Tobias Vaegs

Floating content: Information sharing in urban areas

Content sharing using personal web pages, blogs, or online social networks is a common means for people to maintain contact with their friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. While such means are essential to overcome distances, using infrastructure services for location-based services may not be desirable. In this paper, we analyze a fully distributed variant of an ephemeral content sharing service, solely dependent on the mobile devices in the vicinity using principles of opportunistic networking. The net result is a best effort service for floating content in which: 1) information dissemination is geographically limited; 2) the lifetime and spreading of information depends on interested nodes being available; 3) content can only be created and distributed locally; and 4) content can only be added, but not explicitly deleted. First we present our system design and summarize its analytical modeling. Then we perform extensive evaluation for a map-based mobility model in downtown Helsinki to assess the operational range for floating content, which, at the same time also validate the analytical results obtained for a more abstract model of the system.

Enhancing Scientific Cooperation of an Interdisciplinary Cluster of Excellence via a Scientific Cooperation Portal

In the Cluster of Excellence (CoE) “Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage countries” at RWTH Aachen University, scientists from different institutions investigate interdisciplinary ways to solve the polylemma’s tradeoffs between scale and scope as well as between plan and value oriented production. Next to the CoE’s four scientific subfields – the Integrative Cluster Domains (ICDs) – there are three additional subprojects performing cross sectional research and providing means for physical and virtual cross-linkage, the Cross Sectional Processes (CSP). Scientific cooperation in such a large and diverse consortium – as a meta-structure to the structures present in the member institutes – poses many challenges. To tackle these, an online learning and collaboration platform is developed, called the “Scientific Cooperation Portal”, to optimize the cluster-wide cooperation process. Technically building on the Liferay framework, the portal provides basic features like a member list and an event calendar as well as functionalities to help cluster members to gain a deeper understanding of the CoE’s current state regarding the diversity in interdisciplinary terminology, patterns in publication relationships, knowledge management and developed technologies.

CLUSTER TERMINOLOGIES FOR PROMOTING INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENTIFIC COOPERATION IN CLUSTERS OF EXCELLENCE

Scientific collaboration is getting more and more complex and interdisciplinary, which is even demanded by many research funding sources (Bryson, Studies for Innovation in a Modern Working Environment. International Monitoring, 2009). Good examples are the clusters of excellence supported by the German Research Foundation, consisting of many local institutions investigating a common research question from multidisciplinary perspectives. In such networks it is important to have structures that support the cooperation of researchers and the information exchange among them to reveal potential synergies and help exploiting those (Sydow, Management von Netzwerkorganisationen. Beitrage aus der „Managementforschung“, 2010). There are already a variety of tools available to assist collaboration in large businesses. However, there exists a lack of software, which is tailored to the specific needs of scientific cooperation structures. This demand is met by our Scientific Cooperation Platform (SCP). As part of the SCP the Cluster Terminologies application tackles the understanding between different scientific fields, i.e. differing terminologies. Our first goal is to capture the current state of terminologies in the cluster by gathering and visualizing information about which terms are used with what definition by whom in the cluster. This will raise awareness of where cooperation like interdisciplinary publications can lead to misunderstandings or the necessity to clarify a common terminology beforehand. The second step is to foster discussions about the terminology among the cluster members both in an informal manner as well as in specific workshops. Definitions for some terms will become clearer in this process, which can even lead to an ‘official’ cluster-wide definition. For other terms maybe at least an agreement among members from the same field can be achieved. However, for terms, which simply have significantly different meanings in different research fields, the main benefit in the SCP lies in the advanced understanding of the differing terminologies.

Learning by gaming: facts and myths

Gaming has undergone a transition from a niche hobby to a part of everyday culture. This transition, along with the advance in the use of the internet, has created a new kind of social environment, commonly known as virtual life. This paper presents the survey results of over 1000 gamers worldwide, in which they tell us how gaming affected their lives – both virtual and real – with regard to their career, relationships and social life. The analysis of the answers disproves common stereotypes about gamers, shows areas where gaming can very well be beneficial and where there are still problems.

