… together with nic.at (Austria’s Internet Registry), we organised the so-called 4th “IT-Businesstalk“. Alex Mayerhofer (nic.at) gave an excellent presentation on how standards on the Internet emerge. I would like to share slide No. 2 of his presentation (the presentation can be found at http://www.it-businesstalk.at/fileadmin/www.it-businesstalk.at/praesentationen/event4/Alex-MayrhoferIETF_Nicat.pdf).
Here is slide No. 2:
Would you guess what this map represents?
- Broadband availability?
- Percentage of the population connected to the Internet?
- Standards for plugs?
It is amazing, the correct answer is (3): it is standards for plugs!
The image and further information is available at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Länderübersicht_Steckertypen,_Netzspannungen_und_-frequenzen.
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Here, there is map on voltage: it is already amazingly coloured, i.e. “non-interoperable”.
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And one on plugs: and that one is pretty coloured (15 different plugs sizes/formats)! |
And in Software Engineering we often argue that hardware “is easy” and it is the software that’s the source for heterogeneity …
March 6th, 2010
admin
Trust Researchers is a declaration to the attention of the European Council of Ministers and the Parliament.
The background (text taken from the declaration at http://www.trust-researchers.eu/index.php?file=background.htm):
“Currently research is funded according to many input oriented indicators.
At present the financial regulation – the relevant legal funding framework – treats research in similar way as procurement processes for any goods.
This condition is unsatisfying for researchers, research organisations and the European Community as a whole. It hinders the development of ground-breaking results through ineffective research funding.
The funding of European research should be based on trust. Today European researchers face many red tape and cumbersome financial regulations. We are not against rules. Rules are important and accountability is essential. However, research has to be funded in recognition of the nature of research, thus, the financial regulation and associated rules have to be adapted to primarily output oriented objectives and to conditions creating a transparent justification of costs.
What we need is a change in philosophy! ”
Interestingly, Austria currently leads with respect to the number of signees: see the excerpt form the official web site (http://www.trust-researchers.eu/index.php?file=background.htm) as of today (March 2nd, 2010) on the left. The right figure displays the list of countries in descending order:
At present, 3767 people have signed (March 2nd, 2010).
March 2nd, 2010
admin
I happened to participate in a discussion organised by FFG (Andrea Höglinger and Sabine Herlitschka) on the evaluation of the European Framework Programmes. The (excellent) presentation was given by Peter Fisch (head of unit A3 Evaluation and monitoring of programmes in directorate Inter-institutional and legal matters – Framework programme). The powerpoints are available here (only the first slide is in German).
Interestingly, previous framework programmes (i.e., before FP7) were characterised by “ad hoc” evaluations, i.e., did not really have a systematic monitoring. Then, some impressive figures about the size were presented:
- 25.000 proposals (!) have been received for the years 2007 and 2008 with 160.000 applicants
- 5.500 proposals where retained, 35.000 participants
- SME participation is down to 15.5% (side issue here: in FP7 SME participation is measured after the financial viability check. As a consequence SME participation rate went down one third compared to previous evaluations where SME participation has been measured on the basis of the data provided by participants themselves when submitting the proposal).
FP7 is a mass business!
Some key findings were presented concerning the ex-post evaluation of FP6 (report of Feb. 2009 available). The core message: the achievements overall had a positive balance (i.e., network building was good, project results were good, etc.), the design of FP6 was “mixed” and finally, in the implementation there was “room for improvement”. Recommendations (amongst others): more bottom-up funding, administrative overhaul, etc.
For FP8 this means that there could be new lines of action (Grand challenges = top down, and Great Ideas = bottom up), a significantly higher budget as well as European excellence through global collaboration and competition.
The following figure (taken from the presentation) shows that the IST programme is the only part with a significant role for industry (the blue bubbles):
The following slide shows the central actors: it’s mostly universities, industry is only at the bottom of the list (Telefonica and France Telecom, both big players):
There is many more other interesting figures and data in the presentation!
Finally, the interim evaluation of FP7 will be available by Oct. 2010.
To me, FP6 (at least) was not for industry but mainly for universities and RTOs. In general, networks effects, publications, etc. seem to be well achieved. So let’s hope (and contribute) for a less-administrative and more industry-oriented FP8 (perhaps also with closer links between research programme and innovation-related activities)!
January 18th, 2010
admin
Together with Markus Lassnig (head of e-motion competence centre for ICT in the tourism- and leisure-industries) we edited an HMD special issue on eTourism.
„Experience Economy“ is a term to describe a phenomenon in our society, which describes that the experience itself is being made a product. Tourism is one of the branches that takes the role of the dream factory. And because tourism is information intensive it makes heavy use of information and communication technologies.
