[KDD 2015] MEDIator: A Data Sharing Synchronization Platform for Heterogeneous Medical Image Archives

One of my recent papers, "MEDIator: A Data Sharing Synchronization Platform for Heterogeneous Medical Image Archives" was presented at a KDD workshop this week in Sydney.

I could not present the paper myself at KDD, as my Australian visa was delayed. Luckily, my friend Denis who lives in Sydney helped me by presenting the paper. Much thanks to him!

Abstract

With the growing adaptation of pervasive computing into medical domain and increasingly open access to data, metadata stored in medical image archives and legacy data stores is shared and synchronized across multiple devices of data consumers. While many medical image sources provide APIs for public access, an architecture that orchestrates an effective sharing and synchronization of metadata across multiple users, from different storage media and data sources, is still lacking. This paper presents MEDIator, a data sharing and synchronization middleware platform for heterogeneous medical image archives. MEDIator allows sharing pointers to medical data efficiently, while letting the consumers manipulate the pointers without modifying the raw medical data. MEDIator has been implemented for multiple data sources, including Amazon S3, The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), caMicroscope , and metadata from CSV files for cancer images.

Read the full paper here.

Information flow..

Poster on DPRK in Ljubljana.

So I happened to check my ClustrMaps recently, and it was nice to see some dots/visitors from countries including Korea, Democratic People's Republic of (KP) and Holy See (Vatican City State) (VA). While there is a possibility that there can be a misrepresentation due to the use of proxies such as hidemyass.com, I believe it is not the case for the majority. 

It is amazing to notice how the information flows faster than our own selves. I have even learned the names of a few of the countries just from the blog visitors' list shown in the Blogger admin panel and ClustrMaps. For example, countries such as Bahamas (BS) and Belize (BZ). While I would like to visit all the countries eventually, I am genuinely happy that at least some of my thoughts have reached almost all the countries in the form of the blog posts.

North Korea is surely a country in my list to visit. When I was in Ljubljana, I noticed an advertisement poster for a photography exhibition with photos from North Korea. Again the information flow is amazing, to have reached Europe from one of the far Asian countries, that is not much connected to the outside.

Recently the majority of the comments my blog posts received were just spam comments, often with supportive sentences (such as "Nice post; thanks for sharing") followed by an array of unrelated spam links. I hope one day the comments will be more informative and involving, to create a constructive communication over the topic. At least I prefer a meaningful communication, instead of spamming with unrelated links everywhere on the Internet.

Messaging4Transport at OpenDaylight Summit 2015

I presented the Messaging4Transport (Message Oriented Middleware Bindings for MD-SAL) OpenDaylight incubation project at OpenDaylight Summit 2015 on the 31st of July in Santa Clara. The video recordings of the talk is given below. The updated presentation can be found here.

OpenDaylight Summit 2015 and Santa Clara

Love this name tag from the OpenDaylight Summit

~~ Ready to return home after a very productive conference and unconference, in a few hours. Now it is time to get back to my regular life for a while, and focus on my projects.

This year was full of travels for me, with 11 (short and long) international travels so far (and 2 more upcoming). The best part of this trip was to meet many interesting people, listen to many awesome presentations, and present my project. Unlike the previous trips, I did not do any random walks this time. But will continue in the upcoming trips. :3 I am unpredictable in my travelling habits anyway. I just don't have any pattern. :D

Next year seems more interesting as well, with an array of travels and "migrations" already planned - Shenzhen 2016, Atlanta 2016, and Louvain 2016. Sometimes I suspect that I am becoming a gypsy. lol.

Traveling light weight

Fresh water river in Andorra la Vella

I returned to Lisboa from Croatia after my summer internship a few hours ago. Now I leave home again with my suitcase, to the metro station. Going to the airport for my next flight to San Jose for the ODL Summit. I walk like a zombie - brain doesn't work; but  my legs move in the right direction. I surely lack sleep. Do I really need to do this? I ask myself. It happens to me at times - I overdo things to tire myself. But then, I say, "I will never remember these tiring moments spent in transit. But the good memories will last."

 

I used to travel heavy with lots of luggage. Eventually, I learned to travel light. I often avoid even taking the checked in luggage with me, so that I directly go to the border gates, as I already check in at home. By this I avoid the long queues at the luggage drop and further delay at the baggage claim belts. Sometimes I just go on a flight with a small backpack, which also happens to be my laptop bag. I carefully pack the bare minimum stuff with me. This helped travelling further. An ideal example was my travel to Andorra this year, just a day before the EMJD-DC Spring event in Barcelona. 

Since it was a Sunday, most of the shops were closed. I had a look at the books, written in Catalan, speaking the history of the Catalan region. Andorra is the only country which has Catalan as its national language. Andorra la Vella was pleasant, and felt like the hill country in Sri Lanka. I know that the winter will be different, with mountains covered in snow.