Posts filed under 'research'
… from a talk by Richard Gutjahr (see http://gutjahr.biz) held quite a while ago at the 9th Medientag, Salzburg. He argued that many broadcast organisations think they have understood that – in contrast to earlier days – there now is a backchannel from their customers (via interactive TV-boxes, for instance). In the animated figure below, this would be the difference between (1) and (2).
However, in reality the users interact much more between themselves (via social media such as twitter, facebook, etc.) and they do not need the link to the broadcasters (any more). See step (3) in the figure below. Hence, the broadcasters are somewhat out of the game.
Here is the animated figure I drew from the presentation by Gutjahr:
February 22nd, 2013
Published today (Aug. 24, 2011): Andreas Meier and myself edited an HMD issue on “Communitys im Web” (in German).
It includes an objection by Matias Roskos who critically comments on crowdsourcing and the contribution by “others” (where we all benefit from).
And: besides technical and research papers it also addresses the issue of the knowledge society and how we can deal with relevant issues such as privacy, etc. IMHO the issue of a knowledge policy is a crucial one: we need to define rules, principles, guidelines, legislation, infrastructure, etc. for dealing with knowledge.
Some pointers
August 23rd, 2011
Yet another booklet on “mega trends 2020+” has been published. This one is by Roland Berger Strategy Consultants and it describes 7 mega trends (1. changing demographics; 2. globalization and future markets; 3. scarcity of resources; 4. the challenge of climate change; 5. dynamic technology and innovation; 6. global knowledge society; 7. sharing global responsibility) and 21 subtrends (too many to name them explicitly here).
What I personally like about this publication: it is well argued which methodology they use and how they derive the trends; they refer to urbanisation (on the global level – here in Europe we are mostly urbanised since the 1950s) – this is in line with many other scenarios, e.g. also Matthias Horx; also, they explicitly name the “war for talent” as an issue; and furthermore, there is an argumentation which corporate actions are to be taken to address the individual trends.
But still: it is just another (mega) trend publication. So, if you need other arguments for your lecture, for arguing specific business cases, your personal scenarios, etc. have a look for instance at
I am sure your there is mega trend or at least subtrend that fits your purposes …
August 23rd, 2011
Some guys, mainly from Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, founded the Journal of unsolved questions.
What I like about it: they also except research papers that describe research that has “failed”, i.e., did not (yet) lead to the results expected. I think we need more of this! Why? Because most (all?) of the research projects we do are doomed to success. But how can that be, given the fact that all research activities include risk and that risk is typically taken over by the public. We call that “funding” and sometimes we receive 75 % funding (see for instance the current European Framework Programme). Consequently, a certain percentage of research projects would need to fail – if research were so perfectly calculable, one could go to the next bank office and ask one’s bank of choice to provide the money (at least for applied research that would be the case).
I am not arguing for inferior project management. This has to be top/professional! But the research activities as such are risky and sometimes risk factors will apply. We – as a research community and also the funding agencies – need to be more honest. So: let your research project fail!
August 11th, 2011
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 ;-!
June 1st, 2011
Excellent talk by Manfred Bortenschlager (Samsung mobile research, London and “ex” Salzburg Research) on Samsung Bada – an ecosystem for mobile apps (the talk was given this afternoon at the ICT forum of FHSalzburg).
Why yet another eco system?
Some really good links
May 19th, 2011
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.
May 16th, 2011
On behalf of Austria’s ministry of science and research, Technopolis has conducted a study on the impact of EU research initiatives. Accompanying text and the study itself are available on the ERA portal. The main goal of the study was to provide recommendations on the quality and relevance of support services (with respect to FP8).
Some main findings of the study:
- the main motivation for participation in FP7 is money. Researchers participate despite the complexity of the programme, administrative hurdles and low acceptance rates because there are (almost) no alternatives for international research. And there was a trend towards professionalisation (due to the increasing competition).
- FP7 projects support network building and reputation, they also improve know-how and technical skills. (But) radical innovations cannot be expected.
- for universities, the framework programmes are an important platform for supporting young academics
- with respect to additionality, FFG-EIP (European and International Programmes) should focus on newcomers in the “market”
These findings are not completely new – still they are evidence of what one often feels and thinks (anyway). So there is still value in it
March 17th, 2011
On voxeu.org I came across this interesting article by Jeremia Dittmar on the growth of cities its relationship with the development of the printed press. The argument basically is: those cities that adopted the printing press had higher growth rates, i.e., a faster growth in population and subsequently a better economic development.
For the current (mega-)trend towards cities (in the 21st century – by 2050 70 % of the world’s population will be living in cities), this could mean that information and communication technology (so to say: the Internet as the successor of the printing press) is the basis for future prosperity. But then: we also now that a creative milieu, the youth of the population, openness towards immigrants/and or new ideas are part of future city development.
The Diffusion of the Movable Type Printing Press in Europe, 1450 – 1500, by Jeremia Dittmar, available on voxeu.org:
Some interesting quotes in the article by Jeremia Dittmar:
- The figure above gives an overview of the adoption of the printing press. Interestingly, the U.K. is sparsely populated, also, it seems that northern Italy is a real hotspot in 1500 (besides the Netherlands).
- the growth argument in the article says, that those cities that adopted the printing press, had an advantage in growth of the population – against the other cities – of 21 points (1500 – 1600).
- the reason for this could be that the diffusion was still difficult (the technology was almost kept proprietary for over a century, books were heavy) and thus the geographic coverage was limited. This in combination with positive spillovers (creative, intelligent, young people were attracted) finally led to growth. More concrete, the availability of books on arithmetic basics was key to trading countries and regions such as Portugal, northern Italy, etc. (in order to calculate exchange rates, profit shares, interest rates, etc.).
February 23rd, 2011
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Karl Rehrl and myself have edited an issue in HMD – Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik on Geoweb.
So what is this issue about? Increasingly, we are using the Web to answer questions about the “where”: where is the nearest pub? And what’s the shortest path to it? What activities can I do at my holiday location? These and many other location-based issues are addressed by state-of-the-art Web applications. And this special issue of HMD tells you how to engineer Geoweb applications.
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January 31st, 2011
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