Few days ago I gave an invited talk at the the Future Networked Technologies event in Graz.
It was organized by FIT-IT, the largest Austrian national public funding programme for research in information technology, for the opening of competitive calls for collaborative research projects, in 3 areas: Semantic Systems and Services, Trust in IT Systems and Visual Computing.

It was not an easy task being inspirational for many different researchers coming from these 3 different backgrounds.
I talked about what I did during my PhD Thesis (work on trust metrics and trust-aware recommender systems), about what we are doing in my research group SoNet (research on social networks in Wikipedia and about Enterprise2.0) and a bit about my research institute, FBK. I used the research lines I work(ed) on as motivating examples for what I advocated today research should be: interoperable on the open web and aimed at creating services for real users.
Examples I pointed at toward the end (all of them related to Semantic Systems and services” call) were: DBpedia, Microformats, RDFa, LinkedData.

The slides of my talk are embedded below:

The meeting was very interesting. There were around 40 or 50 researchers from Austria. I got a chance to talk with some of them after my talk and got interesting feedback and suggestions. I hope I gave them some food for thought.
Among the projects I discovered (funded in the past by FIT-IT) I particularly liked:
* DYONIPOS – DYnamic ONtology based Integrated Process OptimiSation (which is more impressive than the website would make you imagine, and more importantly it was used and evaluated empirically by the Austrian Ministry of Finance).
* Caleydo, an innovative Visualization Framework for Gene Expression Data in its Biological Context (below a demo of it).