Submit your proposal, this conference is in my hometown and if you come, we can drink a beer. Submit your proposal!



KI 2008 -- 31st German Conference on Artificial Intelligence
23 - 26 September 2008, Kaiserslautern, Germany

https://ki2008.dfki.uni-kl.de


CALL FOR TUTORIAL PROPOSALS

KI-2008 will include a small number of tutorials, to be held the day
before the technical program starts. Tutorials will be free of charge
for conference participants. We aim at a small number of high-quality
tutorials suitable for a large percentage of conference participants,
including graduate students as well as experienced researchers and
practitioners.

Contents

Tutorials should give a comprehensive, in-depth perspective on
innovative AI methods or technologies that have an obvious potential for
research and/or application and are not covered by typical AI textbooks.
We especially encourage tutorial proposals covering cognitive aspects of
AI. Do not hesitate to contact the conference or tutorial Chairs if you
are in doubt about the suitability of a particular topic for the
purpose. Both full-day (6 hours) and half-day (3 hours) tutorials are of
interest.

Technicalities

KI-2008 tutorials will be held on September 23, 2008. They should
preferably be given in English. The revenue for tutor(s) consists of
free participation at the KI-2008 conference, plus reasonable travel
support if necessary. Teaching material will be printed and distributed
by the conference organization.

How to Propose a Tutorial

Proposals must contain the necessary information to judge the
importance, quality and community interest in the proposed tutorial as
well as the expertise of its tutor(s). Proposals must include
descriptions of the tutorial topic, goals, the intended audience, an
outline of the contents, and brief CVs of the tutor(s), including their
expertise and teaching experience in the field, and the intended length
(half- or full- day). Proposers are encouraged to include excerpts of
material from recent teaching about the proposed topic as an annex of
their submission, if available.
Proposal texts should be submitted by e-mail to the Tutorial Chair in
plain text format. Annexes may be sent as .pdf, .ps, .ppt, or .doc
format.

Important Dates

Proposal deadline: Mar 28, 2008
Acceptance Notification: May 30, 2008
Camera-ready teaching material due: July 2, 2008
Tutorial: Sep 23, 2008

KI-2008 Tutorial Chair

Prof. Dr. Frank Bomarius
frank.bomarius (at) iese.fraunhofer.de

Your computer doesn't start? Black screen, a cursor, nothing else? Well, you may be tempted to wipe & reinstall. Back at impact we had the company directive not to fumble around installing operating systems again and again, but to stick with the os the vendor has preinstalled and fix it. The reason behind this is that most vendors tune the installation and also that re-installing all software and data costs too much time = money.

So yesterday Ingrid's compaq evo laptop got a black screen of nothingness after the bios logo and instead of windows, a cursor flashing once. Then reboot and infinite repeat. I used knoppix to check what happened, harddisk still there, files looked as usual. Next thought: master boot record (MBR) so I read there are two ways: using gentoo startup cd and ms-sys or windows xp install cd. I had only knoppix so I choose windows xp boot cd. But my boot CD didn't have the "recovery console" menu when installing. Pressing F10 continously while it bootet finally brought up console (how intuitive). Later I found the windows xp cd shipped with the laptop, that had the "r" for recovery, so there is a difference between windows and windows.

fixing mbr and boot in the recovery console is easy, type fixmbr and fixboot and it should work. Not for me, I also thought that maybe all this is wrong and my floppy drive is broken (ha, that is the first in boot order), so I moved it down in bios list of boot devices. I also checked HP's guide for fixing boot problems, and blindly entered commands like "fixmbr /device/harddisk0" in recovery console.

Ok, it bootet now. But then:
Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

A thing I often heard from nightmare stories, it happened the registry was missing. Lucky me, the Microsoft Guide to recover the registry is on the first page when googling for the problem. The boot loader was right, half of the files of the registry were gone. I copied them from an automated backup which is done by windows every day (ha, you never know what useful things this os does when "being busy").

Alas, after 3 hours the system was back. So, it took me three hours to get my system back, compared to the 2hours of installing an operating system and then endless days of updatefest and installing software, it pays off. I am quite slow with computers, others may have done this faster. Ingrid was quite happy to have her machine back, though. I don't pick any OS better than the other, I have the same problems with all of them. But keeping one alive is always better than wiping, at least for me.

My old employer, Impact computing, has a new homepage. Looks excellent, nice photos of the products I helped to develop. So I have to update the link on my work website to www.impactit.at



Funnily, the picture is taken at the actual office, the rooms are about 50m to the right (I think), the depicted people are on the bridge between two skyscrapers. I used the bridge to come from the office to the coffee-machine. Excellent view.

Wishing best for Impact-It and the new product they did, EDOCTA. The good old PORTACON still contains my handwriting, and sells good.

FlashMob Ministry of Silly Walks
Kommt am Mittwoch, den 13.02.2008,
pünktlich um 17:45 Uhr
an die Bushaltestelle Rathaus.

Achtet auf eine gepflegte Erscheinung (z.B. Anzug, Aktentasche, Melone, ...) Wir performen den Silly-Walk bis 17:55 und verschwinden dann wieder.

Als Anregung:
Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqhlQfXUk7w

Bitte verbreitet diesen Aufruf über e-mail, SMS, Telefon, ...

Was ist zu beachten? (aus www.flash-mobbers.net)
1. Wenn Du schon hingehst, dann mach auch mit! Aber nicht stehen bleiben und
glotzen!
2. Erscheine erst zum abgemachten Zeitpunkt (pünktlich)!
3. Folge genau den vorgegebenen Anweisungen!
4. Je mehr es wissen, desto grösser wird die Community. Also: weitersagen!
5. Keine Körper- oder Sachbeschädigungen, Beschimpfungen, etc.! Flash-Mobbers
sind friedlich und wollen Spass haben. Und es gibt einen guten Ruf zu
verlieren.
6. Die "Action-Area" zügig wieder verlassen und seiner Wege gehen.
7. Wenn jemand fragt, was das sei oder wer das organisiert hätte, antworten,
dass man spontan da sei.

Bis dann!
Die FlashMobbers.

The german magazine createordie.de is covering the topic "next generation web" in an upcoming issue and searching for an author for the topic of Semantic Web. (the rest in german).

Ich wurde vom Verlag gefragt, ob ich selber einen Artikel schreiben würde, leider habe ich aber momentan zu wenig Zeit (wir haben bald Projekt-Review) um einen guten Artikel zu schreiben. Aber der eine oder andere Leser ist ja selbst Autor.

Konkret sind für den Artikel vier Seiten eingeplant, eine Seite fasst 4.000 Zeichen sowie zwei Bilder, insgesamt also 16.000 bis 17.000 Zeichen sowie 8 bis 10 Bilder. Deadline ist der 25. Februar 2008. Der Verlag honoriert den Text, nicht zu verwechseln mit Wissenschaftlichen Publikationen.

Falls du Semantic Web Experte bist, und bereits Artikel veröffentlicht hast, bitte wende dich direkt an den Chefredakteur Felix Schrader, Kontaktdetails bei createordie. Wie immer, es geht um die öffentliche Sicht aufs Semantic Web, da ist es wichtig ein gutes Bild zu bringen.