and reliable network
architecture that allows standards compliant agents to discover each
other, communicate and offer services to one another. 2) Models,
methodology and prototype solutions for the integration of business
services into the service environment. Using these to enable agents in
the environment to trade with one another and form dynamic, compound
"value added" services. 3) Practical methodologies for the application
of agent communication technologies (semantic models,
ontology, expression of content and protocols) to service modeling in
open heterogeneous environments.
In this project, UPC designed and developed the ADMIT TradeHouse,
which is an agent-based market place that offers a
set of advertising and negotiation and payment agent-services.
Through the trade-house agents can perform a
multi-attribute negotiation for products defined by their own
ontologies. Thus, a new trading
space is dynamically created every time external agents load a new
ontology. The ADMIT TradeHouse is loosely federated with the ADMIT
AuctionHouse, creating a distributed MarketPlace (ADMIT) which
integrates multi-attribute negotiation and auctions as trading
mechanisms. ADMIT AuctionHouse was developed by Dr. Matthias Klusch and
Ovidiu Drugran from DFKI under
Agentcities.RTD Project.
i2Cat: INTERNET 2 a CATALUNYA
Research assistant in the Applications Group of i2Cat (2001). I worded in the
subproject called Collaboratory, which is a multi-agent system to support knowledge sharing and
distribution within a community. My contribution was the integration and improvement of NetExpert
into the Collaboratory. NetExpert is a
system to locate expertise sources within communities.
The knowledge used by this system is retrieved from the personal web
pages and public documents of the community members using
unsupervised learning. By means of the creation of a Social Network and
a Knowledge Network the system aims to answer two 'simple' questions:
1) who knows what? and, 2) who
knows who knows what?
PORQPINE
This project is unfortunately not funded, therefore, it has become a
part-time hobby too often delayed by other projects and duties. To know
more about
this projects please read this technical
paper or the poster. at the
This personal side project started in 2001.
Porqpine is a fully distributed and collaborative search engine for web
pages. This system uses a web pages’ query-based model and
collaborative filtering techniques in order to obtain user-customized
results. All knowledge about users and profiles is stored in each user
node’s application. Overall the system is a multi-agent system that
runs on the computers of the user community. The nodes interact in a
peer-to-peer way in order to create a real distributed search engine
where information is completely distributed among all the nodes in the
network. Moreover, the system preserves the privacy of user queries and
results by maintaining the anonymity of the queries’ consumers and
results’ producers. The knowledge required by the system to work is
implicitly caught through the monitoring of users actions, not only
within the system’s interface but also within one of the most popular
web browsers. Thus, users are not required to explicitly feed knowledge
about their interests into the system since this process is done
automatically. Thanks to Porqpine users obtain the benefits of a
personalized search engine just by installing the application. on their
computer. Porqpine does not intend to shun completely conventional
centralized search engines but to complement them by issuing more
accurate and personalized results.