In August and September 2016, the MICO team of the University Passau was visited by Prof. Alain April, who is full professor of Software Engineering at the Université du Québec Engineering Faculty ETS. Prof. Alain is operating in various up-to-date research areas like Big Data and Data Science, Healthcare and Genomics, Business Process Management, Open Source and Digital Libraries, Construction Industry, Software Maintenance Process Improvement, and Software Quality Assurance. In those areas, he is one of the researchers in Canada. Next to supervising students in the acquisition of academic degrees, he is also co-editor and publisher of books in the fields of Software Engineering and Software Quality Assurance.

Alain April, Full Professor – Department of Software and IT Engineering

One of his newest projects is settled in the fields of economics. The idea is to design a financial sentiment analysis process in order to predict stock market changes before they happen. In the course of the specification of the technology stack, Prof. April stumbled upon the MICO platform, which, with its linked data facilities and plugin functionality for different analytical extractors, was deemed to be a good setup for the economical experiments.

The common scientific discussions showed interesting topics for both sides. The MICO platform is applied to a yet unplanned scenario of being able to process streaming / stream-like data. While receiving a steady stream, it was necessary to analyse the data along the way, which can be done by variously configured extractors. Recommending strategies and applied behaviours can also be generated and proposed by the platform.

Extending the platform with a scenario like this could open it for another field of application, and we are very looking forward to first results!