The 3D Web Unit at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway invites applications for an internship in the area of 3D Web design and programming. The successful candidate will design and implement components of a 3D Web engine for social network visualization and browsing using WebGL.

We offer:

• 2-3 months paid internship – salary: €1,200 net per month;
• Work in a leading Web Science research institute;
• A young, stimulating, dynamic, multi-cultural research environment;
• Excellent ties to research groups worldwide;
• Close collaborations with leading industrial partners, including Bell Labs (Alcatel-Lucent), Samsung, Ericsson, CISCO;
• Up-to-date infrastructure and resources;

We expect:

• Strong background in Computer Science – preferably the candidate should be currently pursuing or finishing MSc degree in Computer Science or related discipline;
• Experience in interactive 3D Graphics programming;
• Motivated and proactive attitude;
• Strong communication skills, verbal and written;

Bonus skills:

• Experience in WebGL is a strong additional advantage;
• Experience in design, prototyping, implementation and evaluation of user interfaces;
• Programming skills in HTML, CSS and JavaScript;
• Experience in 3D modeling (Blender, Maya, 3DS Max);
• Experience with Semantic Web technologies;

Application procedure:

Candidates are requested to submit a cover letter, CV and portfolio with work samples in PDF to: jacek.jankowski@deri.org. A rough closing date for receipt of applications is June 30, 2012. We expect the successful candidate to start at the earliest possible date, ideally in July 2012.

The 1st International Workshop on Declarative 3D for the Web Architecture (Dec3D2012) was held at the WWW2012 conference in Lyon, France on April 17, 2012. This workshop was organized by the Declarative 3D W3C community groupled by DFKI, Fraunhofer and the Web3D Consortium.

Johannes Behr (Fraunhofer IGD), who was part of the workshop's organizing team (together with Kristian Sons, DFKI, who is sitting to the left), presents the community group's goals.

We examined the requirements, options, and use cases for an integration of interactive 3D graphics capabilities into the W3C technology stack in a declarative way. While imperative graphics APIs are powerful and necessary, a ‘Declarative 3D’ approach can provide web authors an easy way to add interactive high-level declarative 3D objects through the HTML Document Object Model (DOM) allowing web authors to easily create, modify, share, and experience interactive 3D graphics using HTML documents.

The workshop was an open platform to discuss the Declarative 3D initiative and also present current technologies, demonstrations, and research papers on Declarative 3D. It was apparent from this workshop that there is a need and interest for a Declarative 3D solution for the Web. Participation, coordination and collaboration between industry, browser vendors, developers and standards organizations are necessary for Declarative 3D to become a seamless part of the Web infrastructure.

What a day!!

Today is my birthday and I got very nice present..;) I am really pleased to write it here – my paper “A Dual-Mode User Interface for Accessing 3D Content on the World Wide Web” has been accepted for inclusion in the WWW 2012 in Lyon, France. Selection was very competitive: only 12% of papers, i.e. 108 out of 885 properly completed submissions, could be accepted as full papers in the technical program of WWW 2012!

See the abstract below:

The Web evolved from a text-based system to the current rich and interactive medium that supports images, 2D graphics, audio and video. The major media type that is still missing is 3D graphics. Although various approaches have been proposed (most notably VRML/X3D), they have not been widely adopted. One reason for the limited acceptance is the lack of 3D interaction techniques that are optimal for the hypertext-based Web interface. We present a novel strategy for accessing integrated information spaces, where hypertext and 3D graphics data are simultaneously available and linked. We introduce a user interface that has two modes between which a user can switch anytime: the driven by simple hypertext-based interactions "don't-make-me-think" mode, where a 3D scene is embedded in hypertext and the more immersive 3D "take-me-to-the-Wonderland" mode, which immerses the hypertextual annotations into the 3D scene. A user study is presented, which characterizes the user interface in terms of its efficiency and usability.

As I have mentioned in one of the previous posts, I am also organizing "Declarative 3D for the Web Architecture (Dec3D2012)" workshop at the WWW conference. See the call for papers on the workshop website!

I am pleased to announce that the Declarative 3D for the Web Architecture (Dec3D2012) workshop proposal has been accepted for inclusion in the WWW 2012 program!

The aim of the workshop is to encourage researchers from both the Web and 3D graphics communities to meet and talk about an integration of interactive 3D graphics capabilities into the Web technology stack. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for the communities, in which participants can:

• Present and discuss approaches to publishing 3D graphics on the Web in a declarative way;
• Discuss how the general principles, that are/were valid for the Web, translate to 3D declarative graphics, what are the difficulties, how can that goal be achieved in the current ecosystem of web development;
• Explore how the incorporation of declarative 3D graphics can be done in currently popular web browsers; we expect to showcase innovative applications that deeply integrate 3D graphics and HTML, among others, Fraunhofer and DFKI will report on X3DOM and XML3D as models for an easy to use 3D hypermedia publishing frameworks;
• Shape the agenda and identify upcoming research issues for the next development stage of the 3D Web.

The workshop will serve as a forum for the confluence of new and multidisciplinary ideas that will help to drive research in the area of 3D graphics on the Web.

I had a chance (thanks to DERI’s financial support) to attend Web3D conference for the third time (I have been to LA in 2008 – see the report here, and in Darmstadt, Germany in 2009 – see the previous reports). This time the 16th annual ACM conference on 3D web technology was held in France - right in the middle of Paris, at "Les Cordeliers". Located in the heart of the "Quartier Latin", this old historical site was always dedicated to science and teaching. Built since 1234, the site was first dedicated to religious teaching during the Middle Age, and became one of the most famous think-tank during the French Revolution. "Les Cordeliers" is now dedicated to medical research and teaching – it’s really interesting place.

