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.
This summer we are hosting a total of 9 students doing internships. The programme is supported by the ministries bmvit and bmukk and is called “generation innovation“.
The themes the students covered includes
Usability
Tag Clouds
Flash Overlays
geotaging on the iPhone
Open Street Map Clients
Rich-Client-Applications
We got some very good feedback by the students. Firstly, the got a completely different view of research and IT; they were exposed to a way of working with a high degree of self-responsibility (which was appreciated very much); and finally, they had fun.
Personally, I believe that the way of opening up research labs to young people means that they get to know what research in practise is; and the researchers themselves are confronted with new (and fresh) ideas and this is of benefit to both sides.
There is a German video available at Salzburg.com.
Today, in a big event at the University of Linz, 326 people celebrated the fact, that 40 years ago at the University of Linz the first study course in “Informatik” (computer science) was introduced.
Johann Eder from the Alpe Adria University in Klagenfurt presented one of two keynote talks. The theme was on the “Great Challenges of computer science”. He selected some studies, e.g. the U.K. study, the ISTAG-Challenges (a nice PPT can be found here) and others. He reflected these with Austrian’s strengths (see Austria’s ICT-strategy).
… an interesting tool that allows a visual comparison of the coverage of various maps, e.g. google maps vs. open streetmap (OSM). Based on people’s enthusiasm, in many (local) places the OSM coverage is much deeper/exacter. However, with respect to quality necessary for routing and navigation applications, OSM in its current status will not be sufficient.
Comparing google maps (left) and open streetmap (right)
it points at Techno-Z, home of Salzburg Research. One can see that buildings, local paths, etc. are covered much better in OSM than in google maps. Still, this is what we as human users interpret; software/machine readability can be – and is! – quite different.
ISO 9001:2000 is an international standard that has its origins in assessing suppliers for technical systems. Salzburg Research today successfully passed the audit (by TÜV Österreich).
I believe that the following three main points argue for a quality management system:
With a QM-System you define rules about processes and interactions; also, these rules are the same throughout the organisation
Knowledge is embedded within an organisation (we all know that this is only possible to a limited degree, but anyway)
Finally, it is a documentation to the outside world (both customers as well as owner) that Salzburg Research is standing for quality
On the negative side there is – obviously – some overhead in necessary documentation and also, you may loose some degrees of freedom/individuality.
… 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.
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
Peer-to-Peer Networking
Embedded Software-intensive Systems
Security and Safety / Privacy / Self-Defending
Semantic Technologies
Knowledge Management
Intelligent Software-Agents
Service Grids in the Internet of Services
Intelligent Resource Management
Self-Managed Systems
e-Processes
Internet of Things
Mobility / Networked Vehicles
Ambient Assisted Living
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:
He really believes in sharing vs. ownership of knowledge (sharing is power vs. knowledge is power)
He argued that there was a shift from “know-how” to “know-how knows how”
and he believes that IT-support for processes will be less important. Which is probably the only thing in his talk that I would agree with.
BTW: Salzburg Research has a strong relationship wih Sun Microsystems. We hosted a SunTREC, an AAJC, got awarded a Sun Center of Excellence for map-based online participation and we are in the process of establishing a follow-up agreement for a CoE for a “Mobility Lab – A Lab on Engineering of Location-based Systems”.
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.
Today we celebrated the fifth anniversary of