The BME-Pannon NetSkills Challenge 2015 national student contest is over. The final round and the follow-up award ceremony took place on November 27, 2015 and was hosted by the Department of Networked Systems and Services of BME. The awards were handed over by the representatives of the sponsors, namely the IT Services Hungary Ltd., the NetVisor Ltd., the HTTP Foundation, the PONTIS Foundation and the HTE Association.

The winner is Dániel Kovács, student of BME. The silver medalist is Dániel Okos, student of BME and the bronze medalist is Péter Vékony, student of Óbuda University.

Congratulations to the winners! More information about the contest: https://bpns.hit.bme.hu/

Cisco invites every interested student to the Cisco Student Day.

Date: 1st October 2015, 2pm – 6.20pm.

Venue: Cisco Systems Magyarország Kft., 1123 Budapest, Csörsz u. 45., Conference room Tokaj.

Registration and further information: www.cisco.com/hu/cisco_student_day

As the outcome of joint work under the COST Action IC1203 ENERGIC the following paper has been published at the 9th International Symposium on Spatial Data Quality (ISSDQ 2015; La Grande Motte, France; 29 – 30 September, 2015): F. Ostermann, H. Huang, G. Andrienko, N. Andrienko, C. Capineri, K. Farkas, R. Purves: “Extracting and Comparing Places Using Geo-social Media”. In this paper, we presented the results of a first step towards a more in-depth study of semantic similarity of places through spatio-temporal clustering using Twitter and Flickr data sources.

We published an article in the IEEE Communications Magazine’s recent issue (August 2015, Vol. 53, No. 8, pp. 158-165., IF: 4.46): K. Farkas, G. Fehér, A. Benczúr, Cs. Sidló: “Crowdsensing Based Public Transport Information Service in Smart Cities”. It describes a smart city application which has been developed in cooperation with colleagues from the Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics of BME, MTA SZTAKI and our laboratory.

We published the following paper at the 4th International Conference on Models and Technologies for Intelligent Transportation Systems (MT-ITS 2015; Budapest, Hungary; 3 – 5 June, 2015): K. Farkas, I. Lendák: “Simulation Environment for Investigating Crowd-sensing Based Urban Parking”. It presents a simulation environment for analyzing crowd-sensing based applications in the Smart City application domain which has been developed in cooperation with colleagues from University of Novi Sad and our laboratory.

Several members of the Medianets Laboratory were awarded by the Scientific Association for Infocommunications Hungary (HTE) at the annual general assembly of HTE on 21st May, 2015. Hence, Vilmos Simon received the Tivadar Puskás award, Árpád Huszák and Károly Farkas received the HTE Gold Medal, Bernát Wiandt received the HTE Silver Medal, and László Bokor and Károly Farkas received the Pollák-Virág award. Congratulations!

We published the following paper at the 3rd International Conference & Workshop Mechatronics in Practice and Education (MECHEDU 2015; Subotica, Serbia; 14 – 16 May, 2015): K. Farkas, I. Lendák: “Evaluation of Simulation Engines for Crowdsensing Activities”. In this paper, together with a colleague from University of Novi Sad we analyzed existing simulation engines and assessed how well-suited they are for simulating the formation, existence and dissolution of dynamic social networks, with a special emphasis on networks formed around crowdsensing efforts.

Károly Farkas, member of MEDIANETS, published an article in the Acta Politechnica Hungarica journal’s recent issue (March 2015, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 123-139., IF: 0.471) with the title “Placement Optimization of Reference Sensors for Indoor Tracking”. In this article, a simulated annealing based method and its simulation based performance analysis are presented to find the optimal number and placement of reference sensors in a given area to be used for indoor positioning.

Our colleague, Károly Farkas gave a presentation about Smart Cities as an invited speaker at the 2nd International Conference on Signal Processing & Integrated Networks (SPIN 2015) taken place on 19-20 February, 2015 in New Delhi, India. More information about the conference: http://spin2015.com.