The conference was really well organized (thanks to the sponsors: ACM SIGGRAPH, Web3D Consortium, and SYSTEMATIC). I presented my “Taskonomy of 3D Web Use” (see the paper). Some interesting talks (apart from mine of course!) included: “MPEG-4-based adaptive remote rendering for video games” by Nicolas Tizon, “ToBoA-3D: an architecture for managing top-down and bottom-up annotated 3D objects and spaces on the web” by Fabio Pittarello, Dynamic and Interactive Aspects of X3DOM by Johannes Behr. There were very interesting keynotes from Alain CHESNAIS (Visual Transitions and ACM President) and Neil TREVETT (Nvidia, Khronos Group President) – the guy behind WebGL.

On the 2nd day of the conference, the "Fete de la Musique" took place in the streets of Paris. It is above all a free popular "fete", open to any participant (amateur or professional musicians) who wants to perform in it. We (me and Iza) really enjoyed listening to different bands (one group was actually playing just in front of our hotel, so we could sit on our balcony and relax).

Two days ago I had my last and probably most difficult exam in my life – Viva Voce (i.e., “thesis defense”). I have been preparing for this examination for the last 4 years!

On the Friday morning (10.00am, 03.06.2011), I set up my presentation in the conference room in DERI. At first there were only several people – the closest friends. Later, more and more people started to appear. The examination committee was 15 minutes late – I think Stefan and the examiners – prof. Manfred Hauswirth (internal examiner) and prof. Peter Brusilovsky (external examiner) had to talk about the procedure. When they finally arrived, I was asked to present my work.

I think that the presentation went quite well, having that I had to polish up my presentation a night before (thanks Stefan for your constructive comments!). Iza claims I was actually not too bad (she said she’s seen me much, much worse), and the timing was just right. As for the reviewers and the audience, they did not seem to be too bored with it either.

Then we had time for questions from the public. I thinks there were 3 questions: Peter asked about the POI navigation techniques that I decided to use, Slawek asked about design methodologies (apart from Shneiderman’s “Three Pillars”) that could be used in any (not-trivial) design process. Maciej asked me what I think about the future of web interfaces.

After a short break for the committee to agree on the “examination strategy”, I was invited to answer some tough questions. After 1.5h of lively discussion, I was yet again asked to leave the room for about 5 min and then invited again to hear the final verdict: I have passed the PhD exam. In Ireland, the viva is not the last stage of the PhD studies. My reviewers asked me to introduce some corrections to my manuscript before submitting the final version to the Exams Office at NUIG.

Yesterday, I came back from the Re-Thinking Technology in Museums conference hosted by the Interaction Design Centre and the Irish Museums Association University of Limerick. Its purpose was to bring together academics and practitioners to discuss novel ways of conceptualizing the museum experience in light of the presence of interactive technologies.

I took part in the Innovation Forum that provided me an opportunity to showcase Copernicus that was designed from the very beginning to support visitors’ experiences for museums, exhibitions and other heritage sites. I made some contacts with museums from Ireland (e.g., Black Rock Castle Observatory from Cork) and abroad – people that are interested in deploying Copernicus in their sites and evaluating its usefulness.

I was also surprised (again!) how many Polish people work and study abroad (I mean not in Poland). I found new colleagues from University of Southampton, England and University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Today I reviewed a few short papers for the INTERACT 2011 conference. Unfortunately, some of them were terrible and only one was so, so... At the end, I had to reject all of them.

The thing is that these papers reminded me myself from few years back. I remember I was struggling to publish anything anywhere (on the first year of my PhD studies I was trying to publish on conferences such as CHI, WWW, ... stupid, stupid, stupid…). Luckily, ONLY SOME of my early “works” were published and these are the works that I am honestly ashamed of.

On the one hand, peer review is employed to maintain standards and provide credibility. However, on the other hand, getting bad (sometimes really, really bad) reviews is also a part of the development of any researcher (of course if the author is not giving up and is trying hard to improve his work).

While I have been to Olhao, Portugal with Iza, Marek and the sensor team finished the first version of the demo for the Open Day and the DERI CSET review (see the previous posts). Our committee was really pleased with the results; Stefan was impressed by the quality of the user interface design, the idea behind the UI, and by the fact that RFID tags, QR code readers, and GSM networks could be integrated in such an interesting manner.

The interaction manual for the demo.

UPDATE!

The Linking the Real World Demo (created collaboratively by USM, USS, MARC, and DAI units) with our Kinect-based user interface was a huge success - it was the most visited demo of the event. Below we show posters presenting the demo and some pictures from the event.

Two posters presented on the Open Day and the DERI CSET review (by Prof. Manfred Hauswirth and Dr. Josiane Xavier Parreira).

"Linking the Real World" demo shows how you can combine real world information (e.g. localization) with online information (e.g. business cards, online profiles), enabling a wide range of new useful applications.

I have just found out (from EricLaw's IEInternals) that .NET Framework XAML Browser Applications (XBAPs) are now prevented from loading from the Internet Zone in IE9. When visiting an Internet site that utilizes an XBAP, an error message is shown, indicating that the application type has been disabled. The reason is that “(...) they are not commonly used on the Internet – Microsoft’s crawls of the top 100,000 websites found no uses of the technology.”

What it means for Copernicus? It means that Copernicus will not be as easy to access as it used to be. A week ago, anyone having Windows system and IE could access the system without any problems. Now, one need to add http://www.3dwiki.net to the list of trusted sites and lower the security level so ActiveX components can be run in his or her browser.

Last week I managed to convince Josi and Brian (our CFO) to hire Marek to make a possibly Kinect-based user interface for the Open Day and the DERI CSET review (see the previous post). Now we need to organize a meeting with sensor people to gather their requirements, make a specification for the REST interface that the USM unit had to provide us, sketch some prototypes, and finally do something ‘cool’.

The other thing is that the deadline for the 16th edition of ACM International Web3D conference is coming soon – actually in a week! I plan to submit the work I did for the Chapter 2 of my PhD thesis that aims to clarify some of the foundations of 3D Web user interface design by focusing on an understanding of the fundamental tasks users engage in while exploring Web-based 3D virtual environments.

