We are proud to announce yet another new employee in the Department of Computer Science. Amir Laadhar has joined Aalborg University as Postdoctoral Researcher in the Database and Web technologies group.
In 2019, Amir Laadhar received his PhD degree from Paul Sabatier University, during which he also stayed as a Visiting Researcher at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo. Before moving to Denmark, he spent one year as a Postdoctoral Researcher at The Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics, and Microelectronics.
Describe your area and research interest:
- I am interested in semantic web, knowledge graphs and machine learning technologies. During my PhD, we proposed a matching system called POMap++ to align large ontologies and knowledge graphs using machine learning techniques. POMap++ ranked as one of the best matching systems for three years in the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC).
During my one year in Montpellier, I collaborated with our partners from 14 research institutions and companies in the frame of D2KAB project. We built a knowledge graph by integrating more than 100 ontologies related to agronomy and biodiversity hosted in AgroPortal. This postdoc is the subject of two publications in the 22nd International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW) and the 11th International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO).
Which current projects are you working on?
- I am currently involved in H2020 domOS project, which aims at developing and demonstrating an operating system for smart services in buildings. The objectives of the project will be achieved through the international cooperation of eleven partners from five European countries.
We are contributing to one of the main objectives of the domOS project, which is enabling interoperability of data and services for smart building through the use of semantics. This will decouple the infrastructure from the actual domOS services, and enable information sharing between different services and/or the entities of a single or multiple infrastructure(s).
The lack of a common data representation model prevents interoperability between smart services and limits the deployment of IoT applications. IoT developers need to map heterogeneous data of different silos, buildings, and infrastructures to a common information model, an ontology. It is important to unambiguously specify the semantics of data to have a common understanding of this data by different stakeholders and smart services. A common information model needs to be expressive enough to capture the contextual information for buildings, the sensors installed, and the data they generate.
Why did you choose to continue your career at Aalborg University?
- I am happy to join Aalborg University because of its great working environment, the multicultural and international team members.
Any fun facts you?
- Besides being involved in research, I am also a photographer, a snowboarder and a nature lover.