Andreas P. Schmidt

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Successful second annual review for AGENT-DYSL

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

The last days I was at Brussels for the second annual AGENT-DYSL project review. AGENT-DYSL is about providing reading support for children with dyslexia.

It is always good to hear that your own work and of the team as a whole is appreciated. Instead of an exam situation, the project officer and the reviewers have managed to create an atmosphere of dialogue (almost) among peers where you can discuss ideas to improve system. That makes reviews much more effective as it can have really a positive impact on the project as an external advice, and you are much more likely to be convinced that reviewer comments really make sense and are not just to be followed because of the assymetry of power.

But the best thing about it was the summary

We recognized the technological excellence & hard work. The tool for reading appears almost as a game, not immediately demotivating as many other solutions for children.

Posted in agent-dysl, education | Comments Off

AKWM Symposion 2008, Karlsruhe

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Yesterday, I was at this year’s edition of the AKWM Symposion, which is the yearly event of the Karlsruhe working group on knowledge management. The organizers always manage to find interesting speakers and presenters, among them the following:

Wim Veen from TU Delft opened the day with his insights around the Homo Zappiens and highlighted the radical shifts difference in media exposure, consumption, and perception of children of the digital age. In contrast to others, he viewed this change not as generally bad, but rather emphasized that multi-player games like World of Warcraft let’s children learn social collaboration behavior, and that parallel usage of different channels help to form the important skill of multitasking. He suggested that as parents and educators we should be less worried about the usage of computers, mobile phones, and other media devices, but rather immerse into those new environments to understand them better and to be able to provide guidance.

Gabi Reinmann from University of Augsburg presented conceptual foundations for personal knowledge management based on her book “Wissenswege” (paths of/toward knowledge), which could be interesting to incorporate into the MATURE discussion on Personal Learning Environments At the end of her talk she presented results from two studies on knowledge bloggers (researchers and teachers), whose emotional/motivational aspects could be crucial for the notion of PLEs, too: experience of competence, social integration, and autonomy. Particularly the latter one could be a challenges and source of conflict for PLEs within organizations – one example in the discussion mentioned that external blogging platforms are preferred over corporate blogging platforms because of the aspect of autonomy.

Manfred Spitzer from the University Hospital Ulm gave a very inspiring talk on the neuropsychological insights of learning. Apart from the entertaining style of presentation, he was also able to communicate the key findings of neuropsychological research in recent years, e.g.,

the role of positive and negative emotions on learning effects: learning based on negative emotions (particularly fear) is very quick, but blocks any form of creativity; positive emotions can boost learning outcomes as it increases neural activity
the differences between children and adults: while learning can be very quick in childhood, adult learning is slower – which does not mean that one is better than the other

Additionally, he had a very strong opinion on how the education system should look like and that modern media (like TV, but also computers) have a bad impact on the development of children. He suggested to expose children to the Internet after the age of 17, opposed the – it would have been interesting to have a panel discussion with Wim Veen. After all, I don’t think that there is any radical answer to the challenges of the digital age, neither protection against, nor uncriticial embracing of the “digital native” phenomenon. But another suggestion from him is definitely a good idea: evidence-based education and conducting more empirical educational research on the effectiveness of pedagogical concepts and methods.

He has a similarly strong opinion on the use of Powerpoint (he opposed the fact that children at school are forced to use Powerpoint for their slides) – and cited the NASA Columbia accident assessment where Powerpoint-based communication was considered one of the causes. Well, probably he was one of the example that very good presenters do not need Powerpoint slides at all, but I would argue that the use of slides makes helps average and less-than-average presenters.

As a replacement for Franz Reinisch, I had the opportunity to present MATURE as one of the key activities in the knowledge management field of the iRegion Karlsruhe. The presentation particularly highlighted the potential of the knowledge maturing approach to overcome the separation of knowledge management and learning.

Hans-Peter Schnurr from Ontoprise and Prof. Rudi Studer from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and FZI moderated the session and gave an overview of the cluster initiative iRegion, aimed at fostering the IT cluster Karlsruhe (which is among the top 3 in Europe).

Technorati-Tags: akwm,matureip,knowledge_management,km,education

Posted in education, km, mature-ip, maturing, symposium | Comments Off

ECTEL 2008 – "Time for Convergence" @ Maastricht

Friday, September 19th, 2008

This week I had the opportunity to attend the 3rd European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning at Maastricht in the Netherlands. It was a good networking opportunity for the TEL community, which some dubbed as a “big family” (with all the different aspects of a family). About 130 participants included mostly players from the European projects in the TEL area.

