Preparing, Sorting and Structuring Contents for Publications

As of now, I am still writing on my PhD proposal.
Also, the whole RECAA-Team tries to funnel its finding into outlines for possible publications in 2010.

The PhD proposal will be finished this year. It looks like we have 3 to 4 papers in the pipeline coming up. We'll see how that turns out.

If I don't come back here before next week - merry Christmas to everybody!

Writing Thesis Proposal and Thinking about Google Fellowships

I am at the throat of my dissertation thesis. Actually have been for quite some weeks. I definitely want to finish it before xmas. That is a must.

Also, Google came around the corner offering fellowships in my research area. To make sure you get this: this ain't a job offer, it's just an option to apply for the fellowship. It is not certain if it will be granted or not. Still, it might be interesting - especially for those following me in my research, sustaining the wave and pushing Requirements Engineering a little further. These guys want to. And they should be able to do so.
Yeah, there's long ways to go, but somebody has to get to the bottom of the pit.

The end of this week should be marked by a rough sketch of the thesis contents. The outline is done, some of the contents and illustrations are already created. But again, way to go.

Let's see what I can tell you next week.

Finished IJSC Journal Article

Just finished the camera ready version of the IJSC article. The paper is due Dec, 1st, but it never hurts to be done earlier than expected.
So look out for our first journal paper in 2010!

Working on Research Project Grants

We are currently planning and structuring our research for the next couple of years.
This will then be transformed into a research application at the DFG.

The structure and contents of the application are all set - now we are in the process of writing the application since we plan on expanding the research area by mid of next year.

This week, we'll finish the "Goal and Contributionts" section as well as the "Preliminary Results".
Next week should be the rest of "Related Work" and then we should be almost good to go.

Made the Switch to KIT

I finally made the switch to me@kit.edu.
That means sven.koerner@ ...

It took quite a while and somehow I had to mess with the whole administration to get it done.
The problem seems to have been that I am still a student (PhD student, to be precise) at university whereas I am also an employee of the university. Well, at least I have employee's rights.
Anyhow - the two accounts seem to be inherently distinct and this caused a lot of problems when I tried to get my paperwork straight.
That said, my quest for the kit.edu program is over. I made it and it took only 8 months (yes, it started in February with applying for the correct email address).

Background:
The University of Karlsruhe merged with other technology research projects in the area to form the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology - short: KIT (yes, the similar sounding to MIT is intended). More information to be found at www.kit.edu

Planning Research Future

I am finally back from the US.
We spent the last couple of days focusing on planning, scoping and scheduling the research plans for the next couple of months. The complete plan includes work for the research group up to the year 2012. These are all tasks which we have and want to address in the future.

We will present our plans next week and try to get the buy in from our professor and faculty. After that, we can focus on budget and middle-term planning. The short-term planning (that is until April 2010) is almost finished. This includes

• 2 master's thesis
• 1 possible master's thesis
• my dissertation proposal
• and finally: my dissertation

All our work will be published, structured and planned using Trac. You might want to take a look at it here.

Attending the ICSC2009 in Berkely, USA

At this very moment, I am about to hear the opening keynote for the 2nd day of the ICSC2009 in Berkeley.
I got here on Sunday night after my 3 weeks vacation touring all over the western US (that includes Napa, Yosemite, Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Phoenix) and visiting my family in San Diego.
I was fortunate enough to have my presentation at 10am the first day of the conference on Monday. It went wall and considering the fact that Dr. Fillmore and Dr. Scott attended my talk made it even more interesting. Some of the people who were in the audience let my know during the reception dinner that they really enjoyed my talk and that they were able to tell I was confident speaking in front of crowds. Well, that's when all the music studies and concerts I gave pay off ;-)

Today, I will listen to another parallel session about NLP - there were some interesting aspects so far which I might be able to consider for my work. I will have to thoroughly read the papers though.

That's it for now, I will keep you posted.

Planning Session for The Next 12 Months

After discussing a possible application for a project funding of our research, I sat down with the my colleagues to evaluate the situation.
The first step was to summon all possible achievements until today and to put these into the big picture. After approx. 2hours we had them sorted out.
The 2nd step then involved probing through ideas, visions, and hints we had so far. These then had to be included into the big picture to show what will be possible with our research in the long term.

As was to be expected, we extracted several tasks to check further research scopes and we will try to make this presentable by September, 20th.

From then on, we will try to write the application as well as focus the research on the big picture we just drew. This includes writing down my work for the purpose of finishing my PhD thesis.
Hopefully, this works out the way we planned it today.
But I have to say - it's a solid approach which makes a lot of sense.

I am off to San Francisco now - cya in a couple of weeks.

Voted for IEEE presidency

Yesterday I voted for the IEEE presidency.
This year, online voting was possible. For a IEEE member not living in the US, this makes a hell lot of more sense than sending snail-mail ballots back to the middle-west of the US of A.

The online system is not beautiful, but it worked like a charm. Congratulations to the providers of this service. It saved my quite some time.

Submitted IJSC 2009 Article for Review

I just finished the paper for the IJSC 2009 journal.
It comprises 25 pages about my work in the previous 12 months.
As soon as I know if this paper is accepted, I will post it here.

