Finishing Review Rounds with Professors

I am about to finish my review rounds with the professor of our faculty. So far, I've had 4 appointments with professors (outside my institute) who were interested in my work. The discussion led to a lot of insight when receiving feedback from a different angle. That really made a difference. I got interesting tips of what and what not to do and how to cope with the latest challenges I am facing in writing/finishing my dissertation.

The current status: All is well and I am on a straight line towards finishing my thesis. For the last leg of the journey I cannot foresee any curvy roads that I might have overlooked; but one never knows, so I am excited but positive that this is the last inning of a long game...

Keep your fingers crossed, I am about to get this thing done in the next couple of months.

Publishing My Work for Internal Review

I have sent out my PhD thesis (i.e. parts of it) to all faculty members holding a professorship to receive valuable feedback for my final dissertation. So far I have received interesting hints as to what I want to emphasize or focus for the written documentation of my work.

I will certainly not be able to respect or include all suggestions since this is out of the scope of this work. But each and every idea from "outside" leaves another opportunity for the RE research team at our research chair. I will include everything in my thesis, even if it falls into conclusion and outlook for further projects.

The clue is that every professor who wants to see and discuss my work can now invite me for a meeting which I have to attend. I will keep you updates how many invitations I will receive.

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.