@ Intelligent User Interfaces Conference 2010 in Hong Kong, China

February 8th, 2010

Currently I am attending the Intelligent User Interfaces Conference (IUI) 2010 in Hong Kong, China. Sunday was the day of the workshops. In the Gaze Workshop I gave a presentation for the Text 2.0 Framework, work by my colleagues at DFKI in Kaiserslautern. Some more information on the paper is online here.

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Not only because of the jet lag we spend the evenings outside of the hotel. Above is a picture from Kowloon.

Tomorrow I have another presentation together titled “A Multimodal Dialogue Mashup for Medical Image Semantics” which is joint work with Daniel Sonntag from DFKI in Kaiserslautern.

The real conference has just started but it seems like brain computer interfaces are becoming a big topic in the community.

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Here is another curiosity from one of our restaurants: Toothpicks with vitamins and minerals!

First Impression from Hong Kong

February 7th, 2010

Until today I thought, the skyline of New York is impressive. It still is, but Hong Kong is a class of its own.IMG 3557

More photos soon…

Ph.D. thesis writing activity so far

January 30th, 2010

This video shows the activity of the SVN for the Latex sources of my Ph.D. thesis for the last months. However, there is still some work ahead…

Alps in the Chartreuse

December 25th, 2009


A Shack in the Alps

December 25th, 2009


Voiron downtown

December 23rd, 2009

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Seasons Greetings from Voiron, France!

RadSem software development visualized with Gource

December 22nd, 2009

Since the beginning of 2008 we spent more than 2 person years on developing RadSem. RadSem is a semantic image annotation and retrieval tool. During the last two years a number of papers about this tool and its features have been published. Using Gource, Patrick (a student at DFKI) created a video of the source code repository activity since 2008 using Gource. And this is the result:

With a little hacking, he even got our continuous integration server running Hudson to create the latest version of the video each night automatically. The video above is a snapshot which has been uploaded to Youtube. Also watch out for the “HD” version on Youtube as the original video has been generated in HD quality.

Annapurna Circuit GPS Track

November 22nd, 2009

After tracking almost every meter of our Annapurna Circuit trek, I’ve created a unified track file with the whole round. Each overnight stay is marked with a flag with the exception of the Ice lake where we went on an day trip to improve our acclimatization.

The complete track is available in GPX format and Garmin’s GDB format. If you want to fly over the track you can download and install Google Earth from its website, download the GPX file mentioned above and drag and drop it into a running Google Earth instance.

back from Nepal

November 22nd, 2009

After almost four weeks in Nepal we are back in Saarbrücken.

Two of my favorite photos are below:

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On Thorong-La we had quite some snow.

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In Chituan National Park in the south of Nepal we spent two additional days with safaris, chased rhinos (down to twenty meters distance, then they ususally start to chase the tourists) and had elephant rides.

It will be hard to top this vacation in the future. But we’ll do our best. :-)

back in Kathmandu

November 18th, 2009

After a great safari in Chituan National Park with close-ups with rhinos and crocodiles (the latter a bit more far away) we have returned to Kathmandu. It is hard to believe that almost four weeks of vacation are behind us. It feels more like one week. Anyway, we’ll return with 11+ GB of photos and plenty of Nepali Kukri rum. :-)