PROMISE(Participative Research labOratory for Multimedia and Multilingual Information Systems Evaluation) is an European project which aims at advancing the experimental evaluation of complex multimedia and multilingual information systems in order to support individuals, commercial entities, and communities who design, develop, employ, and improve such complex systems.

PROMISE copes with the increasing complexity of information systems. An information system has to satisfy user needs and carry out tasks that are becoming progressively more complicated and cross language and media barriers; moreover, it has to manage increasing amounts of information which is often heterogeneous and demands for insightful access to it. Therefore, their design and development requires the integration of components and technologies coming from different areas and domains.

This multidisciplinary makes PROMISE an interesting formative experience both from cultural and technical point of view. Developing a master thesis on PROMISE will give you the possibility to enrich your knowledge on information retrieval, information visualization, visual analytics and HCI, to partecipate in a careful design activity, to improve your teamwork skill, to implement software using latest technologies, last but not least to exploit your skills and to express your ideas.

The University of Rome "La Sapienza" is one of the ten partners of this project. His contribution is: L'università "La Sapienza" di Roma è uno dei 10 partner di questo progetto. Il suo contributo è:

1. develop the user interfaces and the annotation service needed to promote the collaboration among the stakeholders of the evaluation infrastructure and foster the knowledge sharing and reuse;
2. bring a radical innovation into the experimental evaluation practices by developing appropriate visual analytics tools to allow stakeholders to effectively analyze and understand the huge amount of experimental data gathered in the evaluation infrastructure.

On the right side is showed an overview of our advanced visualization architecture which provides a set of graphs working interactively on the same set of data.

From the technical point of view you will have the possibility to improve your skillsin Web programming. In particular you will learn to use Liferay, a portal to build web sites and web application developed in Java and the Javascript library D3 to realize realize graphs.

Within PROMISE our group carries out, in collaboration with other partners of the project, an intense research activity which aims to create innovative visual analytics tools for supporting the evaluationof information retrieval systems and helping researchers in understanding the malfunction causes and in improving their systems. This activity, which led to the realization of the prototype showed on the right, is reported into the following articles:

• To Re-Rank or To Re-Query: Can Visual Analytics Solve This Dilemma?
• Visual Comparison of Ranked Result Cumulated Gains

An optional line of research, parallel to the main one regarding the implementation of PROMISE functionalities, is the exploration of possibility to convert part of the exisisting functions and/or to implement new functions onto tablet mobile device framework like IOS and Android.