There were some interesting key notes:

Kia Höök inspired the participants to consider the body and the affective dimension of human behavior in their research and development. I think that there is a huge potential, particularly if we want truly holistic and motivating/engaging learning experiences, although it is not easy to see how to transfer her research results, e.g., to workplace learning support. One step in that direction could be the upcoming Call 3 STREP xDELIA where my colleague Clemens van Dinther is involved in and which will deal with emotions.
Manu Kapur reported on his experiments on “productive failure”, which showed that students who fail in groups confronted with ill-structured problems outperform those who are successful in groups with well-structured problems even in well-structured problem domains. This implies that short-term failure may not be a reliable indicator for longer term learning success.

ECTEL08 has given itself the mission “Time of convergence”, aiming at bridging different learning contexts. The discussions at the conference showed that convergence it still at its beginning. This manifested in the recurring debates about the role of informal learning and whether the TEL community should target that more (as APOSDLE and MATURE have started):

There was an increasing number of presentations and discussion contributions (e.g, from Graham Attwell as part of the MATURE PLE conceptualizations), including the keynote by Roy Pea who emphasized the role of informal learning compared to formal learning (e.g., only 5% of a student’s learning is within formal contexts).
On the other side, Pierre Dillenbourg doubted that this turn towards the “informal” is helpful for the TEL community (he still acknowledges the importance of informal learning) and suspects that this emerging shift of attention is because of frustration about not being able to change the formal system.
Rob Koper emphasized in the closing panel that if we want to have informal learning support, we should first work on the acknowledgment and valuing of informal activities in career development.

The EC (represented by Pat Manson, Marco Marsella, and Martin Májek) explained that investments into TEL have so far not entered practice in a sufficient way. Stefanie Lindstaedt pointed out that industry could be faster to introduce workplace learning tools, but for that we need to provide evidence about the impact, and this can only be achieved if we do not focus on short term effects, but also on longer term effects.

Also for MATURE, this was a good event. On the first day, MATURE presented the first results of the five months of the project and organized a workshop on Learning in Enterprise 2.0. This was a very good opportunity to bring together the different strands of development (ethnography, concept development, and technical integration of existing tools within design studies) in an open atmosphere and to receive feedback from the community. Additionally, Graham Attwell presented the rolling out of a first simple PLE based on Freefolio in the UK, which is closely linked to MATURE activities.

Technorati tags: ectel08, matureip

Posted in conference, elearning, mature-ip, publications, workplace learning | Comments Off

Learning in Enterprise 2.0 Workshop and first MATURE results

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

Next week, I will attend the ECTEL 2008 conference at Maastricht. Together with several others I am organizing the LEB 2008 workshop (Learning in Enterprise 2.0 and Beyond), which aims at exploring the implications of web 2.0 and e-learning 2.0 to learning in enterprises. This will also be a good opportunity to see the results of the first five months of the MATURE IP and to get into discussion with us:

Informal learner styles: Individuation, interaction, in-form-ation (Ronald Maier, Stefan Thalmann)
This contributions presents an informal learning typology based on the first ethnographic study.
Concept of a Tool Wrapper Infrastructure for Supporting Services in a PLE (Tobias Nelkner, Wolfgang Reinhardt, Graham Attwell)
The authors present further steps towards the notion of a personal learning environment in enterprises.
Ontologies, Dialogue and Knowledge Maturing: Towards a Mashup and Design Study (Andrew Ravenscroft, Simone Braun, John Cook, Andreas Schmidt, Jenny Bimrose, Alan Brown, Claire Bradley)
This contribution introduces a design study of combining the SOBOLEO tool for supporting ontology maturing and the Interloc tool for argument games.

Technorati tags: matureip, ectel08

Posted in conference, elearning, mature-ip, maturing, workplace learning | Comments Off

Presentation on Knowledge Maturing at Ohrid Summer School

Monday, June 16th, 2008

In the middle of weeks of heavy travelling, I am currently at Ohrid for the PROLEARN/EATEL Summer School. Pablo and I had the opportunity to open the summer school with the first lecture on Knowledge Maturing: a different perspective on learning where we explained the main conceptual foundations of the MATURE IP.

