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

CfP: SENSE'09

There is around one week left before the submission deadline of SENSE09 on December 13, 2009. SENSE'09 is a workshop on Software ENgineering within Social software Environments in conjunction with the Conference on Software Engineering (SE2009), March 2-6, 2009, in Kaiserslautern, Germany. The workshop logo designed by Niels is elegant.

Gandhara – Das buddhistische Erbe Pakistans

The exhibition Gandhara - the buddhist heritage of Pakistan (legends, monastaries and paradises) has been opened in the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn since last Thursday evening. Anna and I with our FIT colleagues enjoyed having attended the opening event and visiting the exponents on Gandhara cultural heritage from worldwide on November 20. Our group worked together with RWTH Aachen Center for Documentation and Conservation (ACDC) led by Prof. Dr. Michael Jansen as well as Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technologies FIT led by Prof. Dr. Matthias Jarke, both of which support this exhibition together with Gerda Henkel Stiftung and Cultural Ministry of Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Gandhara was an important area connecting the west and the east in ancient times. It had a much lager geographic coverage beyond its current borders in Pakistan. Its buddhist culture had been influnced or started in the age of Alexander the Great and boomed from 1st to 5th centruries A.D. The Bamiyan Great Buddhas which were devastatingly exploded by the Taliban Regime are representive artefacts of the Gandhara heritage. A 3D reconstruction film of the Great Buddha in Bamiyan is played in the exhibition hall, technically supported by the Augmented Reality Group at FIT and by the CAVE project at RWTH Aachen University. In addition, we have hosted a community portal for Bamiyan Development since years.



Around 300 fine artefacts are on exhibition from November 21, 2008 to March 15, 2009, before they move on to Berlin and Zurich after then in 2009.

ICWL'09 is coming to Aachen

The 8th International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL'09) will be held in Aachen, August 19-21, 2009. It brings researchers together with interesting topics in reasearch areas of Web-based Learning, mobile learning as well as Technology Enhanced Learning. The Call for Paper is online and can also be downloaded in PDF. The important dates are:
Full Paper Submission Deadline: March 1, 2009
Workshop Proposals Submission Deadline: March 1, 2009
Poster Paper Submission Deadline: May 1, 2009

Call for Work in Progress Reports

The PerCom work-in-progress session will be held at the 7th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2009) in Galveston, Texas, March 9-13, 2009. It aims to present and discuss emerging results, and novel research questions, approaches, and directions in the research area of pervasive computing with the paradigm that information systems at anytime anywhere.

Topics include, but are not limited to:
* Pervasive Computing and communication architectures
* Intelligent environments
* Service composition and application adaptation
* Smart devices and smart spaces
* Middleware services
* Mobile/Wireless computing systems and services
* Context aware computing
* Autonomic computing and communications
* Programming paradigms for pervasive systems
* User interfaces and interaction models
* End user programming and end user tools
* Mobile/Wireless service management and delivery
* Resource management in pervasive computing
* Trust, security and privacy issues
* Sensor networks and applications
* Pervasive service oriented architectures

Submission Deadline: November 2, 2008

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

STEG'08 Updates

As I posted a CfP for the First International Workshop on Story-Telling and Educational Games (STEG'08) several weeks ago, the workshop was held successfully in Maastricht last Tuesday. Some updates detail can be found at the Web site. A practical example of Storytelling and Technolog-Enhanced Learning is that we used Skype to present Nalin Sharda's presentation live from Melbourne, with 8-hours' time difference. In the wrap-up, Ralf drawed this graph based on a hot discussion of all participants.



My talk could be found here.

