Siegfried Reich

Posts filed under 'Method'

Journal of Universal Rejection

… haven’t tried to publish there, perhaps it is worthwhile giving it a try

In the store you get your own gear, see http://www.universalrejection.org/

Add comment October 12th, 2012

High Performance Computing in the Western Part of Austria

mach computer linz
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infrastructure, one would have thought that high performance computer clusters (at a single location) are somewhat outdated (or only for niche markets).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

A dispute in Information Systems Research – Wirtschaftsinformatik

Memorandum gestaltungsorientierte Wirtschaftsinformatik

There is a scientific argument – one might even say “dispute” – in the Information Systems Research Community (Wirtschaftsinformatik in German). The argumentation is driven by the fact that the European (mainly German and Scandinavian) tradition of Information Systems Research argue that IT-systems need to provide a benefit for the users. The American argument – mostly driven by American business schools – is geared more towards the scientifically based description of how IT-systems work and what properties they have (following a behaviouristic approach). One might say that this is targeted towards existing (historic) systems and not towards new, innovative solutions.

The issue from a researchers’ perspective is that – as in most other domains – the leading international journals are American and as they follow the behaviouristic approach it is difficult for European researchers to get their papers accepted. And to pursue a successful academic career it needs papers …

This issue is addressed in a “Memorandum zur gestaltungsorientierten Wirtschaftsinformatik” published by Hubert Österle, Jörg Becker, Ulrich Frank, Thomas Hess, Dimitris Karagiannis, Helmut Krcmar, Peter Loos, Peter Mertens, Andreas Oberweis, Elmar J. Sinz and signed by many others. You can find it at http://www.dke.at/fileadmin/DKEHP/Repository/Memorandum__GWI_2010-03-08.pdf.

In their memorandum, the authors argue for the following phases/activities in Information Systems Research:

Analysis: problem description, state of the art, research plan, selection of those factors that are relevant for the problem. Polls, surveys, case studies, interviews, etc. are the methods be used
Conceptual design: construction of the artefacts folowing established methods, etc.
Building prototypes, demonstrators, etc.
Evaluation: checking whether the artefacts meet the objectives, experiments, simulation, field experiments, etc.
Diffusion: dissemination of results, papers, course books, lectures, demos, spin-offs, etc.

There are also some excellent comments on the Memorandum by Henning Kagermann, Klaus Straub and Martin Spann. See Zeitschrift für betriebswirtschaftliche Forschung http://www.fachverlag.de/zfbf/index_19531.htm as well as http://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/Publikationen/69397.

Well worth reading!

Add comment November 5th, 2010

Panel on Web Engineering

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.

Add comment August 8th, 2010

HMD special issue on eTourism

image of HMD special issue on eTourism 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.

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.

Add comment December 21st, 2009

Research Policies and the speed of impact

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 …).

Add comment November 2nd, 2008

Technology Readiness Levels

Thomas Fichtel, a colleague and PhD student at Salzburg Research, pointed me to the following slides/PDFs by Nasa on Technology Readiness Levels.

TRL Chart http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/codeq/trl/trlchrt.pdf
TRL White Paper http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/codeq/trl/trl.pdf
RND Degree of Difficulty White Paper http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/codeq/trl/r&d3.pdf

Add comment May 22nd, 2008

Researchers’ Social Web

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.

Add comment May 10th, 2008

Bauhaus Luftfahrt

Bauhaus Luftfahrt Logo 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).