Fostering interdisciplinary integration in engineering management

Research in the challenging field of industrial engineering and engineering management often needs the expertise from more than one discipline. Various disciplinary competences have to be combined to answer research questions and to solve specific (engineering) problems at the interfaces of different professional disciplines. The disciplines being part of the research and problem solving process have to be consequently integrated to form an efficiently performing interdisciplinary consortium. Current research states that this interdisciplinary integration process has to include various dimensions. This paper introduces three sets of interdisciplinary integration methods. Together they cover all of the dimensions explained before and lead to an enhanced interdisciplinary integration. Having just implemented a set of integration methods, measurement methods are adjusted to evaluate and optimize them continually.

Scientific Cooperation Engineering Making Interdisciplinary Knowledge Available within Research Facilities and to External Stakeholders

In this paper we introduce the Scientific Cooperation Portal (SCP), a social enterprise software, and how it is integrated into our process of Scientific Cooperation Engineering. This process is applied in a large-scale interdisciplinary research cluster to ensure and manage the success of the interdisciplinary cooperation of over 180 researchers in different qualification levels. We investigate the influence of shared method competencies as an exemplary driver for collaboration. From the results we address both offline and online measures to improve interdisciplinary collaboration. We show how the knowledge generated from offline measures such as colloquia are transferred to the SCP and connected with other data available on the portal. This includes the handling of interdisciplinary terminologies, the disposability of publications and technology data sheets. The portal fosters knowledge exchange, and interdisciplinary awareness within the research cluster as well as technology dissemination both within the cluster, across the university, and into industry. The effectiveness of the approach is continuously assessed using a traditional balanced scorecard approach as well as additional qualitative measures such as interviews and focus groups.

TinyWiFi: making network protocol evaluation portable across multiple phy-link layers

Multihop wireless networks, such as sensor-, ad hoc- and mesh-networks, although different share some common characteristics. All these networks exhibit link dynamics. Protocols designed for these wireless networks must overcome the challenge of link dynamics and the resulting churn in network topology. Due to structural and topological similarities, protocols developed for one class of wireless network should also be applicable in the other classes. However, network-layer protocols are usually developed for and tested in only one class of wireless network due to the lack of a platform that allows testing of protocols across different classes of networks. As a result, we unnecessarily constrain the range of settings and scenarios in which we test network protocols. In this paper, we present TinyWifi, a platform for executing native sensornet protocols on Linux-driven wireless devices. TinyWifi builds on nesC code base that abstracts from TinyOS and enables the execution of nesC-based protocols in Linux. Using this abstraction, we expand the applicability and means of protocol execution from one class of wireless network to another without re-implementation. We demonstrate the generality of TinyWifi by evaluating four well-established protocols on IEEE 802.11 and 802.15.4 based testbeds using a single implementation.

A Virtual Collaboration Platform to Enhance Scientific Performance within Transdisciplinary Research Networks

Scientific collaborations are getting more and more complex and transdisciplinary, as even demanded by many research funding sources. An example is the funding priority “Innovative capability in demographic change” initiated by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Several collaborative projects investigate different parts of an overall research problem. These transdisciplinary research networks bring together very different institutions from academia and practice leading to many heterogeneous consortia investigating complex research questions. To discover potential synergies in such research networks means of supporting (physical as well as virtual) networking and collaboration are needed. There is no need to unify the inherent heterogeneity within these collaborations, but researchers must be enabled to learn and benefit from the given diversity. To meet this challenge a variety of different methods is used to enhance learning opportunities for the funding priority in the physical and above all in the virtual world. This paper describes the efforts to support the communication and cooperation within the funding priority and beyond. These efforts especially manifest in the virtual learning and cooperation platform designed for this very purpose.

Statistical vector based point-to-point routing in wireless networks

We present Statistical Vector Routing (SVR), a protocol that efficiently deals with communication link dynamics in wireless networks. It assigns virtual coordinates to nodes based on the statistical distribution of their distance from a small set of beacons. The distance metric predicts the current location of a node in its address distribution. Our initial results from a prototype implementation over real testbeds demonstrate the feasibility of SVR.