Dr. Dr. Sergej Sizov

University of Koblenz, Germany Computer Science WeST - Institute for Web Science and Technologies

Welcome!

I am an assistant professor at the Institute for Web Science and Technologies, University of Koblenz. This Web site gives insights into my research profile and current activities, teaching offers, collaborations and partnerships. I also provide supplementary information for visitors, reviewers, applicants, and students.

Research Interests

My current research topics include Information Retrieval, Web Mining, Semantic Web, multi-modal analysis of social media, and cross-lingual retrieval. A novel direction since 2009 is the inter-disciplinary research in the field of Web Science. You might be interested to learn more about our special interest group FourCats which is working in this field.

Web Science: novel paradigm of inter-disciplinary research on issues related to the us-age and the technologies of the World Wide Web: development and growth models of the Web, its capacity for furthering global knowledge and communication, values of trustworthiness, privacy and respect for social boundaries, examination of the social impact of the Web on human society

Semantic Web: Standards and technologies of the Semantic Web, knowledge management and knowledge acquisition in modern decentralized environments (Linked Open Data, LOD), meta knowledge management (provenance, change, process knowledge, uncertainty), uncertain reasoning

Information Retrieval: efficient analysis and retrieval methods for thematically focused information systems, multi-modal understanding of Social Web contents, detection of events, trends and opinions in Social Media

Key Publications

This page shows an overview of my recent important publications. A more comprehensive overview (including book chapters, workshop contributions, short/demo papers, older papers, etc.) can be found in addendum sections: "More Publications" and "Older Publications". You might also be interested to look into the "Impact and Rankings" section which contains pointers to major bibliographic sources and success/impact estimators.

EXPAND: More Publications

 
Sergej Sizov:
GeoFolk: Latent Spatial Semantics In Web 2.0 Social Media
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Search and Web Data Mining, WSDM 2010, New York, NY, USA, February 4-6, 2010, pp. 281-290

 
Stefan Siersdorfer and Sergej Sizov:
Social Recommender Systems For Web 2.0 Folksonomies
HYPERTEXT 2009, Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, Torino, Italy, June 29 - July 1, 2009, pp. 261-270

 
Philipp Cimiano and Antje Schultz and Sergej Sizov and Philipp Sorg and Steffen Staab:
Explicit Versus Latent Concept Models For Cross-Language Information Retrieval
IJCAI 2009, Proceedings of the 21st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Pasadena, California, USA, July 11-17, 2009, pp. 1513-1518

 
Thomas Franz and Antje Schultz and Sergej Sizov and Steffen Staab:
TripleRank: Ranking Semantic Web Data By Tensor Decomposition
The Semantic Web - ISWC 2009, 8th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2009, Chantilly, VA, USA, October 25-29, 2009. Proceedings, pp. 213-228

 
Renata Queiroz Dividino and Sergej Sizov and Steffen Staab and Bernhard Schueler:
Querying For Provenance, Trust, Uncertainty And Other Meta Knowledge In RDF
J. Web Sem. 7(3), pp. 204-219

 
Bernhard Schueler and Sergej Sizov and Steffen Staab and Duc Thanh Tran:
Querying For Meta Knowledge
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2008, Beijing, China, April 21-25, 2008, pp. 625-634

 
Stefan Siersdorfer and Sergej Sizov:
Meta Methods For Model Sharing In Personal Information Systems
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 26(4)

 
Sergej Sizov:
What Makes You Think That? The Semantic Web's Proof Layer
IEEE Intelligent Systems 22(6), pp. 94-99

 
Stefan Siersdorfer and Sergej Sizov:
Automatic Document Organization In A P2P Environment
Advances in Information Retrieval, 28th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2006, London, UK, April 10-12, 2006, Proceedings, pp. 265-276

 
Stefan Siersdorfer and Sergej Sizov and Gerhard Weikum:
Goal-oriented Methods And Meta Methods For Document Classification And Their Parameter Tuning
Proceedings of the 2004 ACM CIKM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Washington, DC, USA, November 8-13, 2004, pp. 59-68

 
Stefan Siersdorfer and Sergej Sizov:
Restrictive Clustering And Metaclustering For Self-organizing Document Collections
SIGIR 2004: Proceedings of the 27th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Sheffield, UK, July 25-29, 2004, pp. 226-233

 
Sergej Sizov and Martin Theobald and Stefan Siersdorfer and Gerhard Weikum and Jens Graupmann and Michael Biwer and Patrick Zimmer:
The BINGO! System For Information Portal Generation And Expert Web Search
CIDR 2003

More Publications

All Publications

REDUCE: Key Publications

 
Sergej Sizov, Steffen Staab, and Thomas Franz:
Analysis of Social Networks by Tensor Decomposition.
Handbook of Social Network Technologies and Applications, Springer, 2010, pp. 45-58.

