Computational Culture

I was part of the SSSW’06. It was great. Why? Excellent and friendly atmosphere, inspiring students, tutors, speakers, directors! The SSSW was founded by Enrico Motta in 2003. Meanwhile Asun Gomez-Perez and John Domingue take care of the event which is part of the KnowledgeWeb Network of Excellence funded by the EU. Obivously the concept of a Summer School is a well-known instrument to heat up the next generation of Ph.D candidates in a scientific community. Away from daily business people meet like-minded experts in a social environment generating kind of a camp-atmosphere. Especially at SSSW the organizers did an excellent job to create an outstanding atmosphere. First of all, the summer school is limited to 50 people, this year the acceptance rate was about 50%. Second, the students have to prepare a poster showing-off their Ph.D projects. The posters have to be presented and the best ones receives a special award. Tutors and invited speakers give overview talks an theoretical details on the current state-of-the-art concerning Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web. Unfortunately I could not attend the entire week, therefore I had to check the materials of the other speakers at site. The selection was very well done. Jim Hendler gave the big big picture of the Semantic Web and its origins including some great reflections about what it was thought to be and were it ended up so far. Richard Benjamins had a focus on the technology transfer which is rarely found at such events but essential for the researchers to see what should or could happen with their future results. Guus Schreiber talked about multimedia and the semantic web which is one of the long-term topics having still many hard to crack topics. I was invited to give a little bit of an off-topic talk about the social aspects of the web and the implications for the semantic web research. Finally Enrico Motta gave a characterization and classification of prominent existing semantic web applications. Beside these invited talks the schedule was packed with the essential state-of-the-art topics in the area. During the last days the students have to work in teams on mini-projects to come up with interesting applications, bringing up research questions and to get a glimpse on how to work in international collaborative teams. Since the students come from all over the world (Europe, China, Korea, etc.) a lot of cultural and social issues have also been discussed. Having some beers together or hanging out at the swimming pool helped to get into contact and exchanging a multitude of opinons, experiences and hopes for the future. Conclusion: SSSW is a must if you are or supervise a semantic web Ph.D student in the early stages of her/his work!

PS: if you are interested: download my talk “Towards a Social Web?!”.pdf

I had recently the great opportunity to speak to different ISPs and telcos. They are looking for their mid-term future in a meanwhile very competitive marketplace. I generated a 17-page powerpoint-show to illustrate possibilities from a researcher’s point of view being dedicated to media, social networks and rocket science-like processing of audio+video. Since DFKI and its labs have a strong emphasis towards application-oriented research even a sketch for potential business models 2.0 is included. Ok, to be honest I refer to some really outstanding work of Alban Martin at this point, entitled “The Entertainment industry is cracked: Here is the patch.” Nevertheless these 17 pages are kind of a one-stop-all-inclusive overview of the research and according markets we aim at here at C4. Download the .pdf here and enjoy! …and comment!

VisualID is a very interesting research study. They used automatic generated icons for new created files in addition to the filename. The idea behind it is, that people can recognise forms and shapes more easy than filenames. At the first sight this approach might seem arbitrary and confusing, but if you work in a workspace, you will get a relationship to the symbols.

The FAQ says:

“A major principle underlying this work is that, while ‘meaningful’ icons would be ideal, people actually have little trouble learning to recognize arbitrary icons and their relationship to content. Learning and recognizing somewhat arbitrary appearance and associated information is something that is often done instantly and effortlessly in the real world, and learning icon appearance does not appear to be an exception to this phenomenon.”

[via infosthetics.com]