Siegfried Reich

ITS Project Award 2012

… and the winner is … Austria’s TOP-10 IT projects from HTLs:

I happened to be member of the jury of the ITS project award, initiated by Gerhard Jöchtl at FH Salzburg. The idea of the award is to motivate high-school students to engage in science and technical development and secondly, to demonstrate the high quality of these projects. The jury was composed of C. Amann-Winkler (IV), R. Hittmair (BCCS), S. Huber (ITG-Salzburg), P. Korczak (ITS Support Association) and myself (= S. Reich, Salzburg Research).

The Nominees were

• HTL Braunau | Posture Recognizer for Physiotherapy: a pretty cool project using MS Kinect technology to implement a kind of “digital physiotherapeut”;
• HTL Dornbirn | WAKA Kennzahlen Analyse: a project on data warehousing and business intelligence using MS-technology;
• HTL Leonding | CrazyFingers: an early stage project on using various sensor technologies to interpret movements of hands/gestures;
• HTL Mistelbach | Android App über Hautkrankheiten: a seriously well done app for assisting people in interpreting skin diseases – what I liked here was the approach of using a Wizard with questions and answers for narrowing down the choices = diseases (BTW: there was also a learning mode for medicine students);
• HTL Mössingerstraße | Smart Globe: a project on promoting a new chip by Infineon technologies with an eye-catcher device;
• HTL Ottakring | RiffGrabber: a quite clever software for real-time analyzing of guitar riffs. Cool stuff! Also very impressive suite of software tools (web, mobile, …);
• HTL Rennweg | EMPALOGIA – die soziale Plattform: a social web platform for community work/social engagement. See http://www.empalogia.org/: technically perhaps not the really new but truly well marketed.;
• HTL Saalfelden | Hotspot GPS: an innovative, very helpful app for the fire brigade: where is the nearest fire hydrant (it may be hidden behind an anti-noise barrier …)?
• HTL Salzburg | SoccerBoard: again, truly innovative and already in use at the Salzburg Soccer Association, this tool allows for football players to improve their passing;
• HTL Ybbs | Yes, we CanSat: a nicely engineered prototype for measuring local weather and climate data. Needs a rocket to be put up in orbit/space.

The winner is SmartGlobe, HTL Mössingerstraße, Carinthia. Congratulations!

Add comment June 5th, 2012

Some figures and realtime displays on the world’s population: we are 7 Billion people!

By the end of October 2011, the earth’s population was estimated to reach 7 Billion people. There were some amazing data and figures communicated with this – artificial – border that had been passed:

• per second, there is an increase by 2.5 people, that is 150 per minute, 9.000 per hour and 216 every day – the error-rate is apparently up to 5 %
• there is quite a number of countries/areas where there exists no official statistics. So areas are being flown over with airplanes and estimates are made; or, from the number of cattle, the number of people in a certain area is inferred.

And I came across two pretty nice live counters/tools:
One is a live counter available at http://www.umrechnung.org/weltbevoelkerung-aktuelle-momentane/weltbevoelkerungs-zaehler.htm:

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The other one is breathingearth.net:

and a truly impressive animation!

Add comment November 2nd, 2011

High Performance Computing in the Western Part of Austria

This week, the official opening of a high performance computing centre at the University of Linz took place. The machine is called Mach.

For many reasons, this is an interesting event.

