Title : Accessing Natural History

Presenter Marieke van Erp
Abstract This talk will be about the work I did in the Mining for Information in Texts from the Cultural Heritage (MITCH) project prior to joining the VU. The MITCH project was a collaboration between Tilburg University and the Dutch National Museum for Natural History Naturalis. The aim of MITCH was to improve the accessibility of the textual data that accompanies each specimen in the Naturalis collection. In order to do this (semi-)automatic approaches were developed to turn an analogue data sources from the natural history domain into a high quality, enriched and easily accessible digital resource. I will highlight four key aspects of my work in MITCH, namely automatic database population, data cleaning, data structuring and data retrieval.

Title : Economic fueling versus ice build-up on passenger aircraft

Presenter Ruud Stegers
Abstract While in the light of different fuel prices at airports it may be a good idea to take extra fuel for a flight, the subsequent risk of ice buildup make that these kind of decisions are not so clear. A master student is currently working at KLM on a model to predict whether extra fuel increases the risk of icing. This talk will give an overview of flight and fuel planning, and introduces the issue of icing.