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Tags: scohrid
Posted in elearning, hr, km, mature-ip, maturing, symposium, workplace learning | Comments Off

Learning in Enterprise 2.0 and Beyond – ECTEL 2008 Workshop

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Rethinking learning in enterprises in response to bottom-up participatory approaches is one of the main themes of the MATURE IP. So together with my colleague Simone Braun (FZI), Graham Attwell (Pontydysgu), Eric Ras (Fraunhofer IESE), Stefanie Lindstaedt (Know-Center), and Ronald Maier (University of Innsbruck) we are organizing a workshop at this year’s ECTEL conference in Maastricht on that subject: Learning in Enterprise 2.0 and Beyond.

Recently, we have seen a paradigm shift in technology support for learning towards more participatory approaches in which learners are seen as active contributors. Within enterprises, this new perspective brings together traditionally separated disciplines like e-learning, knowledge management, and human resources development, but also requires a fundamental change of the culture of the respective enterprise towards an enterprise 2.0, which is characterized by enhanced collaboration and a cultural of employee participation. The enterprise 2.0 needs to understand itself as a learning organization, needs to leverage bottom-up processes (from the employee towards the organization) and aim at closed-loop approaches where feedback, continuous improvement, and encouraging small and large-scale innovations at all levels is key.

In this workshop, we aim at exploring new ways of technology-enhanced learning within an enterprise on the way to enterprise 2.0, and the role of learning technology in the transformation process. This includes the exploration of individual perspectives in the form of personal learning environments (in contrast to traditional LMS or VLE), the community perspective, and the organizational perspective (new forms of guidance, e.g., as part of competence management strategies). There is a tension between these different perspectives, which has a huge impact on the success of learning technologies in the enterprise. Therefore, we are also looking for conceptual approaches addressing these issues.

One important aspect in this respect is the consideration of motivational factors affecting the engagement in learning activities and the contribution towards organizational goals: how can we leverage the intrinsic motivation of employees and create learning contexts that keep this motivation alive? What is the effect of social relationships?

An essential part of the workshop will be the interaction of the participants, aiming at a better definition/characterization of enterprise 2.0 and the implications for future research approaches. This will be facilitated by a larger discussion slot which will be moderated and guided by lead questions.

Topics

Topics include empirical, conceptual, and technical approaches in the following areas:

Designing personal learning environments
- Learner as consumer and producer and learner empowerment
- Relevant tools, services, and architectures
- Bottom-up approaches for work-integrated learning
- Connecting knowledge assets, e.g. with mashups, semantic structures
Exploring the tension between individual and organizational perspectives on learning
- Scaffolding and guidance of individual learning processes towards organizational goals (business or competence development goals)
- Exploring the transitions between individual, community, and organizational learning
- Learning in distributed communities of practice and collaboration between different enterprises
- Approaches bridging knowledge management, e-learning, and human resources perspectives
- Employability, role of different types of e-portfolios
- Collaborative and participatory competence management
- Novel educational approaches and learning theories on technology-enhanced individual and organizational learning
Motivational and social aspects
- Motivational and social barriers to informal learning
- Designing learning environments to leverage intrinsic motivation
- Awareness of social relationships

Target Group

The workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners concerned with learning in enterprises including includes researchers from different backgrounds like information technology, (vocational) pedagogy, psychology, and multiple fields of expertise like e-learning, knowledge management, human resources, among others.

Submission Types

Research papers (up to 10 pages)
Position papers (up to 5 pages)
Experience reports (short up to 5 pages, long up to 10 pages)

Organization Commitee

Andreas Schmidt, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Germany [main contact, email: aschmidt@fzi.de]
Graham Attwell, Pontydysgu, UK
Simone Braun, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Germany
Stefanie Lindstaedt, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Ronald Maier, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Eric Ras, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany

Programme Commitee

Alan Brown, University of Warwick, UK
John Cook, London Metropolitan University, UK
Knut Hinkelmann, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland
Helen Keegan, University of Salford, UK
Barbara Kieslinger, ZSI, Austria (TBC)
Christine Kunzmann, Kompetenzorientierte Personalentwicklung, Germany
Tobias Ley, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Johannes Magenheim, University of Paderborn, Germany
Torsten Leidig, SAP, Germany (TBC)
Jeanne Mengis, University of Lugano, Switzerland
Andrew Ravenscroft, London Metropolitan University, UK
Uwe Riss, SAP, Germany (TBC)
Luk Vervenne, Synergetics, Belgium
Amir Winer, Center for Futurism in Education, Ben-Gurion-University of the Negev, Israel
Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer FIT, Germany
Volker Zimmermann, IMC, Germany

