Humans have a tremendous Potential of Creativity and Entrepreneurship

Hi, 

today we started the new course "Schlüsselkompetenzen" in WiSe 24/25, which is a new course for first-year Bachelor students at Fakultät Informatik in Dresden. 

I had a wonderful, interested audience of about 40 gents and ladies in the Hörsaal E023. 

The title of the blog is from Mohammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank for microloans in Bangla Desh. The guy who got the nobel prize for his work, and is now prime minister of Bangla Desh.

Do not forget to register in OPAL, so that I can send you an email, if necessary.

Looking forward to meet you every week!

Uwe Aßmann

New Startup Wandelbots

End of 2017, some of our PhD students (C. and M. Piechnick, J. Falkenberg, S. Werner, G. Püschel) have founded the startup Wandelbots. (Facebook entry). I am very proud that the research field "Model-driven robot software engineering" which the chair runs now since 2012 has fostered such a dynamic and interesting company.

Our "robolab" was very active:

• It started in autunn 2015, with the participation of the Kuka innovation award at the Hanover Fair 2016. 
• In Feb 2017, they demo'ed at MWC Barcelona 2017: Mr T., the world's first immersive multi-robot:, an interview with CEO T. Höttges interview (in the front), Mr T. in the background
• And this demo was given at the IFA Berlin 2017: Hot Wire adaptive robot demo
• In December, they participated at the TechCrunch Disruptive in Berlin. They were under the 5 finalists (pitch). 
• BITKOM Startup Area hub.berlin 2017 (1:40min)

The developments were supported by TU Dresden (UR-10 robot), the ECSEL project IoSense (software toolbox), the BMBF project OpenLicht (wearables), and German Telekom (UR-5 robots).

Hypertext, Transclusion and Redundancy

Transclusion means "freedom of redundancy". If a page is transcluded in several other pages, and it is updated, the updates propagate automatically to all includes in a synchronization transaction (hot update).

Ted Nelson defined transclusion as the central concept behind hypertext and hypermedia:
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208353

Transconsistency is a transclusion-related concept which allows for transformations of the page before it is embedded. Web systems are usually transclusive
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167642304001789

Andreas Bartho's PhD on Elucidative Modeling employed transclusion and transconsistency for redundancy-reduced documentation. The technique generates parts of the documentation from models and code.

5G Lab at MWC 2017

End of Febuary, two groups of the 5G Lab Germany,  Software Engineering and Network Coding, ran a big show at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Placed prominently at the Telekom booth, we showed the immersive robot Mr. T, a robot remotely controllable by a sensor jacket. The third arm of the robot can be controlled by movements of the head of a human operator, so that the operator can immerse into the scene of the robot. This immersion capability enables tele-operation, tele-presence and tele-decisions.

• NetworkWorld news
• 5G Lab press release

Project SysPlace about "Blended Interaction with Device Ecosystems" Finished

End of Febuary 2017, the project SysPlace  had its final review. It had several very interesting results for future plug-and-play software architectures in the internet of things:

• A set of "Blended Interaction Patterns" for the communication between mobile and stationary devices. This set of patterns has been published by Hochschule Mannheim, Prof. Köhler (http://multiscreen-patterns.uxid.de/). It contains a very orthogonal and consistent pattern language for the design of modern multi-device applications
• Many case studies based on the pattern catalogue have been realized with our system "Smart Application Grids (SMAGS)" of Christian Piechnick. SMAGS has a new release. If you are interested, read a blog entry in the SMAGS blog, how to implement blended interactions (in German)

Welcome to the world of blended interaction within an ecosystem of devices.

Augmented and Mixed Reality Become Real

At this year's Mobile World Congress, the first glasses of ZEISS has been announced that offer Mixed Reality in form of a "normal" shape of glasses. This is an important milestone after the appearance of the Microsoft Hololens, because the ZEISS glasses are much more simple to wear.

Here is the press release of Telecom and ZEISS.

MR and AR become reality now. MR becomes much simpler and easier to use now. In 10 years from now, everybody will be tempted to wear these classes. What will change in our world?

• We will have many advantages from MR, such as help systems for unknown environments, information about the state of machines, interactions with machines and robots, and many more. 
• However, will we be able to live free like before? Everyone carrying such glasses can be tracked!

We need an extension of the German constitution ensuring the right of "personal non-tracking" when wearing an MR device.

Here you can see some of the first experiments of our chair with the Hololense. We did them in the project CyPhyMan on cyber-physical production management. It had several demos the the fair INservFM on facility management:

• Press release (in German)
• Video on youtube with Hololens demos in AR-based maintenance
• The Daqri helmet

Design Science

Design Science asks the question "How to design for a certain context?".

At the moment, there seem to be several papers who define the concept. One early source is the book of H. Simon "Design of the Artificial" from 1968. Another interesting source is Prof. Roel Wieringa's work at the University of Twente who defines Design Science as a primarily constructive (technical) science with additional "curiosity knowledge questions":

• Paper "Design Science as Nested Problem Solving" 
• Slides

Have a look at Fig. 2 on p. 4, in which Design Science is declared to be a 4-step research process with two constructive (technical) and two "knowledge" question steps:

1. Problem identification (knowledge question)
2. Solution design (constructive question) 
3. Test the design on validity to the context (knowledge question, often empirical or experimental)
4. Implementation of the design (constructive step)

Thus, Wieringa defines Design Science as a mixture of constructive (technical) science and curiosity (descriptive) science. 

 A typical crossover disciplines of Design Science are "Wirtschaftsinformatik" (business informatics) and "Wirtschaftsingenieurswesen" (technical economics). In the ACATECH paper of Prof. Schuh et. al., this is discussed. For instance, have a look at p. 52, Fig. 18, which depicts collaboration of engineering sciences and economic science. All mixed-colored phases are talking about Design Science.

The process of "digitization" (Digitalisierung) consists mainly of the trend that software business models replace classical product- and service-models. An important task will be in the next years to define strategies for "digital transformation", i.e., for the transformation of classic companies to software companies.

To this end, the University should develop courses about software business models, e.g.,  digital HW-SW-ecosystems with platforms and complements. Design science will play an important role for this task, because it is a crossover between classic technical science and descriptive research methodology. And as Wieringa has told us, we have to blend engineering with descriptive science.