Yesterday, together with Krystian Samp, I had a meeting with Manfred, the vice-director of DERI and leader of the Sensor Middleware Unit (USM). He asked us to help develop a user interface for the Open Day and the DERI CSET review. Their idea is to have a screen which shows the information stored on the foaf file for every person standing in front of the screen (who is standing there will be determined based on assigned RFID tags). That would require the implementation of a simple user interface for browsing the foaf profiles.

After the meeting I was thinking about this user interface. I personally got the impression that we need something 'cool' with a big 'wow' factor. Our first idea of displaying a nicely designed business card is kind of static if one cannot interact with the interface. Using a mouse in this kind of setting (big TV screen -> no place for a mouse) can be awkward, and is definitely not 'cool'. This morning it came to me: "why not to make a Kinect-based Minority-Report-type demo, where interaction is done by making some gestures like waving a hand to see sth. or making a circle to show something else?" I have to think about this...

First things first: Happy New Year! Now, what have happened lately? As my thesis is currently under Stefan’s review, I finally had some time for other things than PhD. I started to work on a new EI proposal. I was motivated by the outcome of the project conducted by the Business School final year students. They somehow confirmed my belief of the potential of Copernicus in the education sector. The plan is to partner with an Irish educational book publisher (possibly EDCO) to commercialize the technology. The good thing is that several people, including Brendan Smith (DERI outreach officer, the father of the Galway’s Computers & Communications Museum), Marc Mellotte (Education Competence Center Lead) and Patrick Mulrooney (DERI Commercial Development Manager) offered to help me make this proposal as good as possible. I also started to worry a bit about my weight and overall fitness (for the last three months the only thing I have been doing was seating and writing my thesis...). So, the plan is to attend a gym at least twice a week + volleyball trainings + football (if the weather permits).

Two or three months ago I said to myself – “Jacek, it is time, you have to finish – you can’t be a student for the whole life!” (Actually, Iza was talking about that every day…;); Stefan also wanted to get rid of me…) So I committed myself completely to writing up my thesis.

Now, as my PhD thesis manuscript has reached the “first draft” version, I can finally devote some time to take care of my web site, which was not updated or “watered” (as many bloggers say) for quite some time.

As I have already mentioned, I was working with two student teams from our business school which worked on marketing report for Copernicus. Today I received final presentations from the students.

The program really worked well! It brought together researchers, business professionals, and young open-minded students creating a very interesting and unique mash-up of skills, experience, and values. I had a chance to take part in it to work closely with the Technology Transfer Office and the Cairnes Business School on market analysis for Copernicus. The program worked amazingly well for my technology and I learned a lot from the conducted market research. I was truly surprised by the creativity of students with whom I had a chance to work with; both assigned to me groups even started to contact possible clients and investors! In summary, this program is a win-win for all involved. TTO and myself got the market validation report for free; students could work on a real technology with real clients. I strongly recommend other researchers to take part in this program.

Today I attended the Galway Science and Technology Festival 2010 that took place in the Bailey Allen Hall, NUI Galway, opened by the EU Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science Maire Geoghegan Quinn. Together with some colleagues from DERI and the Cairnes Business School, we positioned ourselves with the DERI stand organized by Brendan Smith (DERI’s outreach officer). On a big screen we played a video we made showing Copernicus in action. We also had two laptops with the program running. Throughout the day we invited visitors to use the application, and we conducted surveys with the students after they had used Copernicus. The children loved using Copernicus. The application also got great attention from passing schools teachers and parents who all agreed there was a need for this form of learning to be brought into schools.

Now, I really have to think, what is the next best step for the further development of Copernicus? Is it Education? Cultural heritage? Or should I do something different...

Together with Yoli and Krystian, we went today for a nice walk in the Burren National Park. The word "Burren" comes from an Irish word "Boíreann" meaning a rocky place. This is an extremely appropriate name when you consider the lack of soil cover and the extent of exposed Limestone Pavement. See the pictures!

Wikimania is finally over. Hundreds of Wikimedia projects’ contributors and supporters gathered in Gdansk – the City of Freedom over the weekend to meet and greet, talk and listen, and think about the future of Wikipedia, the user-edited online encyclopedia that many remember from its earliest days. It started with an improbable mission to share knowledge with the world, and one could feel that this energy is still present. It was really nice to see almost half a thousand people focused on improving already quite functional MediaWiki (adding semantics, video, improving usability), working on new outreach and education activities, and making Wikimedia projects more social.

It is also really nice to see that our conference was covered by the media. Most notably, there was an article published by New York Times (which actually mentioned my name – cool, isn’t it?) - in the article: How Can Wikipedia Grow?

I would like to thank everyone who attended, in person or online, for making Wikimania overflow with ideas and good cheer. The next conference will be held in Haifa, Israel in August 2011. Oh, I forgot! Spain is a world football champion! Congrats!

Wikimania is approaching really fast. About two weeks ago I posted the program on our wiki. Yesterday night, I finished the final print-friendly version of the schedule. This conference guide contains brief information about each presentation. Additional information can be found in digital format – on our wiki.

There are some new things in a program. For example, I introduced Wikimania Madness! We invited all presenters to prepare a 30-second preview of their work to present at a special session we call Madness. Wikimania Madness is one of the only events at Wikimania that brings all attendees together. You can find detailed information HERE.

I would like to thank my co-chairs: Danica Radovanović from University of Oxford, England and Yaroslav Blanter from TUDelft, The Netherlands, internal reviewers: Yaroslav Blanter (User:Yaroslav Blanter), Marcin Cieślak (User:Saper), Łukasz Golowanow (User:Airwolf), Agata Leśnicka (User:Psychology), Danica Radovanovic (User:DanicaR), Arkaitz Zubiaga (User:TXiKi), and external reviewers: Fabrizio Orlandi (User:SiocWiki), Pramukh Arkalgud Ganeshamurthy (User:Pramukh Arkalgud Ganeshamurthy), Anthony Lorrain (User:Anthony Lorrain), User:Adler.fa, User:Alidha125, User:Church of emacs, User:Ciphers, User:Mn6230, User:Shijualex.