 
Philipp Sorg and Philipp Cimiano and Antje Schultz and Sergej Sizov:
Overview Of The Cross-lingual Expert Search (CriES) Pilot Challenge
CLEF 2010 LABs and Workshops, Notebook Papers, 22-23 September 2010, Padua, Italy

 
Sergej Sizov:
GeoFolk: Latent Spatial Semantics In Web 2.0 Social Media
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Search and Web Data Mining, WSDM 2010, New York, NY, USA, February 4-6, 2010, pp. 281-290

 
Sergej Sizov and Andreas Ens:
EventFolk - Automatische Erkennung Von Ereignissen In Sozialen Medien
Datenbank-Spektrum 10(1), pp. 7-13

 
Stefan Siersdorfer and Sergej Sizov:
Social Recommender Systems For Web 2.0 Folksonomies
HYPERTEXT 2009, Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, Torino, Italy, June 29 - July 1, 2009, pp. 261-270

 
Philipp Cimiano and Antje Schultz and Sergej Sizov and Philipp Sorg and Steffen Staab:
Explicit Versus Latent Concept Models For Cross-Language Information Retrieval
IJCAI 2009, Proceedings of the 21st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Pasadena, California, USA, July 11-17, 2009, pp. 1513-1518

 
Thomas Franz and Antje Schultz and Sergej Sizov and Steffen Staab:
TripleRank: Ranking Semantic Web Data By Tensor Decomposition
The Semantic Web - ISWC 2009, 8th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2009, Chantilly, VA, USA, October 25-29, 2009. Proceedings, pp. 213-228

 
Renata Queiroz Dividino and Sergej Sizov and Steffen Staab and Bernhard Schueler:
Querying For Provenance, Trust, Uncertainty And Other Meta Knowledge In RDF
J. Web Sem. 7(3), pp. 204-219

 
Renata Queiroz Dividino and Simon Schenk and Sergej Sizov and Steffen Staab:
Provenance, Trust, Explanations - And All That Other Meta Knowledge
KI 23(2), pp. 24-30

 
Olaf Görlitz and Sergej Sizov and Steffen Staab
PINTS: Peer-to-Peer Infrastructure for Tagging Systems
7th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS), Tampa Bay, USA, 2008

 
Olaf Görlitz and Sergej Sizov and Steffen Staab:
Tagster - Tagging-Based Distributed Content Sharing
The Semantic Web: Research and Applications, 5th European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2008, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, June 1-5, 2008, Proceedings, pp. 807-811

 
Lawrence D. Bergman and Jihie Kim and Bamshad Mobasher and Stefan M. Rüger and Stefan Siersdorfer and Sergej Sizov and Markus Stolze:
International Workshop On Recommendation And Collaboration (ReColl 2008)
Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, January 13-16, 2008, Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain, pp. 439

 
Bernhard Schueler and Sergej Sizov and Steffen Staab and Duc Thanh Tran:
Querying For Meta Knowledge
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2008, Beijing, China, April 21-25, 2008, pp. 625-634

 
Stefan Siersdorfer and Sergej Sizov:
Meta Methods For Model Sharing In Personal Information Systems
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 26(4)

 
Sergej Sizov and Stefan Siersdorfer:
Restrictive Methods and Meta Methods for Themati-cally Focused Web Search
In: Handbook of Research on Web Information Systems Quality. Idea Group, 2007

 
Bernhard Schueler and Sergej Sizov and Steffen Staab:
Management Of Meta Knowledge For RDF Repositories
Proceedings of the First IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2007), September 17-19, 2007, Irvine, California, USA, pp. 543-550

 
Thomas Franz and Sergej Sizov and Steffen Staab:
Computer Mediated Communication and Semantic Environments
In: Semantic Work Environments. Idea Group, 2007

 
Stefan Siersdorfer and Sergej Sizov and Paul Clough:
Know The Right People? Recommender Systems For Web 2.0
LWA 2007: Lernen - Wissen - Adaption, Halle, September 2007, Workshop Proceedings, pp. 330-337

 
Stefan Siersdorfer and Sergej Sizov:
Workshop PC Chairs' Message
Web Information Systems Engineering - WISE 2007 Workshops, WISE 2007 International Workshops, Nancy, France, December 3, 2007, Proceedings, pp. 65-66

 
Sergej Sizov:
What Makes You Think That? The Semantic Web's Proof Layer
IEEE Intelligent Systems 22(6), pp. 94-99

 
Sergej Sizov and Steffen Staab:
Problem Resolution: from Individual Cases to Systematic Expert Knowledge.
8th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR), Work-shop on Textual Case-Based Reasoning (TCBR), Ölüdeniz, Turkey, 2006

 
Stefan