Call For Paper: U-Media 2010

Call for Paper to the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Ubi-media computing is available online. The conference will be held in Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, China, July 5-6, 2010.

Topics include

• Ubi-media Infrastructure
• Heterogeneous Ubi-media Infrastructure
• Ubiquitous Sensor Networks / RFID
• New Ubi-media Devices
• Multimedia Embedded Systems
• Ubi-media Storage and Indexing
• 3G and Advanced Communication Techniques
• Cross-Network Communication Techniques
• Ubi-media Middleware
• Context-Aware Multimedia
• Cross-Network Media Server
• Computational Intelligences in Ubi-media
• Semantic Web and Knowledge Grid
• Ubi-media Content Protection and Security
• Privacy and Security in Ubiquitous Environments
• Ubi-media Human-Computer Interaction
• Plasticity of User Interfaces
• Dynamic composition of User Interfaces
• Multimodal interaction
• Social networks
• Ubi-media Applications
• Ubi-media for Education
• Ubi-media for Commerce
• Ubi-media for Games
• Ubi-media for Health Care
• Ubi-media for Smart Home
• Ubi-media for Citizens and E-Government

JTEL Winter School on Advanced Learning Technologies 2010

For the Interest Groups on Technology Enhanced Learning:
The JTEL Winter School brings interdisciplinary doctoral researchers together in order to provide intense research training and to foster cross-domain collaboration. The event will engage participants in high-level courses and workshops with leading scientists. These workshops and lectures focus on theoretical, methodological, educational, and technological issues of relevance to TEL research, providing space for interaction, group work, and informal discussions. Doctoral students will also be expected to present their own research for constructive feedback from other participants of the Winter School.

Deadline for applications: 14 December 2009

More information

Call For Paper: Mobile Learning 2010

Call for Paper for IADIS Mobile Learning 2010 is open. The conference focus will be User Created Content & Mobile Technologies: From Consumers to Creators bypassing the Learning Opportunity? This is the connecting point from e-Learning to social software.
Important dates:
Paper submission: Dec. 4, 2009
Notification: Jan. 6, 2010
Conference dates: Mar. 19-21, 2010, Porto, Portugal
Topics include:
• Pedagogical approaches and theories for mLearning
• mLearning in formal educational institutions
• Integrating mLearning with broader educational scenarios
• Informal and lifelong mLearning
• Learner mobility & transitions across physical, conceptual, social space and technologies
• User Studies in mLearning
• Mobile social media & user generated content
• Enabling mLearning technologies, applications & uses
• Evaluation and evaluation methodologies for mLearning
• Tools, technologies and platforms for mLearning
• Mobile Web 2.0 applications for mLearning
• Mobile game-based learning

Call For Paper: SeMuDaTe2009

10th International Workshop of the Multimedia Metadata Community will be held in conjuction with the 4th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (SAMT2009), December 2-4, 2009 in Graz Austria. The series of workshops have been held regularly to bring international researchers and application developers to share knowledge of multimedia semantics, multimedia processing, multimedia metadata standards such as MPEG-7 and MPEG-21, and multimedia applications. They have been organized by members of the Multimedia Metadata Community. I attended the 9th International Workshop of the Multimedia Metadata Community (WMM2009) in Toulouse, France in March 2009. The proceedings are published in the CEUR Workshop site with a special focus on context-aware mobile multimedia services.

Topics of interest are how multimedia metadata standards and multimedia ontologies are mapped or integrated into databases, how multimedia query languages are built, and how semantic queries are optimized and processed. Moreover, we are interested how multimedia data services are conceived to ensure interoperability, how to improve security and reliability of access and storage of multimedia data and metadata. Adaptation of multimedia, semantic enrichment of multimedia and bridging of media breaks are typical examples of advanced multimedia database services.

Important dates: submission deadline will be September 22, 2009.

ICWL'09 Program online

Niels and I have finished our ICWL Program in PDF finally. We just extended the program created by Marc, by adding the social program, venue information, and a welcome message from the General Chair Prof. Jarke. A detailed travel information file is also available at the ICWL'09 Web site. The proceedings - Advances in Web Based Learning - ICWL 2009: 8th International Conference, Aachen, Germany, August 19-21, 2009, Proceedings: 5686 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science / Information Systems and) (Paperback) edited by Ralf, Marc and the others - has also been published by Springer. We are looking forward to all participants at ICWL'09 taking place in Building Super C at RWTH Aachen University next week.

