Haritz Medina was a visiting scholar at the HCC Lab from February to the end of May 2020.

Haritz Medina is a Ph.D. student from the University of the Basque Country (Spain). His Ph.D. topic is the adoption of web annotation techniques in domain-specific settings. Previously he studied an MSc. in distributed systems and web and BSc. in Computer Science with a specialization in Software Engineering, both at the University of the Basque Country. He has been working in three different companies developing front-end and back-end applications for industrial data ingestion and processing of audiovisual automatism control.

Here he shares his thoughts on the stay at HCC Lab with us:

International stays are part of learning activities that we can conduct during our Ph.D. My Ph.D. tries to solve customizability in web annotation in domain-specific using a software engineering systematic reuse approach, specifically, using Software Product Lines. I thought that staying in Berlin could be quite profitable for my Ph.D., as HCC has far experience in semantic annotations, one of the main topics in my Ph.D., in the development of Neonion and participation in forums like IAnnotate in Berlin some years ago. But also, in areas that I was interested in but we don’t have an important background, like usability or human-computer interaction. And I wasn’t wrong, I learned a lot from HCC.

My stay at HCC started in February and was expected to end in April, but due to the well-known coronavirus pandemic, it was extended until nearly the end of May. From the very beginning I feel integrated as part of the group. I have done a small presentation of my previous work and I have received a lot of feedback from it. Not only about my approach, also possible future work. In addition, I have the opportunity to evaluate partially the Software Product Line that we’ve been developing, not only in terms of configurability, also in terms of usability of resultant products. In the second aspect, we found that there is still a lot of work to do.

It was also quite interesting to attend some of the different talks given by other HCC members, as PhD students or students doing their bachelor’s and master’s thesis at HCC. They are tackling different research areas, some of them quite far from my base knowledge, like wikidata, machine learning, or interactive data visualization. It also surprised me the heterogeneity of the group, as there were from computer scientists to designers working together, which I think is so valuable.

The stay in Berlin was nice, in spite of the corona-times, which somehow difficulties some of the aspects that I was planning to do. I have to say that it gave me plenty of time to work on my PhD, but also was easier to get along thanks to daily meetings. The lockdown affected some of my plans, but, in the following photo, you can see that I was quite lucky to have the opportunity to enjoy some of the best views in Berlin that are quite close to my student residence.

I have to say thank you to Claudia to give me the opportunity of joining HCC for these months, but also the rest of the team, which treated me really well and I enjoyed really good moments in person but also from the other side of the screen!