From 25 February till 27 February i was a participant of Wirtschaftinformatics 2009. The conference take place in German-speaking countries of Europe(Germany, Austria and Switzerland).
I'm not "Wirtschaftinformatiker" hovewer the conference was so big that i found my tracks:COllaborative services and E-Learning.

It is always a competition between Informatics and Wirtschaftinformatics. Researchers from the first area insist on the fact that they are doing "real science" - hardcore, while the others
think that computer scientists doing something that is not always needed, without analysis what the user really require. There were some presentations/papers that i found poor from scientific point of view, e.g.
ideas were not new or the amount of dataset entries was very low. But there were some interesting presentations and interesting people.

I like Matthias Trier presentation of "Content-based Community detection in social corpora".
The ENRON mail dataset was analysed on the existence of clusters. The research was devoted to two types of networks:a network built according to who write mail to whom and a network built based on content similarity.The clusters
were then compared.and... no wonder!the clusters both types were not similar.people who are talking about similar things were not always connected by mails. I had the same impression in the research of E-learning mailing lists. Now it
is a challenge to find how structures of mail networks are dependent from the content the network members create.What input do actions of the network members have? does it important what roles, experience do the nodes have?

"Mine, yours, ...ours.Designing for princiipal-agent collaboration in interactive value creation" from Jasminco Novak forced me to rethink how important for users to see the system in its development state. Usually users do not know what they
want. Exactly they do but they can not describe it. And if the users will participate in design process (review the prototypes of software) as much as they can, it might be useful to create an efficient software. It is like you are creating
the design of your house.you can have it in your mind but if you use a software that can present how the room looks like then you can change your mind about the furniture, the color of walls, etc.

Thursday was interesting only because of the keynote speaker, Mark Soley. I admit that he is a great speaker. I don't think that he presented something new, otherwise he talked about state of the art. Anyway it was useful to know that 25 millions
computers are running with Windows 3.1. Surely it was one more event that had to be highlighted - Gala dinner in Vienna Rathaus - gorgeous and luxury. I felt myself like in a tale.


Last day the track E-Learning took place. "Der Einsatz von Online-Peer-Reviews als kollaborative Lernform" from WUW (Christine Bauer and Kathrin Figl) was about peer reviews that were done by students to analyse the papers that they read. We have
proseminar now for our bachelors and it may be efficient to ask students review papers of others. And surely it save the working time of assitents ;-)

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!!!