Hackesche Höfe and Hackescher Markt, Berlin

As I attended the conference Intercarto Intergis 12 (2006) in Berlin, we were very lucky to have a nice conference organizer, Mr. Horst Kremer, who took us to many interesting places in Berlin as a local guider. I was struck by the Hackesche Höfe (Hacke’s Courtyards), which is located just at the Hackescher Markt (Hacke’s Market) at the subway station stop with the same name. It is the No. 1 sightseeing in Berlin from the locales’ viewpoint. Usually for the tourist, Brandenburg Tor and the others might be more famous worldwide. So I missed the courtyard, as we visited Berlin in 2003 for the first time.
What’s the special that makes the “Berliner” so proud of their Hackesche Höfe? It must be easy for each Chinese originally from Shanghai, if I say Hackesche Höfe is just another Xintiandi (新天地). There must also be similar places in other cities in China.
Hackesche Höfe contains 8 courtyards in all. The façades are diverse and colorful. Diversity is shown in the different façade building material ranging from mosaic bricks to common bricks, in the different colors used in one façade. This wall is in blue and white, while its neighbor wall is in orange. The architectural style is also a mixture. The German architect August Endell is an Art Nouveau architect who also studied philosophy and psychology. This expertise and academic backgrounds are quite special for architects. Maybe, this is why his design can still attract so many people 100 years later. Hackesche Höfe was opened in 1906. The idea is to have a common outdoor salon for many companies, clubs, as well as residential parts in this building complex. So people can share the courtyards to get certain atmosphere to have some events in common. This idea is still advanced, like many lofts in the office-shopping buildings and Xintiandi. It also proves that advanced ideas are based on the modernism principle “form follows function”. Since the courtyards are for the sharing purpose, they should have the versatility to meet preferences of enterprisers, businessmen, artists, and habitants. August Endell also applied Neo-baroque roofs and Egyptian Obelisks. However, at my first impression, Hackesche Höfe has the Art Déco style, though Art Déco was in fashion nearly 20 later than it was built. Maybe I was just impressed by the vertical lines on the façades.
Hackescher Markt has a longer history with the first document about 1672. It was a new center for barn areas in old Berlin. Later on, it developed to a commercial center with many Jew residents. After the World War II, it lost its prosperity in East Berlin, though it has been a German cultural heritage piece since 1972. The renovation work started in 1993 after the reunion of Germany. Since then it is a favorite place in Berlin with restaurants, cafés, galleries, workshops, and still flats. The immobile price in that area also becomes one of the most expensive areas, Just like Xintiandi.
There are still some differences between Xintiandi and Hackesche Höfe. Hackesche Höfe has just succeeded its original use function after the WWII and DDR break, while Xintiandi was redesigned to create such an entertaining environment with the old Shikumen (石库门 or “stone gates”) which was original designed only for living. It was stated in Wikipedia that Hackescher Markt was once Marx-Engels-Forum. But I don’t think. It is true that Xintiandi has an important historic memorial building in the neighborhood. Both have many new elements after the renovation. I assume some glass façades in Hackescher Markt might not be from 1906, but be built lately.

Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin

I am very glad that several of my best friends are coming to visit me this year. The first group – Ah-V and her family, my best friend I made since I was born, are coming by the end of August. I am motivated to update my blog by writing some city sightseeing. So I start with Berlin, one of my favorite cities in Europe, which Ah-V will visit. This afternoon I video phoned my best college friend Sheep, who has just arrived in Philadelphia as a visiting researcher at the Pennsylvania University. She is going to Washington, D.C. to visit our common best friend in the coming days. One stop must be I. M. Pei’s East Building of National Gallery of Art. I am jealous of her and would like to recap my visits to German History Museum in Berlin.

Deutsches Historisches Museum is located at a corner and a little hidden from the Boulevard Unter den Linden, as an extension of the existing museum building in new classical style after German Reunion. It should be the first architecture of 贝聿铭 in Germany. I discovered it by chance as I visited Berlin for the first time, because it could be recognized at first glance. The museum was already closed at that time and I went there additionally on the other morning and took a lot of non-digital pictures then. The common elements that Mr. Pei uses in most of his architecture are exposed in a more elegant way. It is a small museum in comparison to Mr. Pei’s other museum designs and is just located on a small street. So it is difficult to take a photo of the whole view from the narrow street. However, it does highlight its uniqueness and elegance. Mr. Pei applies a glass spiral cone at the building entrance which gives the simple geometry building some smartish flavor. Inside it is just a small rest area for visitors who can also experience the orchestrating of light and shadows in sunshine. The indoor space is free flowing with escalators, staircases and flyovers. The front huge curve glass walls make a composition of light and shadows on the concrete slabs and walls. Concrete slabs are indispensible in order to project the light and shadows from the transparent glasses. So it is somehow boring to construct buildings with only glasses or with only concrete slabs. Light and shadows make the architectural experiences changing at different daytime.

