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.
…for those who are enjoying football fever there is no end to it with another [ROBOcup 2006] being held at Bremen,
[BBC news] report says….The 10th annual RoboCup in Bremen, had more than 400 teams of robots dribbling, tackling and shooting in an effort to become world champions.Machines compete in 11 leagues including those designed for humanoid and four-legged robots.
The organisers of the tournament hope that in 2050 the winners of the RoboCup will be able to beat the human World Cup champions."RoboCup 2006 is the first step towards a vision," said Minoru Asada, president of the RoboCup Federation.
"This vision includes the development of a humanoid robot team of eleven players, which can win against a human soccer world champion team."
Germany. Interestingly, my University team from Osnabrueck [Brainstormers Tribots] participated in the mid-size league has won the first position in robocup )), here are performance [results]. and here are the [Winners]
Download Tribot's earlier performance at Netherlands [here]. Watch a [TV report].
For technical details and to know how the robot is programmed [look here]
… I have just been to a talk given by [Prof.Ben Schneiderman] here at [DFKI] on the issues of Creativity needed in comtemporary software tools, so far Software has been a productivity support tools, he emphasized on embedding improved usability and creativity within the software.The terms he used for developing Software supporting Creativity features should have
less Threshold (easy to use or start with )
high Ceiling ( Should have much support for Creativity in terms of usabilty and visualizations)
wide Wall ( wide applicability of domains and support for domain experts)
Evaluation of Creative research tools are difficult, he comments "controlled studies are inappropriate and brief case studies are not adequate". A proposal for Multi-dimensional In-depth Long-term Case-studies (MILC) is suggested.
Overall his talk gave a thought provoking impressions with big picture and a vision for Creativity research methods needed for future Software tools.
Out of the 5 matches to be held in Kaiserslautern, 12 june Kaiserslautern got its first game of the WM (german name of world cup – Weltmeisterschaft = world-championship), The game was between Australia and Japan. Aussies[socceroos] made 3:1 win over [Nippon]. Swarms of fans flooded the city that day literally blocking the pedestrian pathways of city center.Ozzy..had their best celebrations with street dance and spilling beer.[read more at Yasir’s blog].Tomorrow we are expecting much thrill in Kaiserslautern with USA against Italy.
Some of the best impressions from Kaiserslautern !!!
…seems like the city is busy for a whole month of festival during the football World cup.So common to see street shows, concerts and offcourse fan fest public viewing area (PVA), extravagantly money flowing and people pouring in, it's a worth visiting place if you are in any of the German sleep cities :-).
[short video] [more pictures]
…lunch at [DFKI] with indian recipes, it is worth mentioning here, it took 3 days in planning, a day long preparations, 2 hours of shopping and 5 hours of cooking…
…for two days I received many food for thoughts and also for belly:), I was in WSPI ’06 workshop at DFKI Saarbrücken
I had a nice time spent meeting people and talking on different issues and challenges in Information era,from services to Science,the idea was to pack together Philosophers and Computer Scientists in Alan Turing room at dfki saarbrücken and see who convinces whom. The debate was heated but never led to conclusion, at least many of interesting ideas emerged …
some smart words from Barry Smith I specially like to jot down, at times he was too explicit that he never hesitated to say the Computer Scientists as “teenagers“, interestingly funny.
But he made the room to ponder on many coherent ideas and science of system (be it formal or non-formal)
some of Barry’s words :
” Semantic Web missing to raise the Standard of Ontology”
” High quality shared Ontologies build Communities”
” Instances are not represented in Scientific Ontology, Why ? …. notion of instances is different in Ontology than the notion of instances in programming languages”
” Human brain is highly flexible but computers are not”
my point in conclusion would be that No thinking, No Consciousness are involved in Computers it’s only a play of words and a hype from Sci-Fi.
Computers are only helpful machines,which should be intelligently designed to be usable and that behaves according to the user’s demand.
…As planned, today i was among SemDesk Hackers for Gnowsis [A desktop application based on RDF to view the hype of Semantic Web Technologies on Personal Computers : A tool to better organise your personal resources on desktop computers].
nice time to meet smart peoples who are quite eager to smoke Semantic Desktop and encourage others to get addicted in Gnowsis 🙂
…Semantic Desktop idea is based on visualizing your organisation of work, categorising your thoughts in personalised ontology and making you smart in work efficiency
…here is my philosophy to support semantic Desktop idea,
basically we as human,are both social and individual in different contexts,wouldn't it be nice to know about ourself [metacognition] and evolve from experiences of our behaviour in different contexts,the more i know about myself the better i organise myself,what if this is realised in Gnowsis: whose idea is to provide a better platform for personalised Ontology right on your desktop.
my way of learning and memorizing a new concept is through association and collaboration,the more i associate myself the better i organise myself,does it work the same for you ? if yes,then get addicted to personal organisation,visualize your mental model,know your social and personal contexts,make your Personalised IM Ontology and be smart :Gnowsis keeps this vision.
my ideas are a bit exaggerated but not impractical "Usability increases metacognition" and "metacognition makes you more intelligent"
…this world needs smart people atleast for Godly reasons 🙂
..so wait we are not finished yet ,two more days to work together,sharing ideas and hack together to make things work together
… now i am in Kaiserslautern ,south-west of Germany, also known as American city of Europe (K-town),because it has a largest American Military base in Europe called "Ramstein"
…expecting a new city life,different experiences and much more work.I see Kaiserslautern as the city of technology sorrounded by beautiful nature:little mountains and forests.Kaiserslautern is One of the 12 venues for World cup Soccer 2006 and expected to be known internationally.
…An investigation of perceptual mechanisms in humans,the idea has been to capture my Attention and Fixations over a given set of snaps…here is what Benjamin says who took my experiement:
” In an earlier eye tracking experiment with rhesus macaques, a big increase in the influence of luminance contrast for the monkeys, as compared to most renowned base lines in humans was found. On the other side, spatial contrast was found to be less influential. We would like to compare the monkeys’ fixations to those of other studies conducted at our institute and show the same stimuli to humans in order to enhance the comparison. It has to be observed especially, whether the aforementioned differences are attributable to differences in perception of monkeys and humans or to properties of the stimuli“.
Danzinde 