Difference between revisions of "AIRWiki"

Revision as of 13:23, 18 April 2008

Welcome to AIRWiki!

AIRWiki is AIRLab's wiki. It was born as a tool for teachers, researchers and students to share information about projects in an easy and quick way. However, it quickly evolved into a display of the activities of the Lab too: you are invited to browse this wiki, to discover what we at the AIRLab are working on.

There is also an official AIRLab website: http://www.airlab.elet.polimi.it/. Look there for a description of what the AIRLab is, who works in it, and what scientific interests they have. But if you want an overview of what we at the AIRLab actually do, AIRWiki is the right place!

Research areas

At the AIRLab we work on a very broad range of topics, organized in these areas:

• Agents, Multiagent Systems, Agencies
• BioSignal Analysis
• Computer Vision and Image Analysis
• E-Science
• Machine Learning
• Ontologies and Semantic Web
• Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence
• Robotics
• Soft Computing

These areas are described in detail on this page of the AIRLab website.

Projects

Research work in the above areas is done within projects. Details about active and finished projects are available at the Projects page. Ongoing projects are covered as soon as enough - and structured enough - information about them is available.

How do I access the contents of this wiki?

AIRWiki is conceptually composed of two layers:

• a public layer, visible to everyone on the internet, containing information about the AIRLab and a description of the projects we work on;
• a private layer, accessible to registered users only, used as a work-in-progress repository of notes about such projects.

The public layer of AIRWiki is (relatively) stable: it is mainly constituted by documentation about past and ongoing projects. The private layer, instead, is a flexible device to store information and quickly share it between the people who work in the AIRLab. Some of this information will eventually be suitably formatted and moved to the public layer.

In operative terms, the public layer is the main namespace of AIRWiki: this includes the Main Page you are currently looking at and the web pages that open when you click most of the links within AIRWiki. The private layer, on the other hand, is composed of the pages belonging to all the other namespaces defined within AIRWiki, such as User pages (namespace User).

The most important pages of the private layer of AIRWiki are those in the Talk namespace, called discussion pages. These are the pages where users write their work notes. For each public page, a discussion page is automatically created and associated to it: such discussion page is accessible by clicking the "discussion" tab on the top of the public page.

Note: while working on AIRWiki, registered users must always keep in mind what is written in Registered users#Caveats for registered users.

How can I contribute?

Contribution to the wiki (i.e. creation and modification of pages) is limited to Registered users.

If you are a registered user and have information you want to share (description of what you do, links to useful sources of information, HOWTOs about lab tools, and so on) just publish them on AIRWiki: it's easy and - dare we say it? - fun! As a guideline, consider putting on AIRWiki everything you would have liked to find there... instead of being forced to find out the hard way. And everything future students who will build upon your work would like to find.

Moreover, a wiki always needs help in terms of maintenance, linking between pages, shaping of a structure and so on. And well, in this very moment it also needs a logo ;-) If you want to help please send an email to either migliore (at) elet (dot) polimi (dot) it or eynard (at) elet (dot) polimi (dot) it.

The AIRLab

Work, generally speaking, is done somewhere and using something ;-) This is true for AIRLab work, too. The following links tell you...

• ...where: The Labs
• ...using what: What's in the AIRLab
• ...why: Projects

If you want details about who the professors and researchers working at the AIRLab are and what scientific work they do, just go to the AIRLab website.

AIRLab survival guide

Sometimes the most difficult problems are not what you expect...

• Bureaucracy
• Tips'n'tricks

As we are on the subject of survival (read: how to avoid hurting yourself or others), remember that to work in the AIRLab you must know the Safety norms and you have to comply with them. In addition to that, you are also required to have read the AIRLab rules.