Triangle motif is one of favorite elements of I. M. Pei, which is repeated in this museum to enhance the flowing ambience. Besides, a large circle opening is used together with the flyovers, which is quite traditional Chinese. It symbolizes completeness and perfectness. Thus, the circle opening as well as the smooth glass and wall curves are re-lived by the triangles everywhere on the one hand. On the other hand, they smooth the potential visual conflicts caused by the triangles. Mr. Pei is good at using contrast. However, visitors can feel a kind of modesty and amiability and close interaction between human and architecture. The architectural details are elaborated as well. For example, the handrails are engraved in the concrete walls, so that no other material is needed. The pureness, the simplicity, and the delight make German History Museum a masterpiece of modern architecture indeed. If Berlin is visited, a visit to the museum is worthwhile.

ICWL 2009 - Call for Participation

The 8th ICWL 2009 will be hosted by Information System and Database Technologies, RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Authors that submitted to the ICWL 2009 conference came from more than 30 countries. The program will include 2 outstanding keynote talks, plenary sessions with invited papers, technical sessions, and 4 co-located workshops. Participants will explore Aachen with its rich culture, long history, and sightseeing via the social programs. ICWL 2009 is jointly organized by Hong Kong Web Society, RWTH Aachen University, and Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science.

Keynote talks:

* "Learning in Times of Abundance: The Snowflake Effect" by Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
* "Exploiting User Generated Content to Improve Search" by Wolfgang Nejdl, University of Hannover, Germany

Invited papers:

* "Debating the wisdom of personalisation" by Helen Ashman, UniSA, Australia
* "On Social e-Learning" by Won Kim, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea
* "Web-based Learning - Yes we can!" by Ulrik Schroeder, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Social Events:

* Welcome reception with live Jazz music, August 19, 2009
* Grand Banquette in the old spa house of Aachen, August 20, 2009
* Guided tour to historical Aachen, August 21, 2009

Workshops:

* STEG'09: Second Workshop on Story-Telling and Educational Games
* ViWo'09: Workshop on Virtual Worlds for academic, organizational, and life-long learning
* SIRTEL'09: Social Informational Retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning
* JEM'09: Joining Educational Mathematics - Final Workshop

Ghazni will be the Islamic Cultural City 2013

We have been working together with Department of Urban History at RWTH Aachen University for cultural heritage management in Afganistan and Pakistan within the German Excellence Research Cluster UMIC. The chair holder Professor Michael Jansen, also the head of Aachen Center for Documentation and Conservation (ACDC), works together with UNESCO and ICOMOS as an expert for cultural heritage conservation in the Middle East. On Tuesday I learned from Prof. Michael Jansen, that Ghazni in Afghanistan would be the Islamic cultural city of 2013. I looked for the information at our Virtual Campfire - ACIS and got some information about Ghazni.

This is what I get from ACIS:



Further Information for the site : GHAZNI
Latitude : 33°34'N Longitude : 68°27'E Province : GHAZNIDistrict : GhazniDescription (by Reference): A large urban site consisting of a vast area of mounds and ruins littered with sherds and building debris. The most conspicious remains are two elaborately decorated brick minarets or towers, both of which have only the first storey still standing, capped with modern tin roofs. Other remains are: the tomb of Sebuktegin on the hillside to the north of the minarets; the mausoleum of Shah Shahid or Muhammad Sharif Khan, a plain brick octagonal tomb, on a spur near the western minaret; the tomb of Mahmud, a modern building housing an extremely beautiful carved marble grave cover, in the village of Rauza; and the mausoleum of Abdur Razzaq, a plain brick building now used as the Museum of Islamic Art, also in Rauza. In addition, there are many elaborately carved grave stones on and near the site. Excavations have revealed two more buildings: a private house and a palace. The palace is a complex of buildings surrounding a central, marble paved courtyard. The most significant find was a long, decorated marble frieze with an inscription in Persian, 250 m long. Other finds include objects of glass, ceramic and bronze, decorative stuccos, paintings, marbles and tilework. [1] Location Description (by Reference): Ghazni Province. 136 km south of Kābul. The remains of the old city stretch eastwards between the new city and the village of Rauza [1] Period (by Reference): Ghaznavid & Ghurid, 11th-13th C. (Ceramic, documentary, stylistic, etc.); Timurid, 15th-16th C. (Stylistic). [1]

