IASTED International Conference on Knowledge Sharing and Collaborative Engineering
Virgin Islands (St. Thomas, St. John) November, 2004

In November 2004, I had the opportunity to present a paper at The International Association of Science and Technology for Development (IASTED) International Conference on Knowledge Sharing and Collaborative Engineering (KSCE) and tour St. Thomas and St. John in the Virgin Islands.

Arriving several days before the conference afforded some touring time. Home base was the Secret Harbor resort.

The building on left (first floor) was the accommodations.

This is the view in front of the hotel.

Secret Cove offers some really spectacular sunsets.

Day 2 my wife and I hop on a ferry to St. John’s island

Beautiful water.

Two-thirds of St. John’s is the Virgin Islands National Park.

Great views abound in the Virgin Islands.

Overlooking Coral Bay

Huge termite nest. It is about 3 feet across.

Cinnamon Bay Ruins is the site of an abandoned Sugar Cane Plantation where they made sugar, molasses, and rum.

St. John’s is known for their beautiful beaches. Here is a view overlooking Cinnamon Bay.

Cinnamon Bay beach. The sand is as fine as flour.

Cinnamon Bay beach. Extremely clear water.

Trunk Bay beach on St. John

Coral World Ocean Park is a unique structure which allows visitors to see underwater life without getting wet. Perfect for water intolerant folks.

A couple of nurse sharks

Overlook of Megan's Bay beach. Supposedly one of the top ten beaches in the world.

Panoramic view of Megan’s Bay Beach

View of Megan’s Bay Beach from the water.


The International Conference on Knowledge Sharing and Collaborative Engineering (KSCE) conference was held at the Frenchman's Reef & Morning Star Marriott Beach Resort on the south side of the island of St. Thomas. The KSCE conference is held concurrently with 3 other conferences. Attendees may sit in on other sessions.

View from my hotel room.

The keynote speaker was Jaideep Srivastava from the University of Minnesota. The title of his talk is, “Web Mining - Accomplishments & Future Directions.”

Two of the conferees, Lillykutty Jacob from India and Renata Araujo from Brazil.

Hidefumi Ueda of Fujitsu labs and James Sawyer of Automation. Both had given their presentations so they were quite relaxed. This waterfall is part of the hotel.

This is the view of one of the hotel restaurants.

Lunch with Hidefumi Ueda of Fujitsu labs and James Sawyer of Automation. Splendid weather for November.

Fernando Puente from Spain presents his work on Improved Workflow Management System based on XPDL

Jacky Swan from the University of Warwick discussing the limits to ICT-led project review practices

Michael Frank from Florida State University presents his tutorial on Nanocomputing.

Ratan Guha of University of Central Florida presents Augmenting Museum Experiences with Mixed Reality. Dr. Guha did a superb job filling in for the original presenter who had to have by-pass surgery a few days earlier.

The conference included a wireless room for checking email. Serious Web surfing going on.

Steve Downey of the University of Illinois giving a talk on NCSA’s Knowledge Center: Facilitating Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration

Late morning of the second day, I met up with Marc Boumedine, the conference chair. He was very gracious if providing a tour of the University of Virgin Islands (UVI). UVI covers 25 acres and the university owns several yachts (for their Marine Biology program).

University of Virgin Islands

Marc and I in front of UVI.

Sudhanshu K. Semwal and yours truly in front of UVI.

View from one of the UVI buildings. The landmass is the end of the runway at the Cyril King Airport.

UVI had some well-equipped classrooms.

Marc, Sudhanshu, and myself in front of the UVI library

The “Information processing and mining knowledge-based systems for learning” session was well attended with very good interaction. Below are screenshots of the presenters.

Rhee Man Kil of KAIST in Korea discusses “Optimization of Regression Models based on the Analysis of Risk Functions.”

Zhuli Xie of University of Illinois presents, “Using Noun Phrase Centrality to Identify Topics for Extraction-based Summaries.”

Robert Murphy of Carnegie Mellon University discusses his paper on Extracting and Structuring Subcellular Location Information from On-Line Journal Articles: The Subcellular Location Image Finder. Interesting idea about merging text searching with visual matching.

Yours truly presents the merits of using Equalized Learning for Predicting Software Defects.

Axel Korthaus of University of Mannheim (Germany) presents (Semi-)Automatic Topic Map Generation from a Conventional Document Index

A social highlight of the conference was the dinner on Tuesday night. It included a live band and great food.

Fellow conferees. A lot of New Yorkers present and we lamented the fate of the 2004 Yankees.

Guests included: Frank Born, Ray Liuzzi, Liz Liddy

The sunsets can be quite mystical. Looks like my ship has come in.

On the morning of my last day in the Virgin Islands I captured this rainbow outside my hotel room.

Looks like “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” ends in the Virgin Islands.

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