Die unsichtbaren Diener – Der Compiler und seine Artgenossen

Boeszoermenyi_LaszloHinter jeder Interaktion mit einem Computer liegt zumindest eine „formale Sprache“, egal, ob es sich dabei um klassische Programmierung oder zum Beispiel um eine Interaktion über eine graphische Schnittstelle handelt.

Die formalen Sprachen werden durch Übersetzerprogramme in eine maschinell ausführbare Form umgewandelt. Die Theorie der formalen Sprachen und deren Übersetzer gehören zu den ältesten und am besten ausgearbeiteten, klassischen Gebieten der Informatik. Die Kenntnis des Übersetzungsvorgangs vermittelt besonders wertvolle Erkenntnisse über die Informatik. Im Vortrag wird ein Einblick in die Theorie und Praxis von formalen Sprachen, von Compilern und von ähnlichen Übersetzerprogrammen geboten.

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Wege, Umwege, Irrwege zur Kanalkapazität

HuberMit der Entwicklung der Informationstheorie gelang C. E. Shannon bereits im Jahre 1948 der Beweis, das mittels geeigneter Codierverfahren auch über gestörte Übertragungskanäle prinzipiell eine fehlerfreie digitale Übertragung möglich ist, solange nicht versucht wird, mehr Daten zu übertragen als die Kapazität des Kanals zulässt. Dieses Kanalcodierungstheorem leitete eine breite Forschungstätigkeit auf dem Gebiet der Kanalcodierung ein. Dennoch wurden über viele Jahre trotz des Einsatzes anspruchsvollster mathematischer Methoden nur eher bescheidene Fortschritte erreicht und das Ziel, die informationstheoretische Kapazität von Übertragungskanälen in der Praxis nutzbar zu machen, erschien grundsätzlich  unerreichbar. Erst durch die Zufallserfindung der sog. „Turbo-Codes

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Recent advances in visual information retrieval

Abstract: Visual information retrieval (VIR) is an active and vibrant research area which attempts at providing means for organizing, indexing, annotating, and retrieving visual information (images and videos) form large, unstructured repositories.  In its early years (1995-2000) the research efforts were dominated by content-based approaches contributed primarily by the image and video processing community.  Later, it was widely recognized that the challenges imposed by the semantic gap (the lack of coincidence between an image’s visual contents and its semantic interpretation) required a clever use of textual metadata (in addition to information extracted from the image’s pixel contents) to make image and video retrieval solutions efficient and effective. The need to bridge (or at least narrow) the semantic gap has been one of the driving forces behind current VIR research. Additionally, other related research problems and market opportunities have started to emerge, offering a broad range of exciting problems for computer scientists and engineers to work on.

This talk revisits the field of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) 10 years after „the end of the early years“ (as announced in a seminal paper in the field) and highlights the most relevant advances, pending challenges, and promising opportunities in CBIR and related areas. Particularly, it includes an overview of  the important field of medical image retrieval, its main challenges and opportunities.

Dr. Oge Marques is an Assoc

iate Professor and Associate Chairman in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Florida Atlantic University in 2001, his Masters in Electronics Engineering from Philips International Institute (Eindhoven, NL) in 1989 and his Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from UTFPR (Curitiba, Brazil), where he also taught for more than 10 years before moving to the USA.

His research interests include: image processing, analysis, annotation, search, and retrieval; human and computer vision; and video processing and analysis. He has more than 20 years of teaching and research experience in the fields of image processing and computer vision, in different countries (USA, Austria, Brazil, Netherlands, Spain, France, and India) and capacities. He is the (co-) author of 4 (four) books in these topics, including the forthcoming textbook “Practical Image and Video Processing Using MATLAB” (Wiley, 2011). He has also published several book chapters and more than 50 refereed journal and conference papers in these fields. He serves as a reviewer and Editorial Board member for several leading journals in computer science and engineering. He is a senior member of the ACM, senior member of the IEEE, and a member of the IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Education Society, and the honor societies of Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, Phi Kappa Phi and Upsilon Pi Epsilon. 

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A Multi-Agent Energy Trading Competition

wolfketterAbstract: The energy sector will undergo fundamental changes over the next ten years. Prices for fossil energy resources are continuously increasing, there is an urgent need to reduce CO2 emissions, and the United States and European Union are strongly motivated to become more independent from foreign energy imports. These factors will lead to installation of large numbers of distributed renewable energy generators, which are often intermittent in nature.