Ludwig-Erhard-Haus, Berlin

Berlin is getting to be one of the most modern cities in Europe. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Berlin became the competition arena of renowned architects worldwide. I have not had any architecture excursions in Berlin. I took some pictures during my private and business trips and it could be nice to have some reviews in my blog.
In the most recent trip, I attended the LMC conference which was held in the Ludwig-Erhard-Haus (LEH) at Fasanenstrasse, near to the subway station of Zoologische Garten, the former central railway station of West Berlin. Ludwig-Erhard-Haus designed by the British architect Sir Nicholas Grimshaw was built from 1994-1998. It is opened to host conferences and other events related to economy. The economic issue is stressed, because Ludwig Erhard in his ministry as a federal chancellor first combined social economy and free market economy, which led to great economic progress in post war in Germany. It is also located beside the German Chambers of Industry and Commerce.
Sir Nicholas Grimshaw used to apply ellipse forms and curves for his architecture. LEH is featured with 15 steel beams in ellipse forms and large glass windows. There are two inside courtyards which collect sunlight for the building. Beside the courtyards six elevators are used as the main vertical transport means, because the steps are somewhat hidden, narrow, and inappropriate to the architectural scale. So you can always see awaiting people in front of the elevators. Fortunately, there are six fast elevators. There are also many irregular halls with columns in the middle of the space, so that only part of the room could be used for presentations. Electricity sockets are often missing for laptops in each room of such buildings nowadays.

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.

CfP: CSTST'08

The fifth international conference on soft computing as transdisciplinary science and technology (CSTST '08) will be held in Ergy Pontoise/Paris, 27-31 October, 2008. The paper submission deadline is 6 July, 2008. Soft computing is a new research area related to soft science. Fuzzy logic and probabilistic are part of key issues in soft computing. Soft Computing is defined in Wikipedia as:
Soft computing refers to a collection of computational techniques in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning and some engineering disciplines, which attempt to study, model, and analyze very complex phenomena: those for which more conventional methods have not yielded low cost, analytic, and complete solutions. Earlier computational approaches could model and precisely analyze only relatively simple systems. More complex systems arising in biology, medicine, the humanities, management sciences, and similar fields often remained intractable to conventional mathematical and analytical methods.

Red Dot Design Museum, Essen

As we had a pleasant institute excursion to Zeche Zollverein in Essen, one of the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage, on May 30, I happened to discover the colocated Red Dot Design Museum. Various industrial products design, ranging from stationery, home appliance, to machinery is exhibited. The annualred dot design award is granted. The jury evaluates the competitors according to the following four principles: innovation degree, funktionality und environmental friendliness and compatibility.
In short, the red dot design principle is that design is fuction oriented, the same as the Bauhaus design theory Forms follow Function. So is the museum building: simple and unremarkable. It was built in 1930s as a boiler building for the new Shaft 12 to enhance cole mining in the Ruhr Area. The whole Shaft 12 buildings designed by Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer are of the Bauhaus style. After the last mining in 1986, the boiler building is no more needed, either. Sir Norman Foster renovate it into a museum, which maches the notorious red dot design. The most exhibits are displayed in the old industrial building, while visitors are led in the new flowing corridors started on the first floor. The corridors are actually just kind of fly-over in white slabs or in glass. Beside the corridors, there are also some exhibtion areas. Spirally, visitors can go to the forth floor which has also the smallest square. The spaces are smaller than a floor lower.
The internal spaces are communicative between the new and the old in a horizontal as well as a vertical way. Led by the fly-over, visitors have the best paths to visit all exhibits. There's no splendid spacious effects, while a dialogue between the old parts and the new one can be perceived quietly and sharply. Sir Norman Foster made it and told every visitors that museums can also be simple except for being exaggerated. It was a little warm inside, because of the closeness of the old building, maybe because of the boiler essential. With regard to the exhibits, many of them are listed in the catelogue and are available on the market.

CfP: STEG '08

First International Workshop on Storytelling and Educational Games (STEG '08) will be held in conjuction with the 3rd European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL '08) in September 17-19 in Maastricht, the Netherlands. EC-TEL brings international communities in the research area of Technology Enhanced Learning together. STEG'08 aims to bring researchers together to present the achieved or on-going research as well as to discuss the development trends in the areas of both multimedia storytelling and computer games with regard to Technology Enhanced Learning.
Some random thoughts or questions about the topics are:
On the one hand, stories are told in kindergarten, schools, colleges, companies, in the circle of families, friends, and neighborhoods, by reporters, by actors and actresses. In the Internet, the term story has even more meaning, can also be used as a verb. What kind of media do you define as a story? How does storytelling help learning?
On the other hand, does computer games support learning? Is a classroom in Second Life more attractive and effective than the real world?
Innovative ideas, novel applications and interesting discussions in the TEL domain will be expected. If anyone that is interested in submitting a paper, the deadline of June 30.