Database and Information Technologies in the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul

Mr. Mohammad Zia Afshar, Deputy Minister of Ministry of Information and Culture of Afghanistan, visited Information Systems and Database Technologies (Informatik 5) at RWTH Aachen University on April 3, 2009. He came to have a training program on database technologies at Informatik 5 in early 2006. He gave interviews and the videos were applied in Virtual Campfire. It is inspiring to hear about the progress happening everyday in the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul, after good three years. The museum building was once a palace and was devastatingly damaged in the Taliban Regime. Now the National Museum of Afghanistan has been opened to the public after the relief work. Although the electricity power supply is sometimes instable and the infrastructure is still limited, there are computer terminals accessed by administrators (curators) and museum visitors. They can use computers to enquire and manage museum artifacts. Over 30 ministries for diverse administration tasks have been established in the whole country. Ministry of Information and Culture have launched its Web site. We are proud to be part of the community by hosting Bamiyan Development Community at our group.

Bamiyan Development Community

Recently Niels and Martin Bachwerk have made much progress to our Bamiyan Development Community on Plone 3.
The highlights include the following new features.

User community
It is much more user-friendly to add and manage your own content to the community website and to browse recent activities (e.g. recent news and content) within the community, because
- The personal member folder has been redesigned to facilitate news, events, etc. management in a more comfortable way;
- The personal profile has been redesigned to let you share more information about your person with other members;
- The contribution policy has been changed so that now everyone can add news, events, photos and so on without having them reviewed or approved by an admin;
- An instant messaging function has been added to let you send messages to other members.

ACIS and the film of Virtual Cave
- A guest login is added to simplify the user management process. Everybody can explore the cultural heritage site at ACIS, while no editing is allowed.
- Dipl. -Ing. Georgios Toubekis starred the Virtual Cave film full of James Bond's flavor.

Nonetheless, filling a community survey is quite welcome to help us improve the community site. You need to login into Bamiyan Development Commiunity and it takes only 5 minutes.

A Real Prototype ...

Would you like to learn Chinese Classical Poetry? Would you like learning Chinese by entertaining? Anyway, there are at least six reasons to read poetry stated at Dumb Little Man. It's my pleasure to present the diploma candidate GAO Yan's Web based Chinese Classical Poetry Learning Platform CCPLE (a tentative name).

You could log in with the user name "guest" and the password "guest". You could upload a Chinese Classical poem. We would be grateful for any enrichment action on the poem database. You could also play a game to learn the peom by heart. This evening, I just got to know from GAO Yan that it is also accessible on iPhones.

However, as it is stressed in this blog entry title, it is just a prototype of a six-month's diploma thesis in the computer science faculty at RWTH Aachen University. During the six months, the diploma candidate is also required to finish writing one's thesis. You could not expect a fancy bug-free Web 2.0 platform. For example, two "tricks" of using this Web site are:
1) Double click the menu bar "My Poetry", so that you will see the menu bar "All Poety" at the end of the left pannel. Otherwise, you can not see all poems in the database and select one from it to play with.
2) In the desktop Safari browser, you need to click to tab and shift at the same time to make the menu bar of the games be displayed correctly.

These bugs will be fixed as soon as possible. I just cannot help advertising this platform a little later. GAO Yan will give his final diploma presentation on Feb. 17, 2009. Dr. Ralf Klamma and I keep our fingers crossed for a successful presentation. We will submit a paper on the results to ICWL'09.

Computer Researcher Community in Sight

I am just inspired by the idea posted in beamtenherrschaft: DBLP Co-Authorship Graphs of all RWTH Aachen University Computer Science Professors. I have also used the interactive tool AERCS and generated a graph to explore myself in DBLP (in one of the four sub graphs).

We are also thinking about a fancy name for the tool instead of AERCS. My spontaneous idea is CommunitySight or EventSight. :D

Call for Workshop Proposals - ICWL 2009

The International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL) 2009 invites you to submit workshop proposals in the related research area. The one-day workshop will provide participants an active platform to present and discuss novel research ideas or their ongoing research results in web-based learning. More information could be found here.

Important Dates:
Workshop Proposals Submission Deadline: March 1, 2009
Notification of acceptance: March 20, 2009
Distribution of accepted workshop CfPs: March 25, 2009
ICWL 2009 conference: August 19-21, 2009, RWTH Aachen Univsersity, Aachen, Germany

Workshop Co-Chairs:
Baltasar Fernández-Manjón Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Frederick Li Durham University, United Kingdom