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infrastructure, one would have thought that high performance computer clusters (at a single location) are somewhat outdated (or only for niche markets).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

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

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 ;-!

Why yet another eco system?

• A growing market! With sufficient size! BTW: There is more people with mobile phones (5.2 Billion) than with tooth brushes (4.2 Bio). And the revenue made simply by selling apps is 2.2 Bio. US$ (2010).
• To distinguish oneself from the other competitors.
• To know what people want and use!
• In the longer term, there will be more than Bada supported by Samsung

Some really good links

• Mary Meeker (at Morgan Stanley) on mobile Internet trends
• The Samsung Bada developer platform developer.bada.com
• 193 videos on a YouTube Bada channel (how to use the compass in the Bada platform, etc.)
• Tomi Ahonen Main Trends in the Telecommunications Market

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.

Technically, this is realised with a time of flight camera which recognises movements of people (standing in front of a shopping window) and interpreting them intelligently.

Info in German on the project: see HTL project page

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.

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.

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).

The open keynote was by Prof. Christiane Floyd.

Good overview, very much from an information systems’ perspective (and not so much from a computer science point of view. Anyway, well done …