Please click on the following links or scroll down for further information on myself.
| Contact & CV | Publications & Reports |
| Research & Downloads | Personal |
| Education & Experience | My links |
| Photos | Demos |
The easiest and fastest way to contact me is electronic mail. Send email to d i e g o [at] i p i n a - d o r s m a n [dot] o r g. Alternative ways to contact me can be found below:
University of Deusto-ko Unibertsitatea |
|
Avda. de las Universidades, 24 48007 Bilbao (SPAIN)
Office: 568-D
Extension: 2930 at +34944
139 003
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| Mobile: +34 XXXXXX |
You can download a copy of my CV from here.
I finished my PhD in January 2002. My supervisor was Professor Andy Hopper in the Laboratory for Communications Engineering at the Cambridge University Engineering Department. My main area of investigation was Sentient Computing. Sentient Computing is about giving perception to computing systems, i.e. enable them to detect, interpret and respond to changing aspects of the user's context. To achieve such purpose, it uses inputs obtained from sensors distributed throughout the environment, and entities' attributes and capabilities obtained from data repositories to maintain a detailed model of the real world and make it available to applications. Applications can then respond to environmental changes and autonomously change their functionality, without explicit user intervention, based on observations of who or what is around them, what they are doing, where they are and when something is happening.
Perhaps the most important attribute of an entity's context is its location, both in absolute value and especially relative to other entities. That is the reason why already a considerable research effort has been dedicated to the so-called Location-Aware research area. As result of that work new sensing devices and software architectures to handle the data provided by them have been carried out. Good examples of the sensing technologies developed are the Active Badge and Active Bat systems created by AT&T Laboratories at Cambridge. One of my research tasks was to devise an alternative sensing technology to these indoors location sensors, called TRIP, that provides similar usability levels but still involves a much lower cost and easier to deploy infrastructure.
![[TRIP target]](images/target.gif)
TRIP (Target Recognition using Image Processing) is a vision-based
location sensor that uses the combination of visual markers, 2D
circular barcode tags, as the one seen on your left, and conventional
video cameras to identify and locate tagged real world objects in the
field of view. Image Processing and Computer Vision algorithms,
optimised to reduce the computational cost to a minimum, are employed to
parse the video frames captured and so obtain the identifier and
accurate 3-D location of the tags seen.
I have finally made available the source code of the TRIP system. This code was produced during my PhD at the Laboratory for Communications Engineering.
In parallel with the work on TRIP, I was also very interested on exploring how state of the art Distributed Systems technology can assist Sentient Computing on its goal of creating responsive Smart Environments. In particular, I comtemplated the development of loosely coupled distributed sentient components that communicate asynchronously by means of events. Some preliminary work done using CORBA and its associated COS Notification Service, was described in the paper "Video-Based Sensing for Wide Deployment of Sentient Spaces". In addition, I looked at means to enable CORBA component mobility. As result of this interest, I produced a software framework for the management of CORBA objects' lifecycle within a fixed ubiquitous network of computers. The system was named LocALE (Location-Aware Lifecycle Environment) and permits client applications to direct the remote instantiation, migration and destruction of CORBA services. At the same time it provides interesting load-balancing and fault-tolerance features on the CORBA objects whose lifecycle handles. LocALE provides, in a nutshell, the functionality of the CORBA Lifecycle Sevice and CORBA Implementation Repositories all in one. A paper describing this system presented in the ICOIN-15 conference can be downloaded from my publications page. Finally, as a third contribution of my PhD, I worked on a network-based Event Correlation Engine that determines on behalf of applications when a set of contraints previously specified, with what I call the ECA language, are satisfied. An overview of this work can be encountered in the paper "An ECA Rule-Matching Service for Simpler Development of Reactive Applications".
![[Basque Government Logo]](images/EJ.gif)
My doctoral research in the United Kingdom was funded by a grant
awarded by the Department of Education of the Basque
Government. The industrial sponsor of the TRIP project was AT&T
Laboratories Cambridge.
