WOMSA at CAEPIA09 (Seville, Spain – November 2009)
On 13th November the recent developments in the field of Emotion and Affective UI were presented in Seville at WOMSA, the first Workshop on Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis within CAEPIA09 (the Conference of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence). In a world in which millions of people write their opinions about any issue in blogs, news sites, review sites or social media, the distillation of knowledge from this huge amount of unstructured information is a challenging task. Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining are two areas related to Natural Language Processing and Text Mining that deal with the identification of opinions and attitudes in natural language texts. The topics of the workshop included opinion extraction and classification, opinion summarization and visualization, recommender systems, user generated content and social media analysis, blogs analysis, sentiment and subjectivity analysis.

Innovate09 (Aviemore, UK – October 2009)
Innovate09 is the Technology Strategy Board's annual conference and exhibition. The day-long event addressed all aspects of technology innovation, with special focus on the commercial exploitation of a low carbon economy, energy generation and supply, the digital economy and life sciences of the future. Through high-level question-time style sessions, in depth seminars, and technology exhibits we were able to make new business connections and take away the tips, tricks and approaches that will inspire us to innovate. Innovate09 also provided a chance to hear about the latest funding opportunities that will allow business to commercialise research and development activities - whether by working with Innovation Platforms, or through collaborative R&D, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, SBRI and European schemes.

BioID_MultiComm09 (Madrid, Spain – September 2009)
This international conference was organised cooperatively by COST Actions 2101 and 2102 to investigate novel technologies for unsupervised multimodal biometric authentication systems and develop an advanced acoustical, perceptual and psychological analysis of verbal and non-verbal communication signals, in order to identify algorithms and automatic procedures capable of recognizing human emotional states.
In this context, we presented our recent developments in the fields of text categorization and affective analysis through a paper, published by Springer, containing a review of the roots, the state of the art and the future trends of Common Sense Computing, from Minsky's Society of Mind to Media Laboratory's Digital Intuition theory.

The Art of the Start (Edinburgh, UK – April 2009)
Guy Kawasaki is managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer Inc. Guy Kawasaki came to Edinburgh to help 100s of students, startups and investors understand better how to make the world a better place through startups. Among Guy's hints: start with the idea of making meaning in place of money, don't get stuck in one type of business but try to jump curves, don't be afraid of polarizing people, find a few soul mates because the road to success is long and tough, keep your business model simple, define the tasks required to open up your potential, enable people to test drive your product, don't ask users to do something that you wouldn't, surround yourself with people who are passionate about changing the world with your stuff.

COST2102 (Dublin, Ireland – March 2009)
The main focus of this international training school held at Trinity College was the development of multimodal interfaces with interdisciplinary focuses on speech, gesture and emotion. The last field was particularly interesting since one of the ideas of the project is to develop emotion-sensitive systems in the sector of e-health. Many useful information were gathered about the categorization of emotions and state of the art techniques to get emotions from text and speech. A talk was also given on 26^th March about the use of Common Sense Computing to enable the development of intelligent web applications capable to understand users also from an emotional point of view. The presentation interested many COST researchers and gave birth to a lot of questions about the Common Sense Computing Initiative.

WebSci09 (Athens, Greece – March 2009)
The aim of this conference was to bring computer scientists and social scientists together across the disciplinary divide, exploring the development of the web across different areas of everyday life and technological development. WebSci'09 was the first web science conference organised by the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) and the Foundation of the Hellenic World (FHW) to be dedicated to the presentation of research into society on the web. The paper sessions were very useful to gather information about the state of the art of semantic web and about the main institutes, organizations and people working on it. The poster session offered the chance to look at other PhD projects and ideas in the area of web science and it was a first occasion to present officially the project research work. At last the conference was also very worthwhile to meet the experts of the field and make new connections.

Visiting the Media Lab (Boston, USA – February 2009)
On February we visited the MIT Media Lab, a department within the School of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Boston. Devoted to research projects at the convergence of multimedia and technology, the Media Lab was widely popularized in the 1990s by business and technology publications such as Wired and Red Herring for a series of practical inventions in the fields of wireless networks, field sensing, browsers and the world wide web. More recently it has focused on product design more generally, particularly for technologies that address social causes. The visit was the occasion for being initiated to the Open Mind Common Sense project and for meeting all the MIT researchers involved in the Common Sense Computing Initiative, especially Catherine Havasi, the external supervisor of this PhD research project.