Bulgarian Guest Professor Veselka Boeva arrived to Sweden in the beginning of May to spend two months working as a guest professor at BTH. Shortly after her arrival she gave a lecture to present a general overview of her research contributions. Among other things she talked about decision-based models and decision analysis based on Kripke’s semantics, mining and analysis of biological data such as clustering approaches for analysis of multiple DNA microarray datasets and expertise retrieval models.

Professor Boeva will stay until the end of June, but there are already plans for a grant proposal regarding a one year long visiting professorship. Her collaboration with BTH and Professor Niklas Lavesson in particular began already in 2004 and has resulted in several published papers related to machine learning and bioinformatics and the two of them intend to continue their joint work related to data science in the future. At the moment there are two projects in the pipeline. The first one concerns clustering techniques in machine learning and is conducted in the big data research environment. The second concerns the Bigdata@BTH profile directly and will likely involve a few of our partner companies. The topic is expertise retrieval and expert mining and the purpose is to help companies evaluate expert capital by developing algorithms and systems to mine not only internal information sources, but also to use data available on the Internet to select people with suitable competencies. This work could be used to assemble a team for a certain task or to replace a retiring colleague for example. Another potential area could be streamlining the process of employing new staff. It can often be time consuming and expensive for a company to go through piles of applications to find the right candidates. If expertise retrieval could be used to make a preliminary filtering out and ranking of candidates this would be a great gain in time and effort. Two databases that might be interesting to start with are PubMed (a repository for biomedical articles) and LinkedIn.

The BTH faculty and Professor Boeva are also looking into other potential collaboration topics in scalable resource-efficient systems for big data analytics.

“I will use the opportunity to establish collaborations with other scientists from the department such as Anton Borg, Martin Boldt and Lars Lundberg among others” says Veselka Boeva and continues “I believe that my visit to BTH will contribute to further extend my scientific connections with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, which will be a good basis for future joint projects and research contributions.”