Recently, I’ve had a chance to play with 3D Vision – a stereoscopic gaming kit from NVIDIA. The set uses active shutter glasses technology – with this method, the left and right eye images are presented on alternating frames. By using a 120Hz monitor, each eye sees a 60Hz signal that is equivalent to the refresh rate on typical LCD monitors. The 3D vision driver software can perform automatic stereoscopic conversion by using the 3D models submitted by the GPU and rendering two stereoscopic views instead of the standard mono view.

As I wanted to learn to build stereo applications from scratch, I played with both DirectX API and OpenGL (quad-buffer). You can find some simple examples below (strangely there is not too much information on how to even start working on stereo – especially in OpenGL).

Just after the CHI conference I went to Denver, Colorado to demonstrate Copernicus at Museums and the Web 2010: the international conference for culture and heritage on-line (MW’10). Firstly, I was really surprised by the size of the conference – there were more than 400 attendees. I found some people that like me are interested in 3D graphics on the Web and more specifically – representing different museum artifacts in 3D on the Web.

I really enjoy the city. Approximately 20 km east of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Denver is nicknamed the "Mile-High City" because its official elevation is exactly one mile (1.6 km) above sea level. As I wanted to hike a bit, I went to Boulder – a small university city 40km from Denver. I choose Sanitas Valley trail heading north up the valley between the Hogback Ridge and Mount Sanitas. See the pictures!

I cannot tell that this was a good and happy week. Four days ago, a plane carrying Lech Kaczyński, his wife Maria Kaczyńska, and other members of a Polish delegation (top public and military figures of Polish state) from Warsaw to commemorate the Katyn massacre crashed while approaching Smolensk Air Base in Russia. 96 people were killed in the crash, including many of Poland's highest military and civilian leaders. Moreover, I will probably not be able to come back to Europe. The eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland caused enormous disruption to air travel across Europe. Luckily, some CHI friends from Atlanta offered working space at GVU (I hope to talk to Jay Bolter there).

Hello from Atlanta, Georgia! Yesterday I presented my paper “Integrating Text with Video and 3D Graphics: The Effects of Text Drawing Styles on Text Readability” at the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2010 (CHI’10) - the premier international conference for the field of human-computer interaction. As I have already mentioned on this blog, the paper presents guidelines for designers of interfaces for games, video, and augmented reality on how best to display readable text on top of 3D and video backgrounds.

The conference is huge and there are many things to see (actually too many – see the program). Some interesting talks included the opening plenary: Messy Futures: Culture, technology and research by Genevieve Bell from Intel – she pointed out (among other things) that people in general still spend more leisure time watching TVs then using computers (which is not a case with me – I even don’t have a TV at home)! From paper presentations I really liked the session about death in online world (e.g., what happens with our online presence/data after we die). I had a chance to talk to Ben Shneiderman and Steven Feiner.

Atlanta is a really nice city. It is the home of Coca-Cola, CNN, and the largest aquarium tank in the world. The Georgia Aquarium, home to the only whale sharks in North America, was also the site of today evening’s Hospitality event (see pictures!).

Few months ago I decided to help to organize the Wikimania conference that this time will be held in Gdansk, Poland. I was asked to lead the program committee, as I had the biggest experience with community/scientific conferences. My main goal will be to create a good, well balanced program.

Wikimania is an annual global event devoted to Wikimedia projects around the globe (including Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wiktionary, Wikispecies, and Wikimedia Commons). The conference is a community gathering, giving the editors and users of Wikimedia projects an opportunity to meet each other, exchange ideas, report on research and projects, and collaborate on the future of the projects.

The Wikimania program includes presentations in multiple formats:

I had some a really productive months lately (in terms of writing PhD – not working on Copernicus). I wrote the introduction to the Foundations chapter. Basically I described the history of user interfaces and the beginnings of computer graphics. I described the evolution of hypertext (from Memex to the emergence of the Web). Furthermore, as a prerequisite to the effective UI design is an understanding of the users and their tasks - the tasks for which that interface will actually be used – I decided to shed some light on the fundamental tasks users engage in while browsing the 3D Web. Firstly, I provided an overview and discussion of several field studies that provide insights on how the current version of the Web is used. Then I made a comprehensive review of the state of the art of mouse-based 3D interaction techniques (Viewpoint Control, Selection and Manipulation, and System Control) for Desktop 3D Virtual Environments (DVEs), the environments that exploit common, general-purpose desktop hardware for interaction, i.e., mouse and keyboard. Finally, I started to work on a simple taxonomy of 3D Web user tasks - a “3D Web Taskonomy”.

Together with Marek I also played around with the head tracking techniques and its possible use in Copernicus (and in other 3D Web interfaces). The idea was to create something similar to the well known Johny Lee Wii hack. By using Seeing Machines’ FaceAPI, we wanted to transform a display into a portal to a virtual environment. We implemented a small WPF application to see if it is actually possible. The application was designed to react to head movements and change a display to a window creating an illusion of depth and space. The outcome was not bad but not too good either. There was a small lag in the responsiveness of the system. The resolution of the tracking was also not perfect.

Ten days ago I decided to switch back to a PhD position. I did this, because:

• I decided that PhD is my first priority, NOT Copernicus.
• I wanted to have more funding for Marek. This way, he will be able to work for two more months on the Copernicus project.

I had to resign from ‘a real work’ and sign the fellowship forms - I am a PhD student again…;) From now on, I will have a 50/50-type of contract: It means that I should spend 50% of my time on my project (source of my funding) and 50% on my PhD.

I am really pleased to write it here – my paper “Integrating Text with Video and 3D Graphics: The Effects of Text Drawing Styles on Text Readability” has been accepted for inclusion in the CHI 2010 Papers and Notes Program! CHI, the International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, is the premier international conference for the field of human-computer interaction.