This special issue has two types of contributions
- on the one hand, we have socio-economic papers that explain the cultural and societal backgrounds and provide facts and figures;
- on the other hand, we have technical contributions which are showcases of knowledge-based systems that explain the state-of-the-art of advanced IS systems.
See http://hmd.dpunkt.de/270/ for further details.
December 21st, 2009
admin
The image above shows the average yearly funding in Mrd. EUR (2.5 for FP5, 3.4 for FP6 and 7 for FP7 sofar) vs. number of projects funded.
There is a short, well written article in research eu, issue June 2009 (unfortunately it is not yet available online at http://ec.europa.eu/research/research-eu/index_de.html). The article is about the development of the European Framework Programms, it is written by Didier Buysse.
The main findings are:
- Over the years, the average annual funding was steadily increased. In FP5 (1998-2002) we talk about 2.5 Mrd. EUR per year, in FP6 (2002-2006) 3.4 Mrd. EUR and in FP7 (2007-2013) sofar 5.7 Mrd. EUR.
- At the same time the competition has heavily increased, we are now talking acceptance rates of about 20-25% across the whole programme (depending on the subject this may even be lower, e.g. ICT in Austria on average has an acceptance rate of 17% in FP7).
- The ambition of the Commission in FP6 and FP7 is to “think big”, i.e., have most of the money being spent in a few projects (this is what integrated projects do/should be doing; actually they cover about for instance 40% of the FP6 budget); also networks of excellence aim at clustering European research expertise to get higher critical masses; at the same time the smaller initiatives should not be neglected.
- The highest competition is in the human mobility programme (less than 20% on average)
- The biggest group amongst the players (about 50000) are the universities and public research labs (they build 2/3 of all participating parties).
- Public-private partnership is strengthened in FP7 with the Joint-technology-initiatives
On a personal note I believe that European research programmes (and the participation therein) are an established method/tool in doing (excellent) applied research. On the negative side, competition on the hand but also auditing on the other hand have increased dramatically, which overall makes the European research programmes less attractive than the used to be. Note on that: the issue in increased competition ist not the competition as such: this is a “healthy” element to ensure quality. However, if the acceptance rates go under 10% the gambling factor simply is too high.
September 13th, 2009
admin
This days, the advanced networking centre (ANC) of Salzburg Research is organising a Workshop on “SECIT – Security IT”. This is a joint undertaking with UPT Timisoara, Rumania.
Our main idea is to join forces concerning evacuation scenarios: UPT for instance, offers know-how in the domain of object recognition, i.e., they can count the number of people by anlysing videos; companies such as Flexit, are looking for software (and know-how) that helps them developing smart evacuation systems; Salzburg Research/ANC offers know-how by developing models that combine object recognition techniques and evacuation needs and thus helps in linking knowledge from basic research with applied research. The following figure is adapted from a slide from TNO and tries to symbolise these relationships:
Also, I learned that data fusion is the technique that combines data from multiple sources in order to obtain satisfying results. Often, pure object recognition techniques are not sufficient, hence, one needs to combine various data sources (with varying degrees of trust and reliability).
August 25th, 2009
admin
… with Prof. Sissi Closs as Keynote Speaker.
She started her carrier by studying computer science at the University of Munich. Interesting to see that she came to research because she wanted to do dance courses and Siemens Munich was the only employer that offered flexible working hours at that time (that was in the seventies), so that she could do her dance courses (and work part-time). IMHO an excellent example how flexible working hours are part of a good habitat for acquiring young researchers!
She founded “COMET-Computer” which focuses on technical documentation (not just the technical part, but of course this domain is very technology centric). Naturally, COMET offers flexible working hours.
She argues for the necessity of role models to attract other female students/researchers/etc. And, of course, it is important that women are equally represented on the management (board) level.
News coverage (in German) is available at http://www.salzburg.gv.at/lkorr-meldung?nachrid=43449. And, most important: the ditact summer school is online at http://www.ditact.ac.at/.
August 24th, 2009
admin
Viviane Reading presented “Investing in a digital recovery: ICT and innovation driving growth“. A well written statement!
What I take from that
- Based on an OECD analysis, two sectors merit investment (for future prospects): “green, low carbon economy” and the “networked economy”
- Why is ICT important for recovery? Because there is a direct link between investment in IT and economic performance; because IT is a key driver for efficiency (and effectiveness)
- The PP Partnerships will be cross-thematic involving five FP7 themes (energy, environment, nmp, transport and ICT)
- Three PPPs will be directly supported by ICT: factories of the future; energy-efficient buildings; and green cars
- Finally: there is a definition of “Future Internet”: the Future Internet will feature almost unlimited bandwidth capacity, wireless access everywhere, potentially trillions of devices interconnected, integrated security and trust for all parties, and adaptive and personalised services and tools. It will open the door to a wide range of new business opportunities and will help us address even better our key societal challenges.
