Planning Work Camera Ready Version for EduSymp2008

Today, I restructured my thesis and also added some fine ideas I brought home with me from the SEKE conference.

There is a little rework necessary for the EduSymp paper so we were rated 3 times "stronly accepted" and 2 times "weakly accepted". That's a pretty satisfying result.
Matter of fact, the reviewers were all craving for more information which we (most likely) won't be able to include into the paper due to page number restrictions. We cannot shorten the article more than 1 or 2 paragraphs without losing information and track of the thin red line. If we are allowed to purchase additional pages, we might add some extra information as (legitimately) requested by the reviewers.
There are after all 15 recommendations we would like to consider revising the paper and forming it into yet another version of our solution-paper. Some of the things pointed out are quite easy to explain/solve in the paper. Some others might not quite make it into the article. It's all about priorities.

EduSymp on MODELS2008 paper accepted

We just got notice that our paper "Automatic Checklist Creation for the Assessment of UML Models" got accepted at the educator's symposium on MODELS2008 conference.
Well, this is good news for the start of a new day.
There is some work to be done till we can ship the camera ready version on August, 11th, but we should be able to finish this task by the end of the week.
I have to read through the inspectors notes to see what we could/can improve whilst polishing the article for the camera ready version.

Work on PhD-Thesis structure

As I already explained yesterday, I am planning my work for the next couple of weeks. First of all, this will include improving/changing/adapting the structure of my thesis as well as incorporating the ideas and feedback I got attending SEKE 2008.
Also, I have to find additional hooks in the requirements engineering "society" where I can plug in with my solution. So far, we are still the only ones with this approach; at least as far as we can tell.

A question I was asked quite a few times during the conference was why I used thematic relations to work with text. Well, matter of fact this was mostly due to that the people working on this part of RE sit right across the hallway from my office. This makes Q&A easier and faster.
Also I think, covering the approach with a complete process from textual specifications to UML (and maybe even to code) is a lot more "life-like" then other variants. So far we have not run into bigger problems and will stick to this approach as long as possible (unless any of you readers does have a perfect argument and objects). If we should bump into bigger obstacles, we certainly would adapt our approach to a more feasible study.

Back from SEKE 2008

I am finally back in Germany. SEKE 2008 went well and I received a lot of interesting feedback. So far, no critics have been uttered, but my presentation led to accreditation of my work.
Right now I am in the process of evaluating the feedback and setting down a plan how to proceed in the next couple of months. Question are:

• which results do I want to achieve next
• which conference do I want to submit articles
• how do I plan and engage my student helper's work
• which would be possible study thesis I could post
• who from the academic community should I try to cooperate with (see related work)
• when to start writing the proposal for my PhD thesis and try to get it acknowledged

As you can see - quite a few questions which might be solvable during the summer break which is just around the corner. Well, I'll have to stash my vacation-bag with a number of articles and mind-augmenting drugs. (latter of which was a joke in case you didn't get it)

Well, enough to do for tomorrow, I figure.

Preps for SEKE 2008 completed, next paper in line

The preparations for the SEKE 2008 conference are finally completed.
The camera ready file can be downloaded here.
Hotel and flights are booked and we are good to go. Just some minor adjustments on the slides I made.

We are already planning another paper (on which I am working at the moment) for the MODELS2008 conference. Actually, that educators symposium, that is. We'll be presenting our advancement in the area of creating checklists to correct UML exam or homework exercises.
More to come here soon.

SEKE 2008 Paper Accepted

Cheerio,

my paper "Improving Automatic Model Creation using Ontologies" has been accepted by the SEKE 2008 conference on April, 17th.
The ratings for the paper turned out to be 2 times .80 and one reviewer chose to give me only .20. He/she also doubted that my paper belonged to the conference and therefore weakly rejected it. I guess I'll have to make up for that in the camera ready version which is due May, 7th.

My paper is 7 pages long, including references and illustrations. I need to crop this down to 6 pages and make the article firmer and preciser. This is going to be my job for the next two days. I am planning on re-submitting the paper early next week.
I will post the camera-ready version here in this blog so you can take a look at it.

So far, I still have to book the flight and make hotel reservations.

I'll keep you updated.

Submitted article - waiting for reviewer's feedback

Again, it's been a while since my last post.
Matter of fact I submitted my first article concerning ontology usage to improve automatic model creation about 10 days ago. The choice was the SEKE conference, taking place in the bay area in July.
The submitted version of the paper can be downloaded here.
Information about acceptance or refusal should be available within the next 2 weeks.

On my next steps, I am working together with a student trying to build a completely covered process from textual specification to UML model directly.

Let's see what new discoveries lie on that path for us.