Tags: elearning, enterprise20, km, knowledge_management, learning, web20
Posted in CfP, competencies, elearning, hr, mature-ip, maturing, workplace learning | Comments Off

MATURE Kick-Off Meeting at Karlsruhe

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

Judging from my inbox (more than 1.200 incoming and 700 outgoing mails), the project must have started quite some time ago, but it is actually only tomorrow that the MATURE IP is going to start. The preparation of the kick-off meeting at Karlsruhe has been a lot of work in which I was supported a lot by my colleague Simone Braun, but I’m now really looking forward to the next three days – the team spirit was already incredible at proposal stage. MATURE is about exciting topics, and I have received a lot of positive feedback on the ideas and approach we have at various occasions. So let’s start to make the ideas reality!

From FZI, we have issued a press release both in German and English, and you can find together with high resolution logo files under http://mature-ip.eu/press:

… MATURE builds on the lessons of the failures of organisation-driven approaches to technology-enhanced learning and the success of community-driven approaches in the spirit of Web 2.0. MATURE leverages the intrinsic motivation of employees to engage in collaborative learning activities, and aims at combining it with a new technology-enhanced form of organisational guidance. For that purpose, MATURE conceives individual learning processes to be interlinked (the output of a learning process is input to others) in a knowledge maturing process in which knowledge changes in nature. This knowledge can take the form of classical (learning) content in varying degrees of maturity, but also involves knowledge about tasks and processes or semantic structures (including competence models). The goal of MATURE is to better understand this maturing process, based on a series of empirical studies, and to build tools and services to reduce maturing barriers. …

Posted in mature-ip, maturing, workplace learning | Comments Off

OntoContent 2008

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

After a successful OntoContent 2007 workshop, we are now preparing a next instance of the OntoContent workshop series. This year will will concentrate on user-centered semantics (under the theme of Web 3.0) and on collecting experiences on ontology engineering and maintenance from the fields of Human Resources, and e-health/life sciences/ambient assisted living.

Ontology Content and Evaluation in Enterprise
with two Special Tracks on Human Resources and E-Health/AAL

in conjunction with OnTheMove Federated Conferences 2008, Monterrey, Mexico

http://ontocontent2008.mature-ip.eu

Under the buzz word Semantic Web a lot of research has been going on in recent years, exploring formalisms for expressing ontologies, reasoning algorithms for inferencing hidden knowledge in an open world, but also on “semantifying” different types of problems. But outside the Semantic Web research community, there has been little uptake so far. This is also due to the fact that the concept of ontology is more about content than formalism, and we are in dire need for content-related research and experiences. As Braun et al. 2007 stated, a “good” ontology is a balance of the degree of social agreement, the level of formality, and the appropriateness for the problem at hand that is supposed to be solved with ontologies. In line with this view, the workshop is looking for experiences and empirical results on which formalism is better suited, how to achieve or measure social agreement, and how to judge whether an ontology is appropriate. It is the mission of this workshop to report on these experiences and to reflect them back to the Semantic Web community.

In the area of system design, there is currently a major shift taking place towards user-centered design, and the workshop aims to foster use-centered ontology-based system design. Therefore, we also welcome research and experiences on participatory and evolutionary approaches (i.e., with a continuously high degree of involvement of the actual users) to building and maintaining ontologies that pave the way towards a Web 3.0, bringing together users and semantics.

We also strongly encourage to submit critical papers deriving lessons from failures with “ontologies in the wild”, not only stereotypical success reports!

Workshop Structure and Topics

The workshop will consists of three main parts: a general part on experiences with real-world ontology engineering and approaches to assessment of ontologies, a special track on ontologies in Human Resources and a special track on ontologies in e-health and ambient-assisted living.