Overall: good to see that Europe (and its politicians) are investing heavily in ICT!
August 18th, 2009
admin
This summer we are hosting a total of 9 students doing internships. The programme is supported by the ministries bmvit and bmukk and is called “generation innovation“.
The themes the students covered includes
- Usability
- Tag Clouds
- Flash Overlays
- geotaging on the iPhone
- Open Street Map Clients
- Rich-Client-Applications
We got some very good feedback by the students. Firstly, the got a completely different view of research and IT; they were exposed to a way of working with a high degree of self-responsibility (which was appreciated very much); and finally, they had fun.
Personally, I believe that the way of opening up research labs to young people means that they get to know what research in practise is; and the researchers themselves are confronted with new (and fresh) ideas and this is of benefit to both sides.
There is a German video available at Salzburg.com.
August 5th, 2009
admin
I happened to be external examiner of Tobi Bürger’s viva entitled “A Conceptual Model for Intelligent Content for the Semantic Web” (with Dieter Fensel as 1st supervisor; University of Innsbruck/STI2). And today Tobias successfully passed his viva. Congratulations!
IMHO opinion this work is interesting as it offers
- a concise definition of the user requirements
- a conceptual model (the RICO model – reuseable intelligent content model) and finally,
- a prototypical implementation in firefox
And, of course, as Tobias has been with Salzburg Research for several years (until summer 2008), we are somewhat proud of his work as well 
Here’s the abstract:
Retrieving multimedia remains a challenge on the Web of the 21st century. This is due,
among other things, to the inherent limitations of automatic multimedia understanding,
limitations which equally apply to the Web 2.0 or its semantic counterpart. Describing
multimedia resources in the form of metadata is thus often seen as the only viable way to
enable ecient multimedia retrieval. Assuming the availability of metadata descriptions,
which is supported by technological developments associated to the user-generated Web,
eectively indexing multimedia requires mediating among the wide range of metadata
schemes and formats presently used to annotate such resources. Semantic technologies
have been identied as a potential solution for this large-scale interoperability problem.
The aim of this thesis is to propose a single point of access for the retrieval of
multimedia content on the Web in order to foster Web-scale content reusability. We
contribute a model for Intelligent Content which can become an integral part of the socalled
Semantic Web. In this next generation of the Web, content is envisioned to have
well-dened meaning, enabling machines to automatically determine what the content
is about, under which circumstances it can be used, and what one needs to oblige to
consume it.
Our rst goal is to investigate media reuse from an end user perspective. We identify
it as a problem in multimedia retrieval, and analyze characteristics and forms of reuse of
multimedia content, barriers and relevant content properties. We analyze the retrieval
behavior of media professionals, and, most notably the properties which they use to
search for, and assess the relevance of media objects. Based on the result of this analysis,
we propose a conceptual model dimensioning reuse of media objects. The model is
validated in an end-user survey.
Our second goal is to introduce a conceptual model and a set of ontologies to mark up
multimedia content embedded inWeb pages and mechanisms to deploy such descriptions
on the Semantic Web. Starting from typical scenarios in which multimedia content is
published on the Web, and on insights gained from existing literature, the thesis species
a set of requirements which a model for the semantic description of multimedia content
should fulll. The proposed model, which is called RICO (\Reusable Intelligent Content
Objects”), realizes a multimedia resource-centric view of HTML pages. Its overall strategy
is to exploit existing descriptions in Web pages and native formats, and to attach
further semantic descriptions to the content. The model is implemented using a set of
Semantic Web ontologies which resort to existing standards such as MPEG-21 Digital
Items, Dublin Core, FOAF, Annotea, or FRBR. The model is evaluated from dierent
perspectives: Its quality is assessed using quality metrics for conceptual and reference
models. Its coverage is measured using data analysis. Finally, its interoperability is
shown via the denition of mappings to established metadata formats such as XMP,
DIG35, and MPEG-7.
Our third goal is to propose methods to smoothly integrate descriptions adhering to
the RICO model and descriptions available in legacy formats into existing HTML pages.
The former is done by analyzing formalisms to integrate semantic descriptions in HTML
pages and by sketching a way how the descriptions can be deployed together with the
content being described. To achieve the latter, we propose ramm.x (“RDFa deployed
multimedia metadata”), a model which can integrate legacy descriptions into the Semantic
Web, and attach them to the content being described. The deployment methods are
prototypically implemented in a browser plug-in to demonstrate their implementability.
We conclude the thesis by sketching possible research directions for multimedia semantics
beyond the scope of our work.
June 12th, 2009
admin
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