Projects

INCOMING: Interdisciplinary Curricula in Computing to Meet Labor Market Needs

INCOMING is a 3-year project (2012-2015) funded by the TEMPUS IV programme of the European Union (project No. 530155-TEMPUS-1-2012-1-EE-TEMPUS-JPCR). It is a Joint Project / Curricular Reform (JPCR) project with the objective to initiate capacity building for interdisciplinary studies at universities in Serbia, to be offered both in English and in Serbian, at all three levels of study (BSc, MSc, PhD), and in at least one of the following three modes of study: face-to-face mode, distance learning, and blended mode. To do that, the project will develop, accredit, implement and evaluate several interdisciplinary study programmes, at four different universities in Serbia (see the page ‘About the project’ for details). By developing and implementing these programmes, the project intends to enhance employment opportunities for graduates of the new programmes, targeting specifically Serbian labor market needs in interdisciplinary computing.

ENGAGE: An Infrastructure for Open, Linked Governmental Data Provision towards Research Communities and Citizens

The main goal of ENGAGE project is the development and use of a data infrastructure, incorporating distributed and diverse public sector information (PSI) resources, capable of supporting scientific collaboration and research, particularly for the Social Science and Humanities (SSH) scientific communities, while also empowering the deployment of open governmental data towards citizens.The ENGAGE e-infrastructure is envisaged to promote a highly synergetic approach to governance research, by providing the ground for experimentation to actors from both ICT and non-ICT related disciplines and scientific communities, as well as by ensuring that the scientific outcomes are made accessible to the citizens, so that they can monitor public service delivery and influence the decision making process.

Simply put, ENGAGE is a door for researchers that leads them to the world of Open Government Data. By using the ENGAGE platform, researchers and citizens will be able to submit, acquire, search and visualize diverse, distributed and derived Public sector datasets from all the countries of the European Union.

ENGAGE is a combination of CP-CSA project funded under the European Commission FP7 Programme.

KEYSTONE: Semantic Keyword-based Search on Structured Data Sources

KEYSTONE is a COST Action IC1302 and the main objective of the Action is to launch and establish a cooperative network of researchers, practitioners, and application domain specialists working in fields related to semantic data management, the Semantic Web, information retrieval, artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing, that coordinates collaboration among them to enable research activity and technology transfer in the area of keyword-based search over structured data sources. The coordination effort will promote the development of a new revolutionary paradigm that provides users with keyword-based search capabilities for structured data sources as they currently do with documents. Furthermore, it will exploit the structured nature of data sources in defining complex query execution plans by combining partial contributions from different sources.

REVLAB: Renewable Energy Virtual Laboratory

The REVLAB project between the University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Technical Sciences and the University of Szeged, Department of Technical Informatics will start a cross-border research cooperation in the field of renewable energy technology which will result in the first-of-a-kind high-power renewable energy laboratory that is completely safe, scalable and accessible anytime from anywhere in the world.

The projects positive influence on local scientific community is twofold: first, the development of the laboratory is a significant technical undertaking which will strengthen the participating institutions engineering and innovation capacity, and second, once completed the laboratory will increase their capacity for research and knowledge transfer. REVLAB project will create a vibrant community that will use the project infrastructure to share the knowledge and experience, solve hard technical problems and raise the awareness about the sustainability and green-energy issues. By increasing cross-border dialogue between scientific institutions, authorities and decision makers, the REVLAB project will have a lasting impact on regional renewable energy policy, as well as innovation capacity of the regional universities, industry and SMEs.

The key objective of the REVLAB project is the development of infrastructural and equipment capacities for research and knowledge transfer in the field of renewable energy. REVLAB is a unique virtual laboratory based on the stateof the art real-time hardware and software, that will enable, for the first time, the researchers and engineers of two institutions to access laboratory premises from a distance, to work together more closely and more effectively, to perform experiments safely and to develop solutions which are the most appropriate for the regions needs. The specific objectives are:

  • to jointly develop the virtual laboratory based on real time emulator hardware and software technology;

  • to develop web portal and necessary communication and server infrastructure to enable constant and online access to the laboratory and distant experiments;

  • to develop applications for energy efficiency improvement in the field of renewable energy sources, such as wind energy and photovoltaic;

  • to make the latest achievements in the field of renewable energy technology available globally over the Internet by establishing virtual laboratory as a new method for knowledge transfer between scientific institutions and economy actors, thus directly enhancing the innovative capacity of the industry and SMEs in renewable energy sector.

4BRANE: Semantic-based Document and Workflow Management

Modern organizations aim to enhance the efficiency of business processes, to improve the quality of their services and to reduce operational costs, and in order to accomplish that goal they are turning more and more to document-centric information systems. There is a vast number of document management systems and related business process management systems available. One of the major obstacles in implementing document-centric information systems is a lack of domain specific services (customized retrieval and browsing of documents, life-cycle management, security constraints, etc.), that requires complicated customization. Also, the gap between frequently changing legislations and regulations on one side, and implemented workflows on the other side, is causing difficulties in enforcing regulatory compliance of information systems. Furthermore, significant number of business processes is distributed (while current systems tend to manage documents and workflows in a centralized manner), and different documents and associated metadata representations often causes difficulties for system integration. The aim of this project is to investigate the opportunities and benefits of applying semantic web technologies to document management and business process management in an attempt to address those issues.

Legal Informatics

We engage in research on the application of computer science and information technology in the field of law and develop legal information and software systems.

In particular, we are interested in legal document and business process management (in legislative, judicial and executive branches of the government and legal offices), formal representation of legal knowledge (legal norms and legal facts) and legal reasoning. Our long term goal is to close the gap between legal documents and legal knowledge. We also promote open legal standards and open access to legal information.

