Siegfried Reich

FYI: Five Innovations that will change our live in five years

… is IMHO a pretty cool initiative by IBM.

Here we go:

• Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows
• You will have a crystal ball for your health
• You will talk to the Web . . . and the Web will talk back
• You will have your own digital shopping assistants
• Forgetting will become a distant memory

Add comment November 27th, 2008

Sun Center of Excellence awarded

We have been awarded a Sun Center of Excellence: “Mobility Lab – A Lab on Engineering of Location-based Systems”. Well done to Manfred Bortenschlager.

Salzburg Research has a strong relationship wih Sun Microsystems. We hosted a SunTREC, an AAJC – Academic Authorized Java Campus, got awarded a Sun Center of Excellence for map-based online participation.

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1 comment November 22nd, 2008

AHORN 2008

… The sixth conference on alpine space, orientation and navigation took place November 20-21, 2008, in Salzburg. FFG (Dr. Klaffenböck) and Salzburg Research were the organisers. Some 60 people attended the event.

The program can be found here.

Add comment November 21st, 2008

The Future Internet

This afternoon, we had a discussion initiated by the Salzburg Global Seminar/Institute for Strategic Dialogue on the future of the Internet.

One of the issues is to define the scope of “future”, i.e., are we talking 10 years, 20 years, etc.? IMHO I believe that for applied research already 5 years is a pretty long period.

Anyway, there is a nice publication (in German only) by the Feldafinger-Kreis: “Trends, Technologies and Applications”. They argue for the following trends

1. Peer-to-Peer Networking
2. Embedded Software-intensive Systems
3. Security and Safety / Privacy / Self-Defending
4. Semantic Technologies
5. Knowledge Management
6. Intelligent Software-Agents
7. Service Grids in the Internet of Services
8. Intelligent Resource Management
9. Self-Managed Systems
10. e-Processes
11. Internet of Things
12. Mobility / Networked Vehicles
13. Ambient Assisted Living
14. Human-Computer Interaction

As far as our own work is concerned, I think that the following items are of particular interest to our research

• the Internet of things (we were talking about all-Ip building infrastructure)
• ambient assistance
• realtime geography/mobile systems
• semantic technologies

Also, in March 2008 the European Commission hosted an event in Slovenia on the Future Internet, see the following URL http://www.fi-bled.eu/ and a short video:

Add comment November 16th, 2008

Lange Nacht der Forschung – Researchers’ Night 2008

Beginning with sunset (16:39) and lasting until midnight, the researchers’ night 2008 took place, also at Salzburg Research. All over Austria some 240.000 people participated (Der Standard, Salzburger Nachrichten, Landeskorrespondenz).

At Salzburg Research we had an immense amount of people coming to see some applications of our research work (tagIT – a Geo-tagging application; tourguide – a project about pedestrian navigation; a traffic control centre; and finally, a project showing the use of sensors using SunSPOTs). The response was truly positive!

Most amazing to me was that even at 11:30pm we had people coming and wanting to see our demos. We do not expect such a huge interest (overall there were some 300+ unique visitors).

Pictures are available here:

• Lange Nacht der Forschung
• Salzburg Research

2 comments November 9th, 2008

Research Policies and the speed of impact

I happened to read two articles on research development

1. One was in “Financial Times Deutschland” (FTD) on “Research in Austria” (Oct. 21, 2008 – also available as http://www.ftd.de/forschung_bildung/forschung/:Forschung-in-%D6sterreich-Jeder-freie-Cent-flie%DFt-in-die-Labore/435388.html?nv=cd-rss900).
2. The other one was in “research eu” (No. 56, June 2008) on the “Finnish model tops the ranking”.

The first article argues that Austria has substantially intensified its research activities and has come from an innovation follower to the position of an innovation leader. The research quote was increased form 1,7 % (in 1997) to 2,63 % in 2008. The increase has been achieved by more spending from the public as well as from industry (fostered by tax incentives and programmes).

The second article argues in a similar fashion about Finland (albeit with a longer historical perspective).

The interesting thing to me is, that in a short period – we are only talking about 10+ years in both cases – a country can be reshaped concerning its FTI-policy. I think this is amazing, I would not have thought that this is possible in such short timeframes (even one might argue that for a sustainable impact including a change of culture this will take at least 25 years …).

Add comment November 2nd, 2008