The paper presents guidelines for designers of interfaces for games, video, and augmented reality on how best to display readable text on top of 3D and video backgrounds. See the abstract below:

There have been many studies of computer based text reading. However, only a few have considered text integrated with video and 3D graphics. This paper presents an investigation into the effects of varying (a) text drawing style (plain, billboard, Anti-Interference, shadow), (b) image polarity (positive and negative), and (c) background style (video and 3D) on text readability. Reading speed and accuracy were measured and subjective views of participants recorded. Results showed that: (a) there was little difference in reading performance for the video and 3D backgrounds; (b) the negative presentation outperformed the positive presentation; (c) the billboard drawing styles supported the best performance; subjective comments showed a preference for the billboard style. We therefore suggest, for reading tasks, that designers of interfaces for games, video, and augmented reality provide billboard style to maximize readability for the widest range of applications.

The conference will take place in Atlanta, GA, USA from 10 to 15 April, 2010. Finally I will be able to make some shopping.

Today was a last day of NUIG’s Start Up Solution (SUS) programme. During the course of three months, I had a chance to work with professionals from the University’s Technology Transfer Office, Marketing Specialists, and entrepreneurs. The course consisted of interactive workshops, case studies, one-to-one mentoring, individual and group exercises, and presentations. I recommend anyone in DERI interested in commercialization to take part in this programme.

Few days ago I presented Copernicus at WikiSym – the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. This year, WikiSym took place in Orlando, Florida, at Disney's Contemporary Resort. It was co-located with ACM OOPSLA.

The conference was really nicely organized – thanks to Dirk Riehle (SAP Labs) and Amy Bruckman (Georgia Tech)! I really liked the open space for personal interaction with other participants (facilitated by Rut Jesus and Ward Cunningham). There were many exciting research talks, workshops, tutorials, and of course invited talks, e.g.: “Visualizing the Inner Lives of Texts” by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg (IBM Research - ManyEyes), 2009 Turing Award Lecture by Barbara Liskov (MIT), Community Performance Optimization: Making Your People Run as Smoothly as Your Site by Brion Vibber (Wikimedia Foundation).

We also spend some time travelling around Florida. We have been to Key West, Miami (we stayed one night at Miami Beach, I can recommend Clinton Hotel. We took an airboat tour in Everglades National Park (Gator Park) – I could hold an alligator (at least four-feeter), Iza kissed a big frog…;). We have been to Cape Canaveral to see the Kennedy Space Center. We had some fun in Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom (we really enjoyed the Splash Mountain and the Wishes fireworks show). We have also been to Bahamas for 2 days – Grand Bahama is lying 90 kilometers off the state of Florida.

Few days ago I came back from Malta. I have been there to present a short paper written together with Yolanda Cobos, Michael Hausenblas, and Stefan Decker: “Accessing Cultural Heritage using the Web of Data” at the 10th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage 2009 (VAST'09). See the abstract below:

Cultural Heritage (CH) is a vast domain, where sharing information is challenging. As a result, the global CH is distributed and heterogeneous. In this paper, we present the concept of the Web of Data as an approach to integrating CH collections. We introduce the CHoWDer (Cultural Heritage on the Web of Data) model, the simple model designed to illustrate how easily CH institutions can participate in the Linked Data initiative.

Few interesting presentations, e.g.: invited talks by Zahi Hawass (Council of Antiquities of Egypt Museums), Christiane Naffah (Director of the Research and Restoration Center for France Museums), a paper by Martin Strobl et al. “Publishing 3D Content as PDF in Cultural Heritage”. The conference introduced the “VAST-STate-of-the-Art Reports (VAST-STARs)”, inspired by the EG STARs. I think that this type of publication should become more common on other conferences.

Malta covers just over 300 km² in land area – it is one of the world's smallest countries. However, its location has given it great strategic importance. It was ruled by the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Sicilians, Knights of St John, French and the British. For me, the most interesting part of Maltese history is the time when Charles I of Spain gave the islands to the Order of Knights of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem (1530). The knights withstood a siege by the Ottomans in 1565, at the time the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean. After the siege they decided to increase Malta's fortifications (you can see these on the photos!).

On the way from Italy to Ireland, we decided to visit Kamil, an old friend from student times who lives in London now. As we rented a car, during our stay we decided to see places that are accessible by car – we left London for the next visit (one doesn’t need a car to see this city – it is actually not a good idea at all). So, we had a chance to see Cambridge (known as the home of the University of Cambridge), Canterbury (a historic English cathedral city), Dover (stunning white cliffs), Brighton, and many other places (see the photos).

We also went to the Goodwood Festival of Speed, an annual race/hill climb/auto show/concours d'elegance featuring historic motor racing vehicles that is held in the grounds of Goodwood House, West Sussex. Typically held in late June or early July, the event is scheduled to fit into the motor racing calendar to avoid a date clash with the Formula One season, enabling not just fans but many teams involved in current motor racing championships to attend. I can highly recommend this event to any petrol head like me. I could see cars and motorbikes from over 100 years of worldwide motor racing history climb the hill, including many of the latest F1 machines and road-going supercars. I could see old and new WRC machines at the specially-built forest stage. There was also an air show featuring Red Arrows! See the photos!

Just after a lovely wedding of Ania and Maciej in Augustow, Poland (see the photo below), together with Iza, I travelled to Torino, Italy to present a short paper “2LIPGarden: 3D Hypermedia for Everyone” at the Hypertext conference – the main venue for high quality peer-reviewed research on “linking”.

Good talks from Mark Bernstein: “On Hypertext Narrative”, Wouter Van den Broeck: “Live Social Semantics, linking your public parts”, Mark Meiss et al.: “What's in a session: Tracking individual behavior on the Web”. Interesting keynotes from Lada Adamic and Ricardo Baeza-Yates. Ted Nelson gave the opening address at all four workshops.

I had a chance to experiment with applications mixing real-world data and on-line data. The organizers deployed active RFID tags in the badges of volunteers and run a data collection platform tracking the real-time relations of physical proximity between the attendees. The data collection and visualization systems were provided by the SocioPatterns project.

The conference was held at the Villa Gualino Convention Centre, on the hills overlooking Torino. We stayed in Atahotel Concord – very nice place, close to many good restaurants. During our stay in Italy we also visited Milano (I can’t stress enough how beautiful is the gothic façade of its cathedral) and the Sacra di San Michele, also known as Saint Michael’s Abbey.