So this should be it for this year's publications. Maybe one more at the end of the year, we'll see.

Next I will have to prepare my presentation for the ICSC 2009 conference in San Francisco. I still have to decide whether I want to make it "Presentation Zen" style, or standard. Depends on the conference attendees. And these you never know before you show up on site.

IJSC 2009 Article in the Making

I just finished structuring the IJSC article which will be published in the special edition of this year's print.
I did receive an invitation to add some of my work after submitting another paper to the ICSC 2009 conference.

The paper for the journal must not be longer than 25 pages which means we will be able to add some information compared to prior papers for conferences, but will not be able to holistically describe our approach. Well, that's what publishing is all about: Put it in a nutshell.

The deadline is Wednesday, so not much slack there this weekend. But hey, that's the way we wanted it.

Sunny greetings - weather is perfect here.

Officially an IEEE member now

This is actually the first time I am back at my university office since the SEKE conference in Boston.
I am now officially an IEEE member with an IEEE ID. Nice.

For the time being, it saved my university approx. $200 when registering for the ICSC2009. That benefit is not directly for me, but hey - it's for the good of the world (or so I keep telling me).

ICSC 2009 Camera Ready Submitted

It was not as easy as expected (had to follow all the authors rules and then pdfXpress check would not work), but I finally managed to submit our camera ready file to ICSC.
It passed the IEEEXplore test and is therefore valid and approved for printing.

The paper can be viewed here.

Have fun with it.

SEKE 2009 Paper and Presentation for Download

Hi Folks,

here is my paper for download.

And for those of you who already requested it, here are the slides I used for the presentation.
This slide-deck actually includes 2 more slides which I was not able to show during the presentation. But who knew that the projector was going to die on me after 10 minutes? Exactly: nobody.

Have fun with it and leave me a comment what you thought about it.

FYI: Next step is camera ready version for ICSC 2009. Should be finished this weekend.

Attending the SEKE 2009 in Boston

I am at the SEKE 2009 in Boston at this very moment.
I have already seen astonishing presentations, i.e. in a good and a bad way.

• There was a presentation where a girl literally read her slides aloud while watching the screen not even looking at the audience once. I thought this was just a joke about powerpoint madness. Reality can be tough.
• There was a very nice presentation which included audience interaction with the speaker as well as very easy to grasp examples with hands on experience. The guy used balls which he juggled during his presentation. Pretty good show and his points came across easily. I still remember all the aspects he noted during his presentation. Well, that was really good.

My talk will be tomorrow morning o920am (ET).
Tonight is the banquett dinner which includes a city bus tour and a visit at Harvard. I am looking forward to that.

Have a good week and I'll let you know how the presentation went.

IEEE ICSC - We're Coming!

We got word today that another of our papers was accepted.
The conference is the IEEE ICSC 2009 conference in Berkeley, CA.

We are happy that we achieved the acknowledgment for the huge effort we made to write this paper. The "reading was excellent" (that's what the reviewers said) and we made it though the acceptance rate was below 30%.
This really makes my day.

This weeks plans still are to finalize the presentation for the SEKE 2009 conference and then work on the camera ready file of the ICSC paper.

I'll keep you updated.

Giving the Presentation a Garr Reynolds Style

Some of you might have read the book "Presentation Zen" by Garr Reynolds or maybe follow his blog.
I am changing my plain standard presentation (as I laid it out last week) into a Garr-style presentation. I expect it to fulfill a couple of serious jobs for me while I present one year's work in about 25 minutes. These jobs are:

• get the attention of the audience though they might already be exhausted from the 2 days prior conference presentations they have seen
• transport my message, i.e. giving them a profound and understandable overview of what I have done within the last 12 months of research
• get them excited for the subject so that I can gather valuable feedback and comments
• stick out of the masses (which I personally think is always good)
• get more attendants to read my actual article in the conference proceedings

Other possible options are:

• win the best-paper award because of the presentation
• get offered a million dollar job because of that presentation
• ... fill in any possible dream you might have ...
  

Well, that's it for this week's funny story. I am off for the holiday and travel to Switzerland after that.
The proposal has to wait a couple of more days.

I wish you the best. Cya.

Created SEKE 2009 presentation

Hi Folks,

just got done with the presentation for SEKE 2009 which takes place in Boston in approx. 4 weeks.
So far I have arranged a presentation of 12 slides which should be enough to transport my research and also entertain the people a little bit.
We all know that research presentations can be long, tiresome and back-killers once your forehead hits the table since you fell asleep. Well, it's not that bad, but we could all learn something from TED. That's for sure.

Further, I am still waiting for feedback to the other conference we sent our latest paper.
This might mark the start of the final stage of my PhD program.
We'll see, I'll keep you guys posted.

Have a great night, I am out of here.

Preparation for Thesis Proposal

As we have submitted our final paper for this year's first half, I am preparing my thesis proposal.