I read a B.Sc. degree (awarded February 1998 - First Class) in Computer Engineering at the University of Deusto (Bilbao - Spain). In the 4th year out of the 5 my degree had, I went under the ERASMUS program to the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), where I completed the 2nd year of B.Sc. in Computation. Later, I read an M.Sc. degree in Distributed Information Management Systems (awarded April 1999 - Distinction) at the University of Essex Computer Science Department (Colchester - UK). My master thesis, supervised by Professor Simon Lavington, was entitled "Criteria for the Design of a Platform Independent Distance Learning System" and dealt with the development of a Java based video on demand distance learning client. These M.Sc. studies were accomplished with the financial support of a Basque Government Education Department's grant. Afterwards, in October 1998 I initiated my Ph.D. studies in the Cambridge University Engineering Departments' LCE group, where I carried out research on Sentient Computing. I am completed this degree in January 2003.
From February 2002 to September 2003 I worked for 3G LAB (now renamed Trigenix) where I was a senior software engineer in the development of mobile services for 2nd and 3rd generation mobiles. My main task was the design and development of server-side software using J2EE. Currently, I work for the University of Deusto, where I have been teaching among other things: distributed systems, real-time systems software engineering, databases and technologies for the development of mobile applications. At the end of my bachelor degree, June 1997, I worked for 3 months in the Basque information systems company Ceinsa, where I was a databases and C++ programmer. While at Cambridge University (UK) I was Subject and Project Supervisor for Undergraduate and Diploma students in the Computer Science and Engineering Departments. In my spare time, I collaborated with Adevas.com software development company, where I contributed with my expertise in the development of CORBA distributed systems using Java, Python and C++.
Here it is my list of publications corresponding to my PhD work. All the documents are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on document titles for their abstract and electronic copies. If you want to have a more up-to-date look of my publications list goto here.
My complete name is Diego López de Ipiña González de Artaza (a bit long isn't it?) and I was born in 1974 in Vitoria-Gasteiz (Araba), located at the Spanish side of the Basque Country, in what we call in Basque language hegoalde (the side of the south). Vitoria-Gasteiz is a very green and clean, well-organised and comfortable city where it has been a pleasure to live till I was 20. I first moved to England, Manchester, when I was 21, for a 9 months ERASMUS student exchange, thinking that would be my longest stay far away from my beloved Basque Country. However, after returning home to complete my fifth and final year of bachelor studies, I decided again to return to UK to carry on my education, and I was in the "exile" for the following six years, first for one year in Colchester and the following four in the lovely Cambridge, where I was a Ph.D. student in the Cambridge University Engineering Department and member of Downing College. Since September 2003 I am back in Vitoria-Gasteiz where I can enjoy the beautiful mountains and landscapes of the Basque Country. If you want to know more about who the Basques are, where we live and what we do, I suggest you either go to Blas Uberuaga's excellent Basque web page or the Basque Government's official Web Site. I will try to come up with a nice list of links about the Basque Country in future amendments of this page.
In my free time, I like to have long walks, cycle around the beautiful surroundings of Vitoria-Gasteiz and watch alternative and non-commercial movies, although that is quite hard in Vitoria, in company of my wife Ingeborg. Whenever, my wife's or my duties permit, we love to travel, most of the times, however, finishing in the Netherlands to visit her family. I also love to read novels, specially medieval age historical ones, although sometimes I waste my time reading too many computing books instead. I used to play basketball and go jogging, however, I have been a bit lazy lately, rather enjoying my wife's excellent cooking skills. I hope I come back to these more dynamic habits soon.
Here there are some of my preferred links:
In this section you can find some of the pictures I have been taking with a Nikon COOLPIX950 digital camera. Click on any of the list items below to see them:
I am afraid this demos are not working any longer. I do still have one on operation, which is the demo for the TRIP and MobileEye systems
![[Powered by
Python!]](images/PythonPoweredSmall.gif){kind=small}
Modified on 13th May 2002 - Diego López de
Ipiña (d i e g o [at] i p i n a - d o r s m a n [dot] o r g)
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