At the end of April I participated in the World Meeting of IAALD, The International Association of Agricultural Information Specialists. About 200 colleagues from overall of the World participated.

Yesterday I represented FAO in the final review of the D4Science project (http://www.d4science.eu) here in Brussels.

D4Science is a project to build Virtual Research Infrastructures, in which scientist can collaborate despite of different locations or disciplines.

From November 6-8 I participated in the 5th International Conference on Universal Digital Library. (Pittsburgh, USA ICUDL -

ICUDL is a worldwide initiative with strong operations in China and India to digitize library content and to make it online available.

The picture shows Prof. Jaime Carbonell giving his presentation on the state of art in machine translation

The presentation that I gave at the meeting is attached.

Wednesday, 28. I am meeting Mimos Management at their Headquarter in the Kuala Lumpur Science Park. MIMOS is an incredible place, great personalities from top management to the researchers, I met researchers not only from Malaysia, but also from Germany (partnership with DFKI) and Iran. I was told that years ago, MIMOS was changed dramatically to get rid of hierarchies and red tape.

Monday, 26, I met Dr. Wang Zhong's team at the School of Information Science, Sun Ya Tsen University. We had first a tour through the "Higher Education Mega Center", which is on an Island between rivers and his home to 10 universities. I was again amazed about the enormous investment of China into higher education,

johannes keizer with Dr. Wang's team, missing Dr. Wang :-)

I got today my letter of engagement for two years as visting professor at the Institute of Intelligent Machines of the Chinese Academy of Science (IIM, CAS). Professor Rujing Wang, Deputy Director of the Institute is very keen to intensify the contacts with our team at FAO in Rome.

Johannes Keizer at his presentation for staff of IIM, CAS

Today I had my presentation at the Chinese Agricultural Ontology Workshop. The workshop started yesterday, but I did not participate as the workshop language was Chinese :-). This was calculated and I was lucky enough to have the entire day to finally compose my presentations

Impact is also if others use the tools, our team is developing, without that we know about it :-). The below picture is from a presentation by the team of CAAS in the Chinese Agricultural Ontology workshop.

The idea behind this is the same as behind our multilingual semantic search assistant. It exploits the structured knowledge of the thesaurus against an unstructured corpus like Google. The work was the product of a PhD thesis and is unfortunately still not published.

This morning I visited the Harbin Institute of Technology. It is a city of it's own within Harbin. HIT financed the express road to the airport, there are two 4 Star hotels on the University ground....

From October 18 to 27 I am on a trip to China and Malaysia with two main goals:
a) to find a partner in China to develop with us a reading assistant for quick automatic translations from Chinese to English/French/Spanish and from English to Chinese.
b) to meet MIMOS representatives in Kuala Lumpur and to establish a formal collaboration on the hosting and further development of the AGROVOC conceptserver.