• Firstly, with the cloud being a part of everyday computing infrastructure, one would have thought that high performance computer clusters (at a single location) are somewhat outdated (or only for niche markets). But given the fact that in many scientific disciplines computing power for simulating processes, analysing data, etc. are necessary, there is an increasing need of HPC power. Dieter Kranzlmüller reported that they could “sell” three times the computing power of the Leibnitz computer centre infrastructure in Munich.
• Secondly, three universities unite in order to make this happen: Linz and Innsbruck as key driver with Salzburg as associated player. It is not typical that universities unite!
• Thirdly, in a keynote by Eng Lim Goh (Senior VP Engineering, CTO – SGI), I learned that the Altix UV 1 sells well to scientists as it basically behaves like a “normal” Unix system. Just with really a lot of memory and high performance. Why is this important? The reason is that many researchers – obviously – are experts in their respective fields but not necessarily in computer science and/or in formulating their research models in a parallel way, i.e., a way that is suitable for HPC architectures
• Fourthly, Eng Lim Goh reported that the increased density of integrated circuits makes high performance computers very heavy. So heavy in fact that standard buildings will in the near future not be able to accommodate HPCs!
• Fifthly, if you plan your next HPC investment, you should think about a partner that would be able to collect the enormous heat that is generated by the processors.

The official press release for Mach is available here.

Add comment October 19th, 2011

Working Group Alpbach on the “Digital City of Tomorrow”

Together with Michael Mürling, I organised a workshop on behalf of Forschung Austria at the Alpbach Technology Forum. It’s theme was “Digital Cities of Tomorrow“.

The workshop was motivated by the fact that we are living in the age of cities: estimations suggest that by the year 2050 over 70 % of the world’s population will be living in cities (BTW: in many countries in Europe we had the moment of urbanisation already in the 1950s). There are many open issues and research questions related to this development, from urban development, transportation and economic development to social services, healthcare, energy, public safety, education and more.

In general the participants (30 overall) agreed that overall the objectives towards smart cities are driven by factors such as sustainability, energy efficiency, high quality of life, safety & security, etc. and that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) will (only) serve as enabling technology. Amongst the services that ICT could offer several aspects were mentioned:

• visualization as a communication tool between different parties
• geographic information systems for handling spatio-temporal data
• semantic interoperability of the various data sources to allow a standardized processing
• open data policies enabling communities to create low-cost services
• real-time systems for managing and monitoring huge data volumes in a near real-time manner
• simulation and prediction to enable decisions by stakeholders in a timely manner
• as well as the possibility for new business models enabled by digitized processes.

At the same time the participants pointed out the need to address the vulnerability of connected services e.g. smart meters and to consider the privacy of customers and to take into account the threats post by decentralized autonomous systems.

As a conclusion there was a consensus that technology-only approaches towards smarter cities will not be sufficient to realize these cities. As a basis a holistic approach is needed, considering the different cultures, the willingness to experiment – especially at the level of decision makers -, the constraints in public funding and most prominently the interaction with the citizens (e.g. crowd intelligence, inclusion of local knowledge, open innovation, modern lifestyles of digital natives).

Further details at www.forschungaustria.ac.at

Add comment August 26th, 2011

2nd Workshop on HPC

The University of Salzburg, Dept. of Computer Science, organised the 2nd Austrian High Performance Computing Workshop (May 30-31, 2011). There were almost 60 people registered, mostly Austrian, but also including participants from Germany and the U.S.

I think that recent advances in computation enable new methodological approaches in many disciplines. Computer science is a tool for many other disciplines, e.g. physicists, astrologist, and many more. They all are provided with better problem solving capabilities. Exciting times!

And also: the more we establish procedures for simulation, the more we create a corpus of data and results of various methodologies approaches. Cool stuff.

And finally: In his keynote, Esmond G. NG, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory mentioned that GPU will have a great future. At least for the next five years ;-!

Add comment June 1st, 2011

Secure Business Austria

The K1 Centre “Secure Business Austria” (SBA) had a meeting of the scientific board and get-together this afternoon. SBA focuses on various aspects of security, including (1) governance, risk and compliance, (2) data security and privacy, (3) secure coding and code analysis and (4) hardware and network security.

I think the centre does extremely well in creating critical mass by clustering research institutes at TU-Vienna, Vienna economic University, University of Vienna, and TU-Graz.

The agenda of the public event can be found here.