Towards Web 3.0: a user-centered semantic web
- lessons from Web 2.0 for ontology engineering
- experiences with participatory and evolutionary approaches to ontology engineering (e.g., based on social software)
- lightweight ontology formalisms (e.g., SKOS) and microformats
- experiences/empirical results on lightweight vs. heavy-weight ontologies
- experiences/empirical results on graphical modeling of ontologies
- experimental evidence (e.g., from cognitive science) on conceptual modeling
- challenges/requirements for maintenance and evolution of ontologies
- good, best, and bad practices

Methods for assessing ontologies
- Ontology evaluation
- Quality measures for ontologies
- assessment of ontologies with regard to social agreement, formality, and appropriateness
- experiences with assessment and evaluations methods

Ontologies in Human Resources (Recruiting, Development, Employability)
- modeling and representation of: Jobs, CVs, Competencies, Skills, Employees, People, Organizations, Social Events, etc.
- HR upper level concepts
- E-Portfolio (standards) and ontologies
- Semantics of HR-XML
- Semantic metadata for HR applications
- Semantics in job matching
- Semantics in learning technologies
- Good/Best practices for semantics in HR
- Maintenance of ontologies in HR

Ontologies in E-Health and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)
- Upper level concepts of healthcare and life sciences ontologies.
- Ontologies of diseases, nursing, therapeutics, drug, etc.
- Ontologies and ontology-driven approaches in Ambient-Assisted Living
- Maintenance of ontologies in e-health and AAL

If you feel that something fits into the theme of the workshop, but is not listed here, just contact the organizers.

Submissions

Types of papers include:

research papers (max. 10 pages)
case studies experience reports (preferrably from industry) (max 10 pages)
position papers, clearly analyzing current state of practice for future challenges of research (max. 6 pages)

Papers submitted to OntoContent 2008 must not have been accepted for publication elsewhere or be under review for another workshop or conference. All submitted papers will be evaluated by at least three members of the program committee, based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of expression.

Papers will be published in an LNCS volume by Springer as part of OTM 2008 proceedings. Excellent papers will be considered for a journal publication or as book chapters

Important Dates

Abstract Submission Deadline: June 15, 2008
Paper Submission Deadline: June 30, 2008
Acceptance Notification : August 15, 2008
Camera Ready Due: August 25, 2008
Registration Due: August 25, 2008
OTM Conferences: November 9 – 14, 2008

Organizers

Andreas Schmidt, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Karlsruhe, Germany [main contact]
andreas.schmidt@fzi.de

Mustafa Jarrar, University of Cyprus
mustafa@jarrar.info

Werner Ceusters, University of Buffalo, USA

Program Committee (partially to be confirmed and to be completed)

Bill Andersen, Ontology Works, USA
Keith Baker, University of Reading, UK
Ernst Biesalski, EnBW AG, Germany
Paolo Bouquet, University of Trento, Italy,
Simone Braun, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Germany
Christopher Brewster, University of Sheffield, UK
Michael Brown, Skillsnet.Com
Yannis Charalabidis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Ernesto Damiani, Computer Science Department, Milan University, Italy
Aldo Gangemi, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy
Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento, Italy
Giancarlo Guizzardi, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Mohand-Said Hacid, University Claude Bernard Lyon 1 LIRIS – Villeurbanne, France
Martin Hepp, DERI Innsbruck, Austria
Stijn Heymans, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Christine Kunzmann, Kompetenzorientierte Personalentwicklung, Germany
Jens Lemcke, SAP AG, Germany
Tobias Ley, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Stefanie Lindstaedt, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Alessandro Oltramari, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy
Viktoria Pammer, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Jeff Pan, University of Aberdeen, UK
Paul Piwek, Open University, UK
Christophe Roche, Université de Savoie, France
Peter Scheir, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Pavel Shvaiko, University of Trento, Italy
Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcalá, Spain
Barry Smith, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA
Silvie Spreeuwenberg, LibRT, The Netherlands
Armando Stellato, University of Roma, Italy
Andrew Stranieri, JUSTSYS, Ballarat, Australia
Karl Stroetmann, Empirica, Germany
Sergio Tessaris, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Robert Tolksdorf, Free University of Berlin, Germany
Francky Trichet, University of Nantes, France
Luk Vervenne, Synergetics, Belgium

Sponsoring institutions/projects

This workshop is organized in a joint effort by the Ontology Outreach Advisory (OOA), the MATURE IP, and the SOPRANO IP.

