Posts filed under 'Method'
At ICWE 2010, Martin Gaedke organised a panel on “How to Successfully Teach Web Engineering?“. The panelists where Fabio Casati, Yogesh Deshpande and myself. See the following pictures of the panel:
More photos are available at http://icwe2010.webengineering.org/Conference/photos.aspx.
After a short introduction, we mainly discussed the following two questions: (1) if you would have a chance to study “Web Engineering” today, where would you do that? (2) If you were in a position to hire Web Engineers, where would you require your students from and what profile would you expect?
My personal message I take home from this panel: perhaps we are trying to much too educate “miracle-students”. From my experience at Salzburg Research I know that Web Engineering, i.e., the systematic development of Web applications, is a truly interdisciplinary task. But it is not the people/researchers as single individuals that are of interdisciplinary nature, it is the teams that are interdisciplinary: so I guess we must not aim at establishing curricula that teach everything from Web technologies, via Web science, design, information architecture, etc. That will be too much for one (single) curriculum and also, it will be unfocused and there students would have a hard time to get a job. What we need is a set of complimentary curricula, e.g., technical engineers, information architects, etc.
August 8th, 2010
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
I happened to read two articles on research development
- 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).
- 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 …).
November 2nd, 2008
 (c) www.hq.nasa.gov
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Thomas Fichtel, a colleague and PhD student at Salzburg Research, pointed me to the following slides/PDFs by Nasa on Technology Readiness Levels.
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May 22nd, 2008
www.arnetminer.org is a great (not to say incredible) site/tool implementing a researchers’ social web, see e.g. arnetminer.org with Siegfried Reich. I am impressed by the quality of the findings, the number (and quality of links) of people I have published papers with. Well done guys!
BTW: I came across arnetminer while looking at www.yasni.de, a site that I was pointed to by my colleague Sandra Schaffert. It also includes my Amazon wish list which is less desirable …
And: both, artminer.org and yasni.de are technically highly professional Web 2.0 sites with an almost desktop application like appearance.
May 10th, 2008
We had a follow-up discussion with a truly interesting and unique organisation: Bauhaus Luftfahrt, an association serving as a centre for creativity and whose purpose is to be both visionary and application-driven (with a long-term perspective).
The founding members include the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Infrastructure, Transport and Technology (STMWIVT), EADS, Liebherr-Aerospace, and MTU Aero Engines.
April 30th, 2008
Thomas Fichtel, researcher and PhD student at Salzburg Research, pointed me to an interesting site on technology readiness levels.
April 15th, 2008
A visit to the No. 1 technical university of Romania: UPT, the “Politehnica”, i.e., technical university of Timisoara (in Western Romania). Some 14000 students (with some 30%+ female students!!!), excellent staff and apparently 35% external funding (I have been told by Rector Prof. Robu). Very impressive figures, indeed.
October 28th, 2007
… are an “evergreen” type of discussion. Universities do not want to give away the right of awarding PhDs. On the other hand, there is a significant number of excellent master students at the level of the “polytechnic universities” (Fachhochschulen) that would well qualify for a PhD programme.
In Sweden, they created a work around with the so-called “Licenciate” (according to wikipedia, there are several other countries with such a mechanism). The licentiate is somewhat between master and PhD, so to say on the way towards the PhD.
In a XING user-group I came across a group that provides links to related sites, e.g. promotion-fh.de or thesis.de.
September 18th, 2007
… with Sabine Fleischmann, managing director of Sun Microsystems Austria, as keynote speaker. She mentioned Sun’s slogan of “The age of participation”, see e.g. Scott McNealy’s message or Jonathan Schwartz’s blog entry.
This is Ditact No. 5 – a success model.
August 20th, 2007
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