Student Assistants

Günther Noack Homepage: http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~guenther/ Old homepage: http://guenthernoack.de

Günther Noack entered DFKI as student assistant directly after school and in parallel to beginning to study computer science. His main field of work at DFKI is the development and integration of software modules for running research projects. He thus greatly contributes to the realization of prototypes showing the benefit of research results.

One of his mayor contributions is the development of EPOS Notes, a tool allowing to create and manage short notes (i.e., tiny text snippets). In contrast to the vast amount of note tools EPOS Notes has the following advantages:

1. We use wordpress, a free weblog framework to store and visualize the user's notes. Blogging and note taking is not so far away, so we melted both paradigms together. You can enter a note using either wordpress or the Java GUI of EPOS Notes.
2. If the user uses the EPOS Notes GUI, the created notes are annotated with the user's current context. This so called creation context of the note gives valuable meta-information which can later be used to find it again using contextual queries for example. Of course, the visualization of the note's creation context when viewing a note is also useful .
3. As we add several meta-information to a note, the search dialog of EPOS Notes provides various ways of searching, browsing, filtering, and clustering notes.

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Ralf Biedert Blog: http://blog.xeoh.net/

Ralf Biedert started his research carreer with the task of investigating and implementing user observation plugins for a text processor/editor. The goal was to observe the user's text work and send respective events to EPOS's context elicitation module.
Ralf started with the realization of an observation plugin for OpenOffice, an open-source text processing framework. Although first experiences were quite promising, we successively ran into more and more trouble regarding the Java API. Some methods did not work, others were missing. It turned out, that implementing plugins for OpenOffice is done best directly in C++, however, that was not on our mind...
The next choice was jEdit, an open-source text editor written in pure Java. Having full Java support, the realization of a user observation plugin has been done. Hence, EPOS's context elicitation is already benefiting from the observation user's text work. However, this only holds for simple ASCII text editing/viewing of course. Whenever you are interested in this plugin, let us know.

Ralf Biedert currently investigates methods to extend the simple observation of the user's text actions towards a recognition of the user's real text work. The goal is to detect, for instance, whether some passage has been really read by the user or whether it was just visible.
First results were quite promising. He will continue this task in form of a diploma thesis. Therefore, read more about that topic in the DIPLOMA THESES section below.

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Moritz Plößl

Moritz Plößel's mayor contribution to our team is currently the design, implementation and maintainance of Mozilla plugins, which is, unfortunately, a full-time job. One goal of the Mozilla architecture is to provide means to realize new extensions/plugins at ease. Alas, this seams to be a quite challenging goal.

The two most important plugins observe the user's behavior in Mozilla and send respective events to some listener. EPOS uses this events to elicit the user's context.

We are planning to publish the Mozilla plugins under open-source, and we will also provide some documentation. If you do not want to check my homepage periodically, or if you just can not wait to get them, feel free to send me an email.

Diploma Theses

Stefan Weisenberger: Colleague-2-Colleague Information Retrieval

Status: finished in Oct. 2005

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks become more and more appropriate to quickly share and find information. In the knowledge management department of the DFKI we use a P2P based document management tool to share importand documents.
Typical P2P approaches have to cope with a dynamically changing network (PCs connect and disconnect frequently). Therefore they aim at eliminating potential loss of information by keeping information redundantly.

In organizational environments, like in our department, the PCs are always on and connected. Hence, distributed information is always accessibel. So, keeping redundant information is not needed. Furthermore, the individual nodes, as well as, the topology of the network is not arbitrary, but has a concrete structure and cause! One colleage queries a colleague's peer (PC) because he knows, that exactly this colleage has the greatest expertise regarding my query. So, consequently, his peer will host the best documents around that subject.
Therefore, we called the P2P network a colleague-to-colleage network, and the diploma thesis exploits this topological structure to greatly enhance the distributed information retrieval.

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Ralf Biedert: Text Work Recognition

Status: starting soon

The task of Ralf Biedert's diploma thesis will be to recognize the user's text work by observing his behavior in a text processor/editor. The work will rely on the user observation methodoloy previously realized by Ralf during the EPOS project. The observation of the text editor jEdit has been extended to recognize the visible part of the text (visible text area).

Together with the user's scrolling behavior the text work recognition (TWR) module will calculate the exposure duration of text passages. Utilizing a function approximating the attention distribution over the visible text area, TWR will estimate the probability for the text passages to be really read by the user. We will start with a recognition methodology for "reading" a text passage and move on to other actions/goals.

Ralf will investigate whether exploitation of web cam and/or eye tracking sensor data can increase the accuracy of the attention distribution.

Project Theses

Frank Osterfeld: Nabu

Status: finished in Aug. 2005

Nabu is a plugin for Jive Messenger, a server implementation of the Jabber Instant Messaging protocol. It provides server-side logging of chat conversations and related events. The logged data is stored in a semantic graph, using the RDF W3C standard.

Nabu is developed in context of the EPOS project. The goals of Nabu are:

• Enable clients to search and annotate their archived conversations. The archive can be searched for messages using the SPARQL query language. Users can annotate messages by adding their own RDF statements, e.g. to classify conversations by topic.
• Allow listeners (authorized and controlled by the user) to subscribe to the logged events. In EPOS, this is used to identify the context (current tasks, documents, contacts, ...) of a desktop user, to provide optimal support by the desktop environment.
• Make it possible to share information with other users. For example, share the log of an online meeting with other team members. Privacy is ensured by a strict privacy model, letting the message sender control which other users or user groups can access the archived message.

Nabu is open-source (see nabu.opendfki.de) and distributed under the terms of the GPL.

Other Student Work

Christian Schütz: Context-sensitive Bookmark Service

Status: finished in Nov. 2005

The EPOS user observation framework includes the detection and storage of the user's browsing behavior. The resource statistics component of EPOS uses this to store document usage statistics like the amount of viewing operations (measured in number of days), the frequency (average number of days between two accesses), and neighborhood (documents used in the same context, i.e., shortly before or after each other).

Now, the envisioned Context-sensitive Bookmark Service annotates each viewed web page with the user's current context, too. For instance, if the user is currently working for some project. The viewed web page will be related to that project, too. Analogously to EPOS Notes this allows context-sensitive retrieval and filtering of viewed web pages. One small conceptual difference to EPOS Notes is, however, that the context annotation takes place automatically for every visited web page and not only for some selected ("bookmarked") pages. That way, web pages viewed, for example, during a recherche process will not be lost but can be retrieved using time- or context-specific queries.

A graphical user interface providing such a context-sensitive bookmark portal is currently being developed by Christan Schütz as an industrial internship.