Add comment May 16th, 2011

First Smarter Salzburg Circle

Together with IBM Salzburg, we are organising a series of events on the theme of making “Salzburg a smarter city”. The first circle took place on Friday, May 13, 2011, and it focused on innovations in traffic. We had around 35 senior experts from industry, research and the public sector. Here is the homepage of smart(er) Salzburg: http://www.smarter-salzburg.at/.

There is a strong cluster of companies in the region, we had many of them as contributors. For instance Salzburg AG, IBM, Audio Mobil, Skidata or Hale electronic. Additionally, the County of Salzburg and obviously we as Salzburg Research are committed to a smarter Salzburg as well.

Add comment May 15th, 2011

Salzburg Research: the first 10 years

It’s been 10 commemorable years for “Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft“. And we had a big celebration/party on Oct. 22nd, 2010. With young researchers, many politicians and intermediaries, researchers, customers, and lots of friends. More photos at http://fotos.salzburgresearch.at/v/2010_10Jahre/. The programme of the event, including information on our symposium on the future of RTOs (Research and Technology Organisations) in Europe at http://www.salzburgresearch.at/10jahre.

Thanks to all who have contributed in making Salzburg Research a success story!!! I am looking forward to Salzburg Research 2020!

P.S.: We have a new web-site: see   and the previous ones at web.archive.org …

12 – Dec 1998	11 – Nov 1999	9 – Oct 2000
27 – Nov 2001	29 – Nov 2002	2006 – 2010

1 comment October 22nd, 2010

What makes a good startup?

Dr. Manfred Reichl (see picture at picasaweb), Investor, Senior Adviser, Board Member and former director for Roland Berger Consulting in Austria, reported at an event organised by ITG Salzburg 2010 on the success factors of startups.

The remaining part of this entry is in German because it does not translate well

Add comment October 12th, 2010

Changes in Architecture and Participation in European Framework Programmes

From May 20-21 EARTO held its annual conference in Gothenborg. Amongst the many excellent presentations, secretary general Chris Hull addressed in his talk “the Grand Challenges: The Essential Contribution of Research and Technology Organisations (RTOs)”. The following shows a slide (presented also at other occasions) which I believe reflects in an excellent way the development of the European Framework Programme. Here it is (copyright Christopher John Hull):

The image expresses IMHO very well how the framework programmes changed – at least during the last 10 years – from a perspective of individual (and co-funded) projects, towards increasingly policy driven initiatives with the idea of making a bigger impact (by larger initiatives such as IPs or by including the member states with Article 169 initiatives, by joint programming, etc.).

I would like to add a second slide that shows involvement of some key Austrian RTOs (AIT, JR, SRFG) in the Framework Programme (the slide has been presented by Klaus Pseiner, FFG):

The slide shows the European participation (in red/orange) and the national participation (in green) of core Austrian RTOs (research and technology organisations). As can be seen from the slide, there is an increase in national participation (for various reasons) and a decrease – at least the last years – in participation in European programmes. One obvious reason for that is the increasing competition through a grown EU; also the year 2003 was an all-time high; there were many national programmes been set-up in Austria; etc. But after all, I would assume, that participation in European framework programmes simply has increased in complexity (not to mention administrative issues). BTW: I should add that Salzburg Research‘s participation in FPs has over the years been slightly increasing in absolute figures (1,04 Mio. in 2004 to 1,39 Mio. in 2009); however, we had a bigger growth in our other activities, which means that the relative portion of the framework programmes at Salzburg Research has declined to about 20% in 2009, which is still an excellent value, I believe.

I would assume that if this trend continuous, FP8 will be even more complex: grand challenges will need to be addressed, a closer cooperation between science and industry is requested, national initiatives will be synched, etc. How this fits to the overall wish of fewer administration, reporting, etc. is an open issue.

Amongst the wishes I have for FP8: one should introduce a reputation system. I.e., those organisations (or units thereof) who have a long track record should be able to earn brownie points for that.

Add comment May 29th, 2010