Preparing ERC Grant

We are currently in the process of preparing a research grant for ERC.

The grant is due Feb, 9th and we will be able to provide a very interesting and nifty vision of how to cope with the future of software development.

I will keep you posted on that.

Results, Presentations, and Assessment

...of past visited conferences.

The slides and papers of the CIKM 2010 and FoSER (FSE) are available now. You can find them here.

A short, brief summary of each conference in a collection of adjectives follows now. I do not want to spend to much time describing the actual conferences, just give you a little idea of what it felt like.

CIKM2010:

• Toronto, Canada
• Free WiFi everywhere (bus, hotel, ...)
• NLP processing software engineers in the information retrieval world: outsiders with a special touch
• interesting insights
• first poster demo ever; interesting and funny
• met a guy from Turkey who studied in Germany and now lives in Finland
• spend 95% of my time inside (what was daylight again?)
• sweet potato fries (never had that b4!)

ACM SigSoft FoSER/FSE:

• Santa Fe
• cool, but sunny
• met all the people I ever cited in person
• not so visionary visionaries after all
• large workshop (150ppl.)
• hotel bed too soft
• nice restaurants
• Santa Fe is literally in the middle of nowhere
• forgot book on flight (yeah, in that seat pocket in front of me)

So that was just a short, random wrap-up. I might contribute some more once I can think of it.

Now it's back to my dissertation.

Finished Poster for CIKM 2010

I just finished the poster presentation for CIKM 2010. I will make the poster available for download directly after the conference. You will find it next to the presentation slides and workshop papers at the IPD Tichy website.

Next step: Prepare presentation for FoSER 2010 in Santa Fe and then off to North America.

Presenting our Work Across North America

I have the pleasure to announce that I will be able/invited to present our work of the last 12 months across North America.

This means I will attend the CIKM2010 in Toronto, Canada at the end of October as well as visit the ACM SigMod/FoSER conference in Santa Fe, USA on Nov, 6th.

Next step is to prepare slides, posters and discussion material for the desired knowledge exchange during these conferences.

I am really looking forward to this trip(s).

About Ontologies, Porn, and the Urge to Have Sex

Yeah,

quite an interesting headline I chose today. But as a matter of fact, I have reason to do so.

Today, I was surfing around, preparing slides and notes for a lecture when I came by the guys from OpenMind. Usually I don't pay much attention to the statements which people give the machine to learn. These statements are shown on the

right hand side (see "vote on these statements") and give assertions that humans made. Then the reader is supposed to rectify these statements or to verify their meaning.

Well ... today, I found this on the page:

And yeah, ... I think it is kind of funny. Here, the big question about semantics vs. syntax arises again. Could we all agree with the statement I marked in the red rectangle? Or is this just a generalization that does not apply to the majority of the people? And if so ... do I vote this statement true, half-true or not true at all? Hmmm, tough one. I let you decide on your own.

So check it out on the site (see link above) and help the guys from MIT improve their database of common sense. As you've seen today, there's always time for a little chuckle during the hard work of verifying natural language statements and their relation towards each other.

So long, that's it from me today.

Back from NLDB 2010, Cardiff University

Got back from NLDB 2010 in Cardiff two days ago.
The conference was very well organized and the talks (as always) reached from very good to extremely poor.
Just to give you some examples:

• one guy managed to talk 32minutes on 39 slides though the time cap was supposedly 15mins for every speaker
• one guy literally (and figuratively) read his slides which weren't actually slides. They were some kind of script we he presented. Kind of a book reading. I do have to admin though, that his presentation still was kind of interesting
• two ladies spoke so loud during the presentations, we only knew they already started their resp. talks because we could see their lips moving
• one guy showed up at 09:47am for his 09:30 - 09:45 presentation. He kind of had a good excuse and was pouring sweat all over his body, poor bastard
• one guy did not manage to get the projector to work with his laptop, therefore he rebooted with the laptop hooked up to it. Then he punched in his password into the "user" field of his Suse linux OS. Well, we all know the name of his wife now
• one guy had a screen saver with (somewhat embarrassing) private pictures which ran for 2 minutes on the big screen before he realized he had just talked too long on the slide and that the screen saver already kicked in. Funny

As you might be able to tell, I had a great time and think my/our presentation went well. I met a couple of very interesting researchers and we found some common ground for research collaboration. Also, Germany won the game in a pub full of English. Not bad either.
And the hotel (Radisson BLU) was centrally located and pretty nice.

You can get the presentation here.

So long. That's my short report from NLDB.

Just Got a Journal Article and Conference Paper Published

As we were working hard on the last publications, we are happy to announce the official release of two of our documents.
One will be published in the proceedings of the NLDB2010 conference in Cardiff, Wales, UK and you can pre-read it here.
The other is a journal article which was released by WorldPress in the International Journal of Semantic Computing. This article can be found here and here.

Have fun reading through it.

FYI: We are still waiting for two more reviews to conferences which we want to provide papers for.