Euro 08 for Virtual Campfire Scenario

This afternoon the RWTH Aachen camera team was at our group. We "starred" together in a short introductory film for the excellence research cluster UMIC to demonstrate our Virtual Campfire scenario. This evening, German national football team beated the Turkey and is going to the finale match on Sunday.

So what might the Virtual Campfire storyboard for a multimedia non-linear story of Euro 2008 look like? (photo resource: Spiegel Online)

Langen Foundation, Hombroich

I have heard of the Langen Foundation Museum located near Duesseldorf since it was about to be opened in 2004. This spring I visited it with friends in a sunny Easter Sunday. It was a little cold, however, splendid since it was the only sunny day in a long period of early spring.
A long narrow field path leads to the museum as well as the rocket station (sign: Raketenstation), which can only be droven by visitors, with green grasses and spring ambience around. Suddenly, we saw a special stone statue, then the glass cube flying on water, and cherry blossom in lines. It is the unique museum by Tadao Ando. And as usual, it is built of glass, beton slabs and water (if available), which integrates light perfectly. The outcoming rhythm of light and shadow on betons as well as in water can even make air much fresher. Simple geometry forms were composed in an interesting way, to shape interial spaces. Contasts between the static (beton) and dynamic (water), solidness (beton) and transparency (glass), white (beton) and green (grass) make a strong visual effect.
The Langen Foundation Museum mainly consists of a beton slab in C-curve with several door holes to welcome visitors in a neutral way, a beton cube in a glass cube for the exibition, and some small beton blocks for administration. All these three parts are located on a large free-style water pool and grasses organically. Surely, white gravel or sand is indispensible for as the bases, which is always used in Zen Garden to symbolize water. The main large exhibition hall is underground.
The Japanese collection was not shown, while a small Indian acient collection, Karl Lagerfeld's photography were on exhibition. Karl Lagerfeld's photos mostly show some abstract concepts or pattern in black and white. Some photos are about Zaha Hadid's mobile architecture, also in black and white. The concept is also brand new.
We went to Ratingen without visiting the Museum Island (Museuminsel) in Hombroich.

Learning World - Der Learning Management Congress (19.-20. Juni, 2008 Berlin)

Letzten Donnerstag und Freitag habe ich mich zum ersten Mal am 9te Learning World - Der Learning Management Congress in Berlin beteiligt. Diese E-learning Konferenz fand in Ludwig-Erhard-Haus statt, das sich neben IHK in der Nähe von zoologischen Garten befindet. Mit dem Motto Empower Learning Innovation. Integration. Inspiration. ist Web 2.0 ein großes Thema geworden. Alle Key Note Speaker reden über Web 2.0 inklusiv Wikis, RSS, und Tagging usw. Es gibt Anzeichen dafür, dass Web 2.0 stark Forschungen in der Domäne E-learning beeinflußt hat und weiter beeinfließen wird. Der 2.0 Spirit zieht immer mehr wissenschaftliche Aufmerksamkeit auf sich. Es führt auch zu Diskussion, worauf man den Wert angesichts Forschungen legen soll. Sind es die benutzerfreundlichen Benutzeroberflächer mit runden Buttons, Einsatz von Wikis und Tagging überall, oder einfach Podcasting? Der Weg zum E-learning 2.0 bzw. Enterprise 2.0 scheint doch noch lang. Zwar fehle es auf dem deutschen Markt viele Informatiker, sowohl Hochschulabsolventen als auch Ausgebilderten, so Prof. August-Wilhelm Scheer. Alle Vorträge und Preisverleihungen bis auf die 10-Minuten-Präsentationen wurden aufgezeichnet und wird bald auf der Webseite veröffentlicht, indem gutes E-Learning Material das Publikum zugängig gemacht wird. Ich habe unsere Virtual Campfire in der Session 10-Minuten-Präsentationen Forschungsprototypen demonstriert. Dabei habe ich auch viele spannende Vorträge gehört.