To those of you who wonder what the proposal is all about:
It is as well intended for my supervisor as for any other skilled mind which does not come from my certain area of research. It shows what my idea of what I have been working on so far and explains what the drawback of related work have been. It ends with a kind of roadmap to reaching the final part of the PhD student's life: The dissertation.

In short this means I am structuring my research findings to cover 6 important points I have to address with the proposal.

1. A statement of the problem and why it should be solved (is there a problem at all?)
   
2. Reference to and comments upon relevant work in this area (what have the others done so far?)
   
3. My ideas and insights of how to solve the problem plus results I have already obtained (this is how i role! And yes, I can do it ...)
   
4. Characterization of the solution that is being sought after (when do I want to stop and insist on the piece of paper they call degree)
5. A plan of action (what else is there to do besides writing it all down? Often many hours are buried in evaluation)
6. A rough outline of the thesis (well, what the little book gonna look like?)

Besides that, I still have to prepare the presentation for the SEKE 2009 conference.
But as you can see, this should be enough work for the next 2 months.

On the Verge of Submission

The submission date for ICSC was postponed to May, 10th.
We haven't made many changes on the paper for 2 weeks, but some minor adjustments in last couple of days.
We plan to submit the paper on Friday and give it another two days to find spelling errors and other mistakes in the document.

After that, we need to prepare the presentation for the SEKE 2009 conference as long as the papers "ingredients" are still fresh in our mind.
I am looking forward to visiting Boston. Always liked the city and having a hotel at the harbor has never proved to be a mistake.

Talk to you soon.

Alpha Version of new paper is ready

The alpha version of the new paper is finished as scheduled.
The submission date is not till next Thursday, but we are already as far as we could go.
A last check on the weekend should suffice.

Yeah, we got it. Honestly, this feels great - it's been a stressful 10 weeks.

SEKE 2009 is Camera Ready, 2nd paper almost done

I just finished the SEKE 2009 camera ready version. In case none of my pals find any typos or incorrect sentences, this should be the final version before the submission on May, 1st.

The other paper describing RESI in all its detail and workmanship is also almost done. We finished our internal alpha-version at the weekend and already progressing to the beta-version which should be ready on Saturday or Sunday.
This one will simmer till Wednesday the following week and will then be submitted after a final proof-reading. Let's hope the best the reviewers like our paper as much as we do.

So long, that's it for today. I am out.

Accepted for SEKE 2009

Our first paper submission (due march, 25th) was accepted at the SEKE 2009 conference in Boston.
Congratulations to all of us. It was tough work - and it seems to pay off any time.
We got an overall scoring of 7.8/10 which is pretty good for a first shot.
The reviewers remarked things we were already aware about and also suggested that we should keep focusing on getting the software to run.
Well, this is what we (already) did and therefore are about to finish the next paper concerning the other topics which we could not address so far.

Today we're going to have our internal paper-workshop which should give us a nice alpha-version of the next paper which is then due on May, 1st.
From our own opinion, this paper is even better than the last one and we are confident that our submission might yield fruit soon.

Have a sunny day, y'all.

Paper 2 in pre-alpha state

Discussed the paper content with Torben today (he writes his master thesis).
We did some polishing on the existing chapters and divided the work for the following chapters.
So far, I would dare to say the paper is 60% done. Give it another week and we should have a nice alpha version up next Sunday.
After that we need to pass the Walter F. Tichy (head of our research chair) quality-gate and probably run another revision of the paper (this would be the beta version).
After that, we let it simmer for another 5 days and do a last check and changes. This leads to the gamma version which we will then submit to the conference.

So far we're good on the schedule ... let's stay focused so we can keep the timeline.

Happy Easter to everybody and cya next week.

Paper 1 submitted, Paper 2 in progress

Hi all,

the first paper of this quarters plan is submitted to the conference. Let's see if our work satisfies the reviewers. We truly hope so.
It is the conceptual basis of the tool we're working on at the moment. Parts of the implementation are already done.

Today, we prepared the rough sketch of the next paper which will describe in detail how RESI (Requirements Engineering Specification Improver) works. This one will be submitted to the ICSC at the end of the month.

Next thing I need to do is update the AutoModel homepage and my profile.
That's it for today.

Btw - where's the sun? I was promised sunshine and love from last nights forecast ... none of it here today. Damn.

Preparing Two More Papers

We are currently working on two more conference-articles (papers, that is).
One explains the conceptual work we had to overcome with the "ontology decider",
the 2nd will explain how the ontology-decider system itself works.

The first paper is due March, 16th whereas the other one needs to be presented by May, 1st.

So far, we're on time and the schedule seems doable. This means another 8 stressful weeks, but by then we'll know what we did it for.

It might be the last two papers before I start to compose parts of my PhD-thesis from what I learned in the last 3 years. Let's see if this plan turns out the way it feels right now.

Preparing annual report

I am about to file in my annual report for 2008. The reports are being published university-wide in February and also used for the university's monetary justification.

I will combine my report with Tom's and I will cover the following aspects:

• My article which I presented in San Francisco, June 2008
• The ideas of ontology-usage improving automatic model creation
• The research currently being undergone by me and my team (UML enriching with various ontologies)

So long ... 10-7, over and out.