Finished Related Work Research

Today I finally managed summarizing, excavating, and structuring the related work for my dissertation. All in all, it's about 300 references to books, chapter, papers, articles, ...

That was quite a bit of work; though on the other hand no one can say I missed a reference.

Also, the various bits and pieces delivered additional argumentation for some of research goals. This encourages me and my fellow researchers, too.

I guess today's a good day.

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.

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.

Paper for NLDB Accepted - Going to Cardiff in June

Our paper for the NLDB 2010 has been accepted. We are now working on the camera ready version which is due in 3 weeks.
So from June, 23rd-26th we'll be in Cardiff, UK presenting the results of our work.

We'll give you a heads up about the other papers we submitted as soon as we get feedback.

Submitted 2 Papers for NLDB2010 and RE2010 conferences

We submitted 2 more papers in the last couple of days.
Just one more paper left, before we round up the work of the last 4 years into one big and nice dissertation.
Let's hope my mentor sees it the exact same way ;-)

The plan for the next weeks:

• Finish research project grant
• Finish thesis proposal
• Start compiling thesis
• Make master thesis students finish
• Hand over thesis
• Retire and enjoy life in a elderly neighborhood in Florida

So far, so good (once again). I will keep you posted.

Submitting Paper for NLDB

To our readers: we are currently under full load for the paper deadlines we need to hold in the next couple of weeks.
First deadline will be the NLDB 2010. We plan to submit one paper.
Next deadline is RE 2010. We plan to submit another paper.

All our pieces we worked on for the last couple of months are slowly coming together into one serious tool repository which might end up being the big solution for the new RE approach. We call it RECAA. It stands for "Requirements Engineerings Complete Automization Approach".

After the RE 2010 deadline on Feb, 19th, we plan to focus on the DFG proposal to support our project. That's the next big step into financing our studies for the next couple of years.

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.