PhD/Researcher Vacancy at OUNL

there are current open positions in the European projects at OUNL. You can also contact me to know what it is like to work as Ph.D at OUNL

Please look details [here]

EduSynergy simulation

EduSynergy- a small world simulation (Albert Angehrn)

Albert Angehrn from INSEAD made us taste the EduSynergy simulation, which was quite interesting to know how we should understand, visualize and interpret the social networks dynamics. Online social networks are changing the way our society interacts. Participation about user-generated web contents provide us with the mechanism to observe, analyze, interpret and consume for our own personal interests.
What striked to my mind that social networks could have many implicit interpretations that might help in making strategic decisions by the interested parties. Some white decisions and some black ones. Black decisions, people who want to exploit your social network, break your trust connection, inject their interests and earn their gains. This raises the issues of trust and privacy of social network. At least it got much clear to me that social network can be analyzed and interpreted in much more different ways and used for many business interests that might surprise you.

The tremendous amount of personal information that we share over network like livejournal, facebook, orkut or social networking tools for making ourselves belong to a community, might be very valuable for people interested in personalized marketing business. A good paper to read on privacy issues in social networking.

TENC Winter’s Cool 2008 in Innsbrück ;-)

I am spending a week long Tencompetence Winter School in Innsbrück (Austria). We arrived today from Rotterdam in an hour and 10 min flight to Innsbrück. It was exciting flight with an amazing view over the Alps. We were lucky to see clear blue sky and white mountain peaks, simply awesome!

We took taxi to arrive at Grillhof, dropping our bags and leaving directly to the woods for a hike. Tomorrow would be an official start and much people would pour in. The challenge is to keep the people involved in conference when the surroundings and weather tries to seduce you… we will see, . Tim is flickring using his iPhone…stay tuned for some impressions soon.

First day at OTEC in Heerlen

…Today was my first working day at OTEC . An important step before making a long journey towards realizing a Ph.D thesis. The day was consumed in meeting new people, warm welcome and wishes of success, possibly some nice impressions of Dutch hospitality. Some of the important face-to-face talk included meeting with Jo Boon, she explained me the overall skeleton of OTEC, the working departments and the research groups. Hans Hummel, he gave a quick conceptual overview of Navigational Support in Learning Networks for Life-Long Learning. Francis Brouns, she described research issues of identifying Communities and Social Policies and exploiting them to apply to Learning Networks (LN), a lot of food for thought. Rest of the day spent with organizational issues and chit-chatting with other Ph.D colleagues, Henderik Drachsler who is working on Personal Recommendation System in LN and Sibren Fetter, who has started his Ph.D last month on Community and Social Policies, seemed busy making his way to write research plan, an important step before conducting further Ph.D research. The overall day was full of impressions. Many thanks to Mieke Haemers, our secretary for organizing all what is needed to get familiar with new environment. Interestingly enough, the working place for all OTEC Ph.d’s are called Ape Cage , atleast metaphorically, it does mean we are taking the footsteps of our grand grand fore-fathers…did we really evolve …I am expecting more to learn and know every day. Stay tuned to read my experiences in Ape Cage.