The OOA is an international not-for-profit association that consists of industry, government, and research leaders and innovators with respect to ontology development, use, or education. The general mission of the OOA is to develop strategies for ontology recommendation and standardization, and promote the ontology technology to industry.
The MATURE IP is a large-scale integrating European project (FP7) in the field of technology-enhanced learning aiming at support of knowledge maturing processes within and across companies, including in particular ontology maturing.
The SOPRANO IP is an integrated European project (FP6) in the field of ambient-assisted living and follows an ontology-driven service-oriented approach to construct a flexible and affordable platform for in-house ambient-assisted living solutions.

Tags: aal, competence, hr, ontology, web30
Posted in aal, CfP, competencies, hr, maturing, ontology, soprano | 1 Comment »

Good Tags – Bad Tags: Social Tagging in Knowledge Organization

Monday, February 25th, 2008

Tagging as a lightweight, more participatory approach to resource metadata has become a hype in a wide range of disciplines, among them computer science, information management, and psychology. Last week’s workshop “Good Tags – Bad Tags: Social Tagging in Knowledge Organization”, well organized at Tübingen at the Knowledge Media Research Center, showed the different, but converging perspectives on tagging. Main success factors identified were:

simplicity (and the resulting ease of use), although a “tagging competency” was still considered necessary
enabling of participatory system design (i.e., tagging as appropriate metadata formalism for user generated content)
reduction of cognitive load for the annotator
flexibility and agility (not prescribing metadata structure, but allowing for emergence thereof)

The workshop also showed different understanding of “tags” and “tagging”. Johannes Busse (a colleague from ontoprise working in our project Im Wissensnetz made a good point with differentiating between linguistic tagging (where a tag represents a syntactic string) and semantic tagging (where a tag is another resource, be it a semantic concept, a person, another resource etc.). Also, some definitions of a tag annotation were presented, which stressed that a tag annotation is basically a triple (resource, tag, user) with several other attributes (e.g., timestamp, but also additional semantic qualifiers).

While tagging is a challenge for controlled vocabularies like library thesauri, it should be clear that controlled vocabularies and ontologies have their clear benefits in terms of disambiguation, multilinguality, levels of abstraction, and simple typos. So our contribution on ontology maturing, from simple tags to full-fledged ontologies actually showed the way: leverage on the simplicity of tagging for broadening the group of users contributing to the metadata generating, while retaining the possibility of higher-quality metadata. Interesting lightweight developments in that respect was the approach on Semantic Weblog by Benjamin Birkenhage.

Posted in maturing, ontology, symposium | Comments Off

First German Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Congress 2008

Friday, February 1st, 2008

The last three days I was at the first German AAL Congress at Berlin and presented (together with my colleague Christophe Kunze) our results in the area of context-aware technologies for ambient assisted living. This encompassed intelligent sensor systems for detecting activities and other vital parameters, our ontology-centered design methodology as well as our AAL ontology from our work in SOPRANO. I had some interesting discussions with a lot of interesting people

The congress had 330 participants on the first two days alone (and they had to close registration early in January) Demographic change was the stereotypical motivation slide… And the dominating discussion theme of the German-speaking part was the lack of business models, which was seen as a main cause for the lack of market take-up. Closer inspection revealed that the majority of problems probably is due to regulatory conditions, especially in the area of health and care insurance. This is supposed to change with the new financial system of the health insurance in Germany, starting 2009 where a lot of interesting things are expected to happen. Let’s see if this helps to reduce barriers.

The European day was dominated by the new Joint AAL Programme under Article 169, which is supposed to introduce a new funding programme that is aimed at more short-term projects (2-3 years time-to-market). The first call will be published end of March/beginning of April. Available funding does not appear to be extremely high – so the call will probably be highly competetive. Expected consortia are about the size of FP7 STREPs. The proposals will be evaluated centrally (at an European level), however, the funding contracts will be made with the national authorities. Although it was claimed that the funding regulations are making it easier to participate, especially for SMEs, because of the national funding agencies, I believe this introduces additional complexity (while FP7 rules are – also for SMEs – quite simple if they have some consulting on it). The national authorities have budget limits so that situations may arise where a consortium is recommended for funding while the national funding agency does not have any money left… Probably, also with decentralized reporting, you will generate additional overhead.

The emerging AAL community appears to be an interesting mix of various disciplines with surprisingly concrete visions and a challenging field for applied research where technology can achieve much – but only if it is embedded in a holistic solution.

Posted in aal, conference, ontology, soprano | Comments Off

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