My summary of the year

I decided not to wait till 31st of December and write down the summary of this year today.

I started to work as a research assistant at Information Systems and Databases Chair in RWTH Aachen University from March, 2008. That is my first working position after i finish my master thesis. I'm happy to have helpful and positive colleagues. You can find some of them in blogosphere -Yiwei Cao, Ralf Klamma, Amine Chatti, and most in Facebook:)

My work starts with supporting my colleagues in writing EU ICT proposals. By the way, new calls are opened, if you are interested.

I'm working as well in CUELC project. It is EU Tempus project together with Cairo University(CU) and INT Sud Paris. We have managed to organize the visitation of Egyptians to European colleagues and vice versa. The first one was organized in Aachen as a workshop "Challenges for intercultural virtual campus systems" together with Forschungskolleg in Cologne. The main topic of discussion were E-Learning systems of universities(RWTH Aachen and Open University(we visited Heerlen OU - thanks Sebastian Kelle)) and intercultural communications.

Next visitation was organized by CU in Egypt where Katherine Maillet and me participated in ICT Learn conference. We got an actual status of PLEs and other E-Learning systems in Middle East.

Last day we had the productive discussion with Magda Fayek and Ahmed Hefny about next CUELC programming competition(the first one was finished recently - the happy winners

got there iPods Shuffles). I want to thank again colleagues Professor Samir, Professor Nevin, and Dr. Magda Fayek for great organization of our meeting in Cairo.

Some of my colleagues and i participated in annual PROLEARN Summer School. Numerous interesting contacts and lectures made the event very useful for many of PhD students and their future works. Our research group was presented by "Mobile and Contextualised Learning" workshop, done by Anna, Dominik, Ralf and me. Firstly we organised the set of Flashmeetings

• Flashmeeting from 09.06


• Flashmeeting from 10.06


• Flashmeeting from 11.06

and after that we had the real presentation in Summer School. Truly, it was challengeable to organize all the staff, but a good lesson for us. Anyway, summer school left very bright memories. Great thanks to organization comitee: Katherine Maillet, Klime Poposki, Liliane Esnault, Ralf Klamma, Tomaz Klobucar, Ambjörn Naeve, Margit Hofer and many others.

I'm a member of International Recruiting Team of RWTH Aachen, organized within Excellence Initiative. The idea of the group is to promote our institution between students all over the world. In the frames of this activity colleagues from International Office and i was in the business trip in Sankt-Petersburg and Kiev. The trip was organized by DAAD and had all types of bustles - usual for post-soviet countries. I got acquainted with representatives of many German universities and colleges as well as with their institution marketing that is useful for us. I hope that next year we will manage to make more in so called "online brand management". I think that we should focus on different social network sites as well as social network services to inform and consult potential students and their forces(people who influence on choice of university) about RWTH Aachen.

September was full of conferences: firstly I-KNOW - together with Anna, Ralf and Yiwey we wrote Getting to "Know" People on the Web 2.0 paper; the second one was EC-TEL, where Ralf and I had a presentation about No Guru, No Method, No Teacher: Self-Oberservation and Self-Modelling of E-Learning Communities; the third was digital social network workshop on the day of GI, where we had the paper about our Media Base - The Troll Under the Bridge: Data Management for Huge Web Science Mediabases. For each of the events i made many of notes - now i understand that i should post it earlier)

In October our students, Christian Hocken and Dominik Renzel, organized annual Developer's Day, that has many interesting presentations. I like discussions.

Except of all these projects and conferences we have teaching tasks and this year i'm one of the supervisors of exciting Hightech Entrepreneurship and New Media practical course. Students of my group work with Localite company and develop a system that will help the company to organize products, contracts and correspondence in a better way(interactive and web2.0 based). I'm looking forward for their results.

Last, but not least was the organization of Christmas celebration in the chair together with other new colleagues: Sandra Geisler, Elisabeth Birk, Khaled A.N. Rashed, Man Cuong Pham, and Vaishak Belle. I hope that was a lot of fun, at least for the organization team.

Happy Holidays for all of readers!!!

Reflective patterns in online communities

The rate of return (ROI) answers are the money gained or lost. It measures a percentage of the interest to the investment, e.g. you gained 5 € on your 10€ investment - the ROI is 5/10=50%. The ROI can be as well negative.

How can we analyse the interest of the investment in online communities? What events cause positive or negative activities in networks? There are some papers trying to explain the matter of things basing on communities contributions:

In Burke et al. the scholars calculated the probabilities of getting a response in discussion boards. The probabilities highly depends on the type of introduction("i'm lurking here for several months" - group introduction or "working as a professional in this area" - topic introduction) and sometimes on the type of group.

The wiki case is observed in "Wikis as social networks: dynamics and evolution", where the vandalism on a wiki page was detected if the page regulates the information flow within Wikis. Particularly, if the page is a hub between many other pages, the probability of trashing is high.

Anyway, it is more complex to find out the ROI for human interactions as to calculate the finance ROI, where monetary values are used. The investements in human interactions and the interests of these are not uniform and hardly comparable. What you know from the childhood: if you use rude words in the conversation, your listener will reply coarsely as well (in most cases). The rule "if ... then ... " is on the stage. If we have the pattern "rude question", will we get the pattern "rude answer"? Why yes and why now? What are dependencies? Shouldn't the activities/events/actions in communities be modeled? Then will modeling be useful to find the provoked profit?

In the informatics there is a bag of artificial intelligence problems like reasoning, learning, decision making. Those are aware or at least try to be aware of all the inconsistencies and uncertanties human interactions have. Those should be used to find the reflective patterns.