This trend conflicts with the current power grid control infrastructure and strategies, where a few centralized control centers manage a limited number of large power plants such that their output meets the energy demands in real time. As the proportion of distributed and intermittent power production capacity increases, this task becomes much harder, especially as the local and regional distribution grids where renewable energy producers are usually installed are currently virtually unmanaged, lack real time metering and in many cases are not built to cope with power flow inversions.

While the hierarchical command-and-control approach served well in a world with a few large scale generation facilities and many small consumers, a more flexible, decentralized, and self-organizing control infrastructure will have to be developed that can be actively managed to balance both the large grid as a whole, as well as the many lower voltage sub-grids. One strong candidate for this control infrastructure is to create energy markets at the retail level. To help mitigate the risk of instituting such markets in the real world, we are deve

loping a competitive market simulation testbed. We expect that this testbed will stimulate research and development of market structures along with automated software agents that can support decision making in these markets. Participants in the competition will design intelligent agents that will act as brokers, building portfolios of energy producers and consumers, and matching energy supply from producers with energy demand from consumers. The competition will closely model reality by bootstrapping the simulation environment with real historic load, generation, and weather data.

Wolfgang Ketter is Assistant Professor at the Department of Decision and Information Sciences at the Rotterdam School of Management of the Erasmus University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 2007. He founded and runs the Learning Agents Research Group at Erasmus (LARGE). The primary objective of LARGE is to research, develop, and apply autonomous and mixed-initiative intelligent agent systems to support human decision making in the area of business networks, electronic markets, information systems and supply-chain management. He was co-chairing the TADA workshop at AAAI 2008, the general chair of TAC 2009, and is member of the board of directors of the association for trading agent research since 2009. He is the program co-chair of the International Conference of Electronic Commerce 2011. His research has been published in various information systems, and computer science journals such as AI Magazine, Decision Support Systems, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, European Journal of Information Systems, INFORMS OR/MS Today, and International Journal of Electronic Commerce. He serves on the editorial board of Electronic Commerce Research and Applications.

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FTF-Newsletter Mai 2010

logo_newsMit dem FTF-Newsletter wollen wir sowohl einen Rückblick als auch Ausblick auf die Tätigkeiten des Fördervereins Technische Fakultät geben:


Rückblick:

Ausblick:

://campus.uni-klu.ac.at/va/ctl/vainfo/details?vanr=37205″>Lecture Series on „Artificial Vision“ von Prof. Gian Luca Foresti, Dr. Christian Micheloni and Dr. Claudio Piciarelli (University of Udine, Italy)

  • 7. Mai 2010: TEWI-Kolloquium „Code Quality at Google“ von Markus Clermont
  • 28. Mai 2010: TEWI-Kolloquium „A Multi-Agent Energy Trading Competition“ von Wolf Ketter
  • 11. Juni 2010: TEWI-Kolloquium „Recent advances in visual information retrieval“ von Oge Marques
  • 16. Juni 2010: Vortrag „Wege, Umwege, Irrwege zur Kanalkapazität: Anmerkung zur Geschichte der Entwicklung hocheffizienter digitaler Kanalcodierungsverfahren“ von Johannes Huber
  • 18. Juni 2010: 40 Jahre Universität Klagenfurt, Uni-Sommer
  • SS2010: Ringvorlesung der Informatikprofessoren, Mittwochs 18:00-19:30, HS B
  • Alle Termine finden Sie natürlich auch im TEWI-Fakultätskalender der Universität Klagenfurt. Allgemeine News rund um die Universität Klagenfurt finden Sie hier.

    An- bzw. Abmeldung zum Newsletter via http://www.foerderverein-technische-fakultaet.at/ [RSSEmail, Twitter, PDF, Xing, LinkedIn].