Germany - Frankfurt

Yet again I had a chance to attend a Web3D conference. 14th in the series, the Web3D 2009 International Symposium addressed a wide range of topics covering 3D hypermedia on the web. Attendees shared and explored methods of using, enhancing, and creating new 3D web and multimedia technologies, such as X3D, VRML, COLLADA, Croquet, MPEG4, Java3D, Canvas3D and WPF. The symposium addressed new trends such as interactive 3D graphics applications on mobile devices. Unfortunately, like in the previous year, there were only few works that focused on integrated information spaces where symbolic (hypertext) and visual (3D graphics) data are simultaneously available and linked.

The conference was really well organized (thanks to Dieter Fellner and Alexei Sourin, and the sponsors: ACM SIGGRAPH, Web3D Consortium, and EUROGRAPHICS). The program was interesting (thanks again to Johannes Behr and Krzysztof Walczak).

Thanks to the Iza’s family visit, I finally had a chance to visit Aran Islands, Inishmore to be more specific. The main thing to see on the island is Dun Aengus, an Iron Age fort situated on the edge of a cliff at a height of 100 meters overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. See the photos below!

I have just come back from Madrid. I had a chance to participate in the 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2009) that was held in this charming and cosmopolitan Spain´s capital. The World Wide Web Conference is the global event that brings together key researchers, innovators, decision-makers, technologists, businesses, and standards bodies working to shape the Web. DERI had one paper accepted (well done Dahn!) – it was about Yahoo Pipes. Our institute was also represented at the Linked Data on the Web (LDOW2009) workshop. Unfortunately, there was (again!) nothing about 3D graphics on the Web.

Madrid is a beautiful city. We (me and Iza) really enjoyed our stay (thank you West for having us). We visited, among other things, Museo del Prado, one of the most important art museums in Europe, Royal Palace, Temple of Debod, and Retiro Park.

Together with Adam Westerski and Mateusz Radzimski, we have visited Toledo (just 70 km south of Madrid) that was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1986 for its extensive cultural and monumental heritage as one of the former capitals of the Visigothic Kingdom and the Spanish Empire. Toledo's Alcázar and Cathedral are must see. What was interesting for me, Toledo has been a traditional sword-making, steel-working center since about 500 BC, and came to the attention of Rome when used by Hannibal in the Punic Wars. Soon, it became a standard source of weaponry for Roman Legions.

We have also been to Segovia to see its famous Alcazar (it is said that its design influenced the Disney's castle), the roman aqueduct and cathedral (the last Gothic cathedral built in Spain), and to try the famous Cochinillo Asado (suckling pig).

I was quite inactive on this blog recently. What am I up to now? With regard to DERI work, I spend most of my time on managing the development of Copernicus. I am really lucky to have Marek Jozwowicz (my long time friend from high school and later Gdansk University of Technology) working o the 3D engine and Yolanda Cobos working on the database and D2R server.

With regards to family life, my I was visited by my parents who came here for Easter. We decided to see the Ring of Kerry (a new thing for me), Cliffs of Moher, Coral Beach – see the pictures below!

I finally decided to bring here a car from Poland. As one cannot send a car via post, I had to drive it through the whole Europe. We made two stops. The first one was in Berlin. We were really lucky – during our stay there was a “Festival of Lights” show (it takes place annually). A number of buildings and landmarks were lit up for the occasion (see the photos).

Then we traveled further. On the way to Paris, we stopped for a coffee in Brussels (a nice but busy city – hard to get in and out). We have seen its main attractions: the Grand Place (UNESCO World Heritage Site), with the Gothic town hall in the old centre and the St. Michael and Gudula Cathedral.

We arrived to Paris quite late. Luckily, we got to the city center thanks to Eifel Tower that was quite visible almost all the time. As Iza got a map of Paris from a hotel just opposite Louvre, we could find our friend’s apartment (thanks Bartez for having us!).

On the next day we went to see The Palace of Versailles (Château de Versailles) - the center of political power in France from 1682, when Louis XIV moved from Paris, until the royal family was forced to return to the capital in 1789 after the beginning of the French Revolution. We than went to visit the infamous Normandy beaches (used during the Second World War for the D Day landings – Operation Overlord). We have seen Pointe du Hoc, where the US Rangers mounted an assault up the cliffs to capture the German coastal guns. After that we took a ferry from Cherbourg to Rosslare in Ireland.

As I wanted to play with the Exhibit from MIT Media Lab, I created a portal for PhD students from DERI - http://phd.deri.ie. My colleagues really liked the idea of the Hall of Shame. One can find out who is doing what and (what is most important) for how long! I hope that this chart can motivate some people in our institute to finish their dissertations. And yes, I am talking about You Guys with black bars!!

WOW! I thought that the WWW conference is big. I, clearly, was mistaken… This year, about 30.000 creators of computer graphics and interactive techniques attended SIGGRAPH!!!

SIGGRAPH is known for world-class technical presentations, creative exploration, and the industry’s largest marketplace of products and services: the Exhibition. I had an opportunity to test drive all the most advanced tools (e.g., I could play with dual-handed haptic device); see, hear, and interact with digital innovators, creative researchers, award-winning producers, artists, and engineers.

The caliber of the conference is unparalleled – I think it can be judged by its keynotes: Ed Catmull (President of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios; FOUR-TIME ACADEMY AWARD WINNER) talked about Managing the Creative Environment; Takeo Kanade (Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, and Director of the Quality of Life Technology Engineerying Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University; REAL ROBOTICS GURU) presented his Personal Take on the Last 30 Years in Robotics and Vision.

