Last week, I gave a lit­tle pre­sen­ta­tion at the col­lo­quium of the media infor­mat­ics fac­ulty at TU Dres­den. Find the slides here. I would also like to use the chance to make you aware of the OUTPUT event on April 23, where stu­dent and research works are pre­sented and some inter­est­ing talks are planned. For read­ers of this blog, prob­a­bly the Tech­nis­che Visu­al­is­tik track will be most inter­est­ing, with talks about multi-touch, blended inter­ac­tion, touch­less inter­ac­tion etc.

SIGGRAPH 2009 is over. Tra­di­tion­ally renowned as a graph­ics geek fest, with a focus on 3D and ani­ma­tion, I was not sur­prised to hear “GPU” in every sec­ond over­heard sen­tence. But there is also the other side of SIGGRAPH: the art exhi­bi­tions, the emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies exhi­bi­tion and the freshly intro­duced infor­ma­tion aes­thet­ics pro­gram with talks, a panel and an exhi­bi­tion. I was present there with the well-formed.eigenfactor project and also had the chance to give a lit­tle talk.

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I will have a ses­sion at Viz­Think ’08 about visual tools for the socio-semantic web.

You can find a pod­cast inter­view with me about the ses­sion and ongo­ing work here.

The (pre­lim­i­nary) ses­sion abstract reads

In this break-out ses­sion at Viz­Think 08, Moritz Ste­faner will present visual strate­gies to under­stand and dis­cuss emer­gent infor­ma­tion archi­tec­tures in the web. Phe­nom­ena like the main­stream acknowl­edge­ment of the web as a social plat­form, and the first steps towards a seman­tic web (as envi­sioned by Tim Berners-Lee a decade ago) demand for new approaches to infor­ma­tion han­dling. Fol­low­ing the research agenda for web sci­ence, visu­al­iza­tion can not only help to under­stand these emrg­ing struc­tures, but also to shape and steer inter­face design. We will dis­cuss and crit­i­cize exist­ing and cutting-edge approaches to search and brows­ing of resources and the visu­al­iza­tion of con­cep­tual structures.

So, I planned to show some of my the­sis work, and on-going work like the MACE project, and make some gen­eral posi­tions state­ments about where things should head in this area. But the rest is pretty open – for those attend­ing – what are you inter­ested in? Happy about short comments!

Btw: If you plan to reg­is­ter, use the dis­count code DCFF23 to get 50 € discount!

I am back from a lit­tle excur­sion to the Lud­wig Boltz­mann Insti­tute for media art research in Linz. I gave a talk on visu­al­iza­tion and my master’s the­sis.

Here are the slides (ger­man). Most of the exter­nal ref­er­ences are linked (click on the pictures).

Thanks to Mario Röhrle and Diet­mar Offen­hu­ber for the invitation!

Another week, another conference :)

This time, it was the EC-TEL07 (Euro­pean Con­fer­ence on Tech­nol­ogy Enhanced Learn­ing) in Crete. Elisa Dalla Vec­chia and I pre­sented the MACE project (slides, video 1, video 2) and besides, met a lot of nice people.

The con­fer­ence itself was really well orga­nized. The keynotes (Her­mann Mau­rer and Bruce Ster­ling) were excel­lent and big pic­ture, cov­er­ing a wide range of dig­i­tal lifestyle top­ics and wild ideas. Dig­i­tal quacks & char­la­tans, why Google is not so non-evil after all, telepa­thy is triv­ial, fly­ing cars. No kid­ding. Many of the ses­sion talks, on the other hand, were not that excit­ing at all. I have the feel­ing many peo­ple in this area first build a “frame­work for…” before actu­ally try­ing out some ideas on real learners.

More info on the con­fer­ence blog, wiki and the flickr stream.

Greet­ings to Mar­tin Mem­mel from DFKI, who I met to talk about the ALOE project and Chris­t­ian Glahn, who pre­sented nice work on Smart Indi­ca­tors for learner feed­back, and Joris Klerkx, who is quite into infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion. I am look­ing for­ward to future devel­op­ments, guys!

And just for the record, here are my favorite insider nerd joke con­fer­ence memes:

• Magic doesn’t scale.
• Minigolf? Ouzome!
• “Every­thing is a plat­form” — freaky!
• Telepa­thy is trivial.
• “Any­ways — back to me”