Our past and current projects include legal document and business process management solutions, legal information retrieval and browsing systems and text and data mining in the legal domain.

MDE Tools for Participative Development of Enterprise Applications

Kroki (fr. croquis – sketch) is an open-source tool for participatory development of business applications based on executable mockups. Kroki is being developed in order to foster development agility, better understanding of end user needs, and better communication among team members with different specialties. The mockups are used not only for requirements elicitation but during design and implementation as well, because they are later supplied with implementation details through a set of views that support participation of developers with different specialties. Since Kroki provides immediate execution of the application being sketched, it can significantly contribute to decreasing the communication gap between development team and end-users.

Mockup creation and execution is based on our EUIS DSL for specifying user interfaces (UI) of business applications at a high-level of abstraction. Unlike most other solutions where only the UI skeleton is executable, Kroki’s executable mockups can be tested through all three application tiers (the user interface, the business logic, and the database).

Watch a demo at YouTube.

Tools for Domain-Specific Language Engineering

A set of FLOSS tools whose aim is to help in the creation and maintenance of textual Domain-Specific Languages. Currently two tools are developed and used in both academic and enterprise setups:

  • Arpeggio - is a PEG parser with full backtracking and memoization (aka packrat) written in Python programming language. Arpeggio works as a grammar interpreter. There is no code generation. The grammar can be specified in multiple ways: using python statements, using PEG notation (there are currently two variants).

  • textX - is a high-level library for DSL engineering built on top of Arpeggio parser and inspired by Xtext tool. From a grammar description textX builds a meta-model and a parser for the new language. Language utterances are parsed and automatically transformed to a model which corresponds to the automatically deduced meta-model. The model can be further transformed, interpreted or a program code can be generated out of it.

Language Workbench called Textile is in conception phase. It it envisioned as an IDE built on top of Arpeggio and textX that will enable easy DSL specification and evolution.

Platform-independent Code Generation for Controllers (Typhoon HIL)

Project description

CRIS UNS: Current Research Information System at University of Novi Sad

CRIS UNS system is under development since the year 2008 within the project Development of Software Infrastructure for Research Domain of the University of Novi Sad (DOSIRD UNS). It has been implemented with an intention to fulfill all specific requirements prescribed by rule books of the University of Novi Sad, Provincial Secretariat for Science and Technological Development of Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, and Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia. In addition, the substantial requirement to be fulfilled by the system CRIS UNS is its interoperability with systems possessing large databases of scientific research results, thus improving the visibility of the scientific results achieved by researchers from University of Novi Sad and therefore raising the rating of the University.

Informational requirements imposed to this system are:

  • Access to the application via an arbitrary modern web browser.

  • Researchers entering their references by themselves without the need to be at home on any standard for references describing.

  • Interoperability of our system with diverse systems containing scientific content such as CRIS systems, institutional repositories, library information systems, digital repositories, etc.

  • Capability to search the database containing scientific results.

  • Capability to perform evaluation of scientific research results following the rule book(s) prescribed by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia.

  • Reporting for the faculties, University, Provincial Secretariat for Science and Technological Development of Autonomous Province of Vojvodina and Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia.

Automated summarization and sentiment mining in Serbian language

Monitoring public opinions has its use in vast number of domains. For example, consumers tend to decide on purchasing a product based on the recommendations and advice from other users. It is in the interest of manufacturers to keep track of public opinions in order to improve user satisfaction. Political parties and public figures have a special interest in the way they are portrayed in the media.

Internet is an immense, valuable source of public opinions which can be obtained easily and for the low cost through news sites, social media, blog posts, review websites, on-line discussions, etc. However, the vast amount of opinionated text being produced every day makes manual (human) processing impossible, thus revealing the need for their automated retrieval and understanding.

Our goal in this project is to develop methods and tools for automated processing of texts in Serbian language. Serbian language poses a special challenge since text mining and natural language processing tools are very scarce and lacking in performance in comparison to well-known languages e.g., English. The project encompasses many aspects of text mining and natural language processing, such as: text classification, summarization, topic mining, subjectivity detection and sentiment mining.

Healthcare Text Mining

Recent advances in the availability of electronic health records (EHRs) provide an opportunity to improve the quality of clinical care and to support medical research. While key issues remain in the adoption of EHRs and in managing data confidentiality, automated processing of available clinical data is also a major challenge: manual identification of such information is time consuming and often inconsistent and incomplete. This is particularly the case with clinical narratives, which are often the primary, preferred and richest source of patient information.

The aim of this project is developing techniques for large-scale text mining of un- and semi-structured health textual resources, and on health-related information synthesis. We are currently focussed on the extraction of clinical events and temporal expressions and de-identification (anonymization) of clinical narratives. Our partner in this project is the team from the University of Manchester, School of Computer Science under the leadership of prof. Goran Nenadic.

Software Performance Monitoring and Management

This project deals with problems of software performance management. The main focus of the project is the devlopment of techniques for efficient monitoring of working software. We want to find a way to reduce monitoring overhead. This can be achieved by developing adaptive monitoring tools and by using instrumentation that leaves smaller footprint. In collaboration with , and based on their Kieker monitoring tool, we have developed adaptive monitoring tool DProf. It automatically chooses which parts of software to monitor.

The second part of the project is the monitoring goal specification. For now, we use XML, but we are looking to develop specific language. Based on monitoring goals, that are defined using this language, parameters for monitoring systems will be generated.

The third part of this project focuses on the use of obtained monitoring data for performance management, prediction, capacity planning, etc.