The conference started with the Fast-Forward Technical Papers Preview session, where the world’s leading experts in computer graphics and interactive techniques shortly previewed their latest work (sometimes these summaries were really hilarious). Thanks to this session I could mark the presentations in my conference guide that I wanted to see. On the first day I was running from one room to another to see everything that I planned. Then I learned about the Geek Bar, where I could watch streaming content from the SIGGRAPH 2008 session rooms while sitting on comfy chairs with an access to refreshing beverages...;)

As I have already mentioned, I came to DERI Galway to do PhD under Stefan Decker’s supervision in the Sebastian Kruk’s Semantic Infrastructure group in the ELITE project. I was responsible for Didaskon – Semantic eLearning Framework. However, as you might have already noticed, my primary research interest is (and always has been) 3D Web. Therefore, during my free time, I have been working on the Copernicus project (I like to call it 3D Wikipedia).

Now, Web3D International Symposium is THE event covering 3D Hypermedia on the Web. I really, really badly wanted to go there. Luckily, my poster “Copernicus - 3D Wikipedia” was accepted at SIGGRAPH, the conference that Web3D’08 is collocated with. Stefan did not object, when I asked him if I can attend both conferences.

The conference just ended today. It was really nice to see and talk to people that like me think that 3D has a bright future on the Web. The program of the conference was full of interesting talks. There was a nice keynote “The Present & Future of Web3D?” by David Luebke (research lead at NVIDIA Research), good tutorials: “Ajax3D for Web-Based Virtual Worlds” and “Immersive and Augmented Reality with X3D”. I attended a really interesting panel session: “I See Web3D's Future in...” moderated by Rita Turkowski (Intel); panelists included: Johannes Behr (Fraunhofer IGD), Mimi Harris (Rivers Run Red), Remi Arnaud (Intel), Marty Poulin (Social Sage), Doug Twilleager (Sun Microsystems/Wonderland), Mark Young (Google) and Vladimir Vukicevic (Mozilla). X3D PlugFest was devoted to testing X3D browser interoperability (testing how browsers are playing the same content). As for research papers, I liked the presentation “Structured Design of Interactive VR Applications” by Krzysztof Walczak. As for myself, I presented Copernicus during Web3D Showcase.

Today was a last day of the Second IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC2008), an international interdisciplinary forum for research that advances the state of the art and practice of Semantic Computing. The program of the conference was interesting. There were nice keynotes from Eduard Hovy: “Building and verifying a shallow ontology for higherquality NLP” and Michael F. Goodchild: “The geospatial web - A state of the art report”. Nokia was well represented by Ian Oliver: “Personal Semantic Web Through A Space Based Computing Environment” and Ora Lassila: “Semantic Web Approach to Personal Information Management on Mobile Devices”.

I presented the paper written together with Adam Westerski, Sebastian Ryszard Kruk, Tadhg Nagle, and Jarosław Dobrzański: IKHarvester – Informal eLearning with Semantic Web Harvesting, where we propose the idea of incorporating the informal knowledge into Learning Management Systems and propose semantic web harvesting technology as a solution in the form of the knowledge acquisition tool called IKHarvester.

There were some other papers from DERI, like “WSMX Middleware for Dynamic Discovery in B2B Integration” by Maciej Zaremba, Tomas Vitvar, Jacek Kopecký, and Omair Shafiq; “Review and Alignment of Tag Ontologies for Semantically-Linked Data in Collaborative Tagging Spaces” by Hak Lae Kim, Alexandre Passant, John G. Breslin, Simon Scerri, and Stefan Decker; “A Tool for Annotating Services with Domain Specific Semantics” Nikolaos Loutas, Lemonia Giantsiou, Alex Simov, Vassilios Peristeras, and Konstantinos Tarabanis.

From the tutorials I remember “Semantic Business Process Management” presented by (among others) Agata Filipowska and Michal Zaremba, from workshops – “Middleware for the Semantic Web: Enabling a Web of Knowledge and Services” by Elena Simperl et al.

Wikimania is an annual conference for all Wikimedians who contribute to one of the many Wikimedia Foundation projects. Past conferences have been held in cities from around the world such as Frankfurt, Germany (2005), Boston, USA (2006) and Taipei, Taiwan (2007). This year, Wikimania was hosted in Alexandria, in the prestigious new Library of Alexandria (Bibliotheca Alexandrina).

I gave a talk entitled “Copernicus – Adding the Third Dimension to Wikipedia”. I talked about the possible way of evolution of Wikipedia towards the three dimensional Web and introduced Copernicus - The Virtual 3D Encyclopedia.

Interesting talks? During the opening ceremony, Florence Devouard (Wikimedia Foundation chair) gave a talk, where she said that there is a need for 3D graphics in Wikipedia (unfortunately, Florence is stepping down from being a chair this year). Good talks from Jimbo Wales on Freedom of speech, human rights, and free culture, and Brion Vibber on State of the MediaWiki. I also enjoyed Wikimedia Foundation Board Panel: Jan-Bart de Vreede, Kat Walsh, Stuart West, Domas Mituzas, Michael Snow, Jimbo Wales, Ting Chen moderated by Andrew Lih and James Forrester.

UPDATE: The abstract of the presentation and its video recording can be found on Kaltura.

During my stay in Egypt, I had some time to see Cairo and its neighborhood. I had a horse tour in the Giza pyramid complex – I had a chance to see the oldest of the ancient Wonders and the only one still in existence. I visited the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, known commonly as the Egyptian Museum, a home to an extensive collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities (actually, there are too many things in this museum!). In Alexandria I’ve seen an ancient Roman theatre Kom al-Dikka, excavated by the Polish-Egyptian archaeological and restoration team.

The Science Picnic of Polish Radio and the Copernicus Science Centre is Europe's largest outdoor event dedicated to science. It has been held every year since 1997 in Warsaw, each time attracting crowds of visitors – more than 100,000 in the course of a single day! The Science Picnic was commended by the European Commission in 2005 as one of 10 model European projects in the "Science and Society" field. The event has served as the inspiration for many other popular science initiatives, including the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw.

The funny thing is that I was asked to co-represent Irish research institutions on this event. Brendan Smith, our DERI’s outreach officer, asked me to demonstrate Copernicus to the visitors of the “Irish tent”. The good thing is that some young students from Warsaw University were really impressed by the fact that there are some Polish researchers working in the Western Europe.