    Le Marketeur Francais: Enfin Sur CB ! Des Commissions Record !
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    ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2010

    Hi everybody,

    In this last post I want to present you two very interesting papers and ideas presented at ACM CHI ’10.
    The first paper entitled “Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface” was presented in the “Computing on the Body” session and won one of the best paper awards. It was published by Chris Harrsion et al. As the title of the paper suggests, “Skinput” uses the skin as an “input device”. A sensor array, worn as an armband, collects signals which occur when touching the skin. Depending on the place where the skin is touched (e.g. fingers, specific place at the forearm) these signals differ. This allows for a classification and the possibility to control a device, e.g. a cell phone, by just touching a specific location on one’s arm. Here is the abstract:

    “We present Skinput, a technology that appropriates the human body for acoustic transmission, allowing the skin to be used as an input surface. In particular, we resolve the location of finger taps on the arm and hand by analyzing mechanical vibrations that propagate through the body. We collect these signals using a novel array of sensors worn as an armband. This approach provides an always available, naturally portable, and on-body finger input system. We assess the capabilities, accuracy and limitations of our technique through a two-part, twenty-participant user study. To further illustrate the utility of our approach, we conclude with several proof-of-concept applications we developed.”

    The second paper I want to mention was published by Anne Aula et al. from Google. It was presented in the “Exploratory Search” session and is entitled “How does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult?“. Abstract:

    “Search engines make it easy to check facts online, but finding some specific kinds of information sometimes proves to be difficult. We studied the behavioral signals that suggest that a user is having trouble in a search task. First, we ran a lab study with 23 users to gain a preliminary understanding on how users‘ behavior changes when they struggle finding the information they’re looking for. The observations were then tested with 179 participants who all completed an average of 22.3 tasks from a pool of 100 tasks. The large-scale study provided quantitative support for our qualitative observations from the lab study. When having difficulty in finding information, users start to formulate more diverse queries, they use advanced operators more, and they spend a longer time on the search result page as compared to the successful tasks. The results complement the existing body of research focusing on successful search strategies.“

    This work was especially interesting for me, since it is related to our research and shows a perfectly designed user study.

    Concluding, I want to thank the “Förderverein Technische Fakultät” for the great support and the chance to attend the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2010 in Atlanta. Since I’ll start my PhD Program at Delft University of Technology soon, I am absolutely sure that I’ll benefit from all the knowledge and impressions gained while visiting this conference.

    All the best and see you soon!

    Christoph

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    Praxissemester am MIT, Cambridge USA – TEIL I

    In letzter Zeit werde ich oft gefragt wie es mir so ergangen ist am Massachusetts Institute of Technology oder einfach nur kurz dem MIT. Um euch ein wenig Einblick zu gewähren werde ich hier über die nächsten paar Tage/Wochen einen Mehrteiler veröffentlichen und ein wenig über die Zeit am MIT Media Lab plaudern an dem ich vom August 2009 bis Februar 2010 ein Praxissemester absolvieren durfte.

    MIT Main Entrance

    Wenn mir jemals jemand gesagt hätte ich würde einmal am MIT studieren und arbeiten, geglaubt hätte ich es bestimmt nicht, obwohl es ein langjähriger Traum von mir war. Als ich im Mai 2009 nach etwa 3-monatigem Hin und Her endlich die fixe Zusage hatte, dass ich mein Praxissemester am MIT Media Lab in Cambridge machen kann, war ich mehr als nur überglücklich – ein Traum ging in Erfüllung.

    Doch war es nicht gerade einfach. Das Media Lab mit ihren 29 Forschungsgruppen ist eine ausschließlich durch mehr als 60 namhafte Sponsoren finanzierte Einrichtung am MIT, welche es 138 Studenten (73 Master, 65 PhDs) ermöglicht auf Weltklasse Niveau zu forschen und zu studieren. So, oder zumindest so ähnlich, war mein erster Eindruck den ich gewinnen konnte, nachdem ich mich auf meine Reise in die USA vorbereitet hatte. Bevor mir jedoch die Pforten zum MIT geöffnet wurden, gingen zahlreiche Emails, Skype Konferenzen und ein von mir verfasster Forschungsvorschlag über die tief im Meer verlaufenden Übersee-Datenleitungen quer durch den Atlantik. Kurz darauf, oder genauer gesagt am 5. August desselben Jahres, machte ich mich dann auf die Reise von Klagenfurt über München nach Boston, über den Atlantik oder ganz salopp gesagt „ab über den große Teich“.
    MIT Stata Center
    Nach 10 Stunden Flug, und damit nicht ganz so schnell wie die Datenpakete sondern um etwa einen Faktor 3,6 * 105 langsamer, erreichte ich die Ostküste der USA voller Aufregung und mit einer großen Portion Abenteuergeist.

    Wie es mir nach der Ankunft ergangen ist könnt ihr im Teil II nachlesen, welcher schon bald hier veröffentlicht wird.

    Bonifaz Kaufmann

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