Recall "Internet-Kooperation verändert die Kulturwissenschaften"

As I reviewed some documents and papers on my table this afternoon, I found this article. It could be easy for it to be recalled here (blogized), instead of being kept in a thick magazine.

How does Internet cooperation change research on cultural heritage management? It is reported by my colleagues Matthias Jarke, Ralf Klamma, and Marc Spaniol in RWTH Themen 1/2006 (Page 10-11). Two prototypes called MECCA and ACIS were demonstrated to explore what have movie research taken by film theorists and cultural heritage research taken by cultural scientists in common?

UMIC Workshop on Future Mobile Applications - Program

The workshop program is also downloadable in PDF from the Workshop Web site.

09:00
Welcome to UMIC Workshop on Future Mobile Applications
Yiwei Cao and Wolfgang Gräther, RWTH Aachen and Fraunhofer FIT
09:15
Mobile Device as a Smart Metering Display (with Demo)
Oleksandr Lobunets, Fraunhofer FIT
09:45
ideaPitch - A Spatial Tool for Notes (with Demo)
Nils Jeners, Fraunhofer FIT
10:15
Mobile Cloud Computing
Dejan Kovachev, RWTH Aachen
10:40
Coffee Break
11:00
Mobile Informal Learning
Christian Glahn and Dirk Börner, Open University Netherlands
11:30
Augmented Reality for Mobile Learning: information feeds
versus designing scenarios
Stefaan Ternier, Open University Netherlands
12:00
Resource Annotation and Delivery for
Mobile Augmented Reality Services
Martin Memmel, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz
12:30
Lunch Break
13:30
Open API Platform (with Demo)
Johannes Willig, Ericsson Eurolab
14:00
Service Composition (with Demo)
Konstantinos Vandikas, Ericsson Eurolab
14:30
Virtual Campfire iNMV – Storytelling on the iPhone (with Demo)
Yiwei Cao and Xi Chen, RWTH Aachen
15:00
iBSCW - BSCW applications on the iPhone (with Demo)
Wolfgang Gräther, Fraunhofer FIT
15:30
Coffee Break & Demos
16:15
Discovery and Interaction in Ubiquitous Environments
Marc Jentsch and René Reiners, Fraunhofer FIT
16:45
Supporting Mobile Maintenance in Construction Industry
Anne-Kathrin Braun, Fraunhofer FIT
17:15
Discussion and Further Steps
Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen

UMIC Workshop on Future Mobile Applications - Call For Presentation/Demo/Participation

UMIC (Ultra Highspeed Mobile Information and Communication) is a research cluster established under the German Federal and State Government Excellence Initiative, focusing on the research and realization of future mobile applications and systems through interdisciplinary and academic-industrial collaborations.

The one-day UMIC workshop aims to bring together researchers and PhD students involved in the rapidly increasing field of mobile applications. The workshop provides a forum for academics and practitioners to share knowledge and experience, explore future scenarios, directions and application domains of innovative research, and discuss the challenges and solutions for developing new mobile systems and applications. The workshop also aims at establishing a research community across universities and research institutions for further knowledge sharing and long-term collaboration.

The equipment of mobile phones with embedded camera, GPS, and other sensors greatly influenced the application area and the development of mobile applications. The benefits from the emerging mobile technologies include enhanced flexibility and mobility for end-users, improved productivity for learning, working, and common life, increased social interactivities through personal mobile devices and the availability of context information (such as location and time). However, different considerations need to be addressed in developing applications for mobile devices, like the demand for more resources for real-time context information processing, higher interactivity for better user and community experiences, and improved usability and sociability.

Promising solutions or methodologies are mobile cloud computing, mobile social software and augmented realities. Mobile cloud computing unlocks computing resources and data storage from devices and opens new classes of applications that didn’t seem to be possible previously. Over the past years social software has seen a huge explosion in usage and is now taking its first significant steps towards mobility. The interplay between mobile technologies, sensor/contextual data, cloud services and social computing generates new and exciting research questions on new challenges, utilization of context, location and other sensor data, innovative next generational mobile applications.

The workshop topics include, but are not limited to:

• Scenarios and requirement engineering for next generation mobile applications
• Software architectures for mobile systems
• Mobile social software and mobile Web 2.0
• Data management for mobile applications
• Mobile multimedia
• Mobile Web services
• Mobile learning
• Mobile gaming and other forms for entertaining
• Mobile applications for sensor networks
• Context-aware, location-based and mobile sensing applications
• Augmented Reality
• Mobile cloud computing programming model
• Mobile application development standards e.g. Open Mobile Alliance
• Mobile usability
• Quality of service for mobile community information systems
• Innovative cross-platform mobile applications (Android, iPhone, iPad, and Symbian etc.)
• Security and privacy in mobile systems
• Native applications vs. mobile Web applications - HTML5
• Smart object applications (RFID and QRcodes etc.)

Workshop presentations and demos:

• Presentation: 30 minutes
• Presentation + demo: 45 minutes
• An additional demo session will take place for all demos

Workshop Organization Teams:

• Informatik 5, RWTH Aachen University
• Fraunhofer FIT
• UMIC Research Center

Links:
http://dbis.rwth-aachen.de/cms/events/umic-workshop-on-future-mobile-applications

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.

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]

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.

Call for Participation: Developer's Day 2008

The Students in our group is organizing an exciting event on Oct. 13, 2008: Developer's Day 2008. This is an annual event at Informatik 5, RWTH Aachen University since 4 years. Students are encouraged to present technologies and tools on software development. It is an event organized by students for students who want to gain knowledge beyond their regular study program. Students are invited to give talks on self-chosen topics with a length of 30-45 minutes including time for discussion. At the same time, students gain insight into academic events.
The registration is still open at http://dbis.rwth-aachen.de/developersday/, on the behalf of:
General Chair: Dominik Renzel, Christian Hocken
Publicity Chair: Martin Frericks, Niels Drobek

An Announcement of the Final Presentation of Gaming Communities Lab

The students attending our lab course Gaming Communities give their final presentations at 18:00 tomorrow in AH II at RWTH Aachen University.
At the beginning of the Summer Term 2008, students were required to propose their own projects. The three following projects were selected from all, which builds up three groups consisting of 4-5 students.
1) Civilization IV historical scenario
2) Gaming Communities on iPhone, und
3) Empirical research on gaming vs. carreer/relationships/groups
During the semester, the students made ideas concreate and realized their proposed platform by programming. Evaluation process was also carried out. Students learned the whole life cycle of software development. The lab course requires 200 hours of work load. One group has also submitted a paper to STEG 08.