I finished the work on the Didaskon project! As I have already described on this blog, Didaskon is a framework for automated composition of a learning path for a student. The selection and workflow scheduling of learning objects is based on their description, semantically annotated specification of user profiles, anticipated knowledge after course completion, and technical details of the client’s platform.

In the final report I describe the Didaskon Algorithm. The document delivers detailed specification of HTN Planning and its use in course generation. It is based mostly on work done by Carsten Ullrich in his Dissertation: “Course Generation as a Hierarchical Task Network Planning Problem”.

Two days ago the special DERI event at the 5th Annual European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008) presented the research and results, goals and targets of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute for the next five years. I was responsible for the movie that gave an overview od DERI – see the movie below!

VIDEO (coming soon!)

According to Manfred and Stefan, so far we got very good feedback. People think the topics we are covering and the research we produce are very good. Several (important) people called DERI "the best and most innovative Semantic Web research institute in the world"!

I just came back from the SemTech conference in San Jose, the world’s largest, most authoritative conference on semantic technology for enterprise computing professionals. I went there to present Didaskon, our semantic eLearning framework.

There were many interesting talks. Eric Miller gave a keynote on Zepheira that aims to help organizations use the Web to connect, visualize, analyze and augment data assets across system boundaries. It is based on the combination of a number of open source projects (e.g., exhibit). Nova Spivack’s presented Twine, Natasha Noy and Tania Tudorache gave an overview of Collaborative Protégé, Dave Beckett (the guy that developed Redland that I am using in Didaskon) talked about the semantic behind Yahoo!. There was also a great presentation on Open Calais (it can have a really important role to play in linking tagging and a more systematic terminology usage). John Breslin (DERI and boards.ie) also organized a meeting with Nova Spivack and Radar Network’s team in San Francisco to present what we do in DERI (I presented Copernicus).

After the conference, together with Ania, Maciej and Armin, we travelled around SF area (e.g, we have seen Berkeley), and later went to Los Angeles and San Diego.

DERI is a Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) established in 2003 with funding (Lion grant) from the Science Foundation Ireland. After more than five years of operation DERI has become an internationally recognized institute in semantic web research, education and technology transfer which directly contributes to the Irish government’s plan of transforming Ireland into a competitive knowledge economy. It has developed into an internationally leading research centre, as documented by its large number of high-quality publications in core conferences, outnumbering any other research organization world-wide in our field of research.

Yesterday, we had a big day - DERI Lion review. Our institute had to prove that it spends money well and has good results. In the same time it applies for a new grant that DERI needs to survive. Lion2, the next round of funding we try to get, will be targeted at supporting people, organizations and systems to collaborate and interoperate on a global scale by enabling networked knowledge using Semantic Web technologies.

My part was to present a demo of Copernicus during the informal demo session. I had a chance to describe my research to David R. Karger that is responsible for example for SIMILE and Simile widgets (e.g., Exhibit).

I just got back from China. I had an opportunity (thanks to DERI) to participate in the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008), held in the historical and charming city of Beijing. Since its inception in 1994, the WWW conference has become the annual venue for international discussions and debate on the future evolution of the Web.

On the first day of the conference (Monday) there were few interesting tutorials: Adaptive systems for E-learning by Peter Brusilovsky, A Semantic Multimedia Web: Create, Annotate, Present and Share your Media by Raphael Troncy and Lynda Hardman, User Experience by Chen Zhao, and Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web by Uldis Bojars, John Breslin and Alexandre Passant. Tuesday was a workshops day. I attended Linked Data on the Web (LDW2008) organized by Tim Berners-Lee, Christian Bizer, Tom Heath, and Kingsley Idehen.

Together with my girlfriend Iza and with my friends Robert and Aneta I was on holidays in Slovakia – in Tatra Mountains in particular. We were staying in Nova Lesna, a village between Poprad and Stary Smokovec. We went there by car – it took us 12 hours to get there from Gdansk (the good thing was that Robert could learn to drive a bit). On the first day (it was Wednesday) we decided to try reaching the summit of Slavkovsky Peak (2452m). To be honest we were not prepared for this and the weather wasn’t too good. That is why we gave up on 400 - 500 meters from the peek. You can see on this picture the view on Lomnicki Peek (2633m) from the point we’ve reached. On the second day the weather was much nicer. However, since Robert was not in a good shape, we decided to walk on an easy path to Chata Plesnivec (1290m). On Friday we went to Strbske Pleso. We took a chairlift to Chata pod Soliskom (1840 m) and together with Iza and Aneta we reached the summit of Predne Solisko (2093m). From this peek you can have great view on Velke Solisko (2413m), Krywan (2495m) and Satan (2422m). On Saturday we went by “elektriczka” to Stary Smokovec and then, using Tatrzanska Magistrala path we went to Skalna Chata (1751m). And at last we reached the peak of Lomnica by the cable car. After our excursion, we went to a restaurant and ate delicious "prazony syr”. On Sunday we visited Thermal Park near Stary Smokovec, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience (especially for Anetka). On Monday we came back to Olsztyn. Home sweet home…:)

On June, 7th and 8th, together with Jarosław Dobrzański and Filip Czaja I had a pleasure to attend the 5th Annual Conference on Teaching & Learning: Learning Technologies in Galway, Ireland. We presented the results of our research in the field of Social Semantic Information Sources, e-Learning and Informal Learning. Below you can find an abstract of our presentation entitled: “Adapting informal sources of knowledge to e-Learning”.

I have decided to start a blog documenting my research in DERI. There are few reasons (apart from the fact that my supervisors encouraged me to do so). Firstly, writing this blog will force me to sit down and assess my own progress on a regular basis. It will also help my friends and family stay in touch with what I’m doing (especially since no one really knows what a PhD researcher does all day long). It will also hopefully going to be a way to communicate with people who share an academic or professional interest or are just curious about my work.

I have just started my adventure with research. However, I can say that, from what I have experienced and observed so far, doing a “world-class” research is not easy but doing it earns just rewards.