Category: Research & Teaching

Tomorrow the lecture term of the summer semester 2014 starts. Of course, I did not made as much preparations as I liked to do, but it is alright. Most stuff is prepared for the first few weeks. Concerning the rest of the semester, well, there are still some busy days in front of me. Well, it’s part of the job.

However, because of that I almost did not do anything for my private projects. When I come home in the evening and even on weekends, I don’t feel like doing something on those. Although, I have many great ideas, I just don’t have the energy to make them happen. At least I manage to do my own household chores.

This week the lecture period for the winter semester 2013/14 ended at the TUD. I love working with students, I love tutoring them with their (Master or Diploma) thesis, and I love giving lectures. If it were different the university would be the worst working place choice for me. However, I am still happy that the lecture period is now over and that I now have more time again for the research projects.

The VICCI project is now in its last year. Now we need to bring the reached results just one step further and achieve a good presentation. We all want to show the quality of our results to everyone. The visualization work is currently in its (hopefully last) review cycle. One or two more weeks of work and it should be done. After that, I only need to do some more programming for the software infrastructure.

Additionally, of course, the preparations for follow-up projects are being made, too. We have a whole lot of open questions. The tricky part is to select a nice subset of these questions, to pack them into a realistic work package, and to convince the potential funding agency that this is worth their money. I, myself, have some very nice ideas, I thing. Hopefully I will get the chance to start the respective projects.

A few days before Christmas my old work project, the SFB 716 at the University of Stuttgart, surprised me with a great little Christmas gift: the SFB 716 doctoral award (website in german). I really did not expect something like this and I am very happy.

The German research landscape has many problems. This week I had a very nice discussion with a colleague, about research, the way it is performed today, will not solve any problems. Every researcher only hunt’s for funding, the ones with more ambition hunt for tenure. Doing so, they produce as many papers as possible as fast as possible, to display their excellent scientific quality. As a result, none of the problems they work on is ever solved completely. Every single time, special cases are excluded and only data sets are published which work well, neither representative nor complete; but published. Thus the research community accepts the publication as solution for the corresponding problem. The people having the problem are the upcoming researchers and PhD students, which need to use that stuff. If the only want to continue research, they are forced to make the same simplifications as before. If they want to really used the “solution” to work, they have to solve all the special cases, add robustness, performance, whatever. The tremendous amount of work they have to invest will not be recognized by anyone, since the research community already believe that problem had been solved before, hindering any new publications with the actual working solution. Thus researchers are forced to work with 1/4 solutions all the time.

So what about industry? They could create the full solutions. … Why should they? The industry creates their own solutions, especially tailored for their own problems. They are not interested in generic solutions for a broad audience, and rightly so.

This view of my obviously is limited to the research I see around me, namely the work in computer science. I hope other fields do better research.

So, how do we go on? … Well, exactly as before. There won’t be solutions and we will burn money.

The lecture period started this week.

This semester, together with a colleague, I am giving the lecture on “Scientific Visualization”. I am looking forward to it. However, this, of course, also means a lot of work. Mainly revising and updating the lecture slices and exercises. Therefore, I hardly had time to do anything else. Well, this is also part of my job.

The image of the article, by the way, shows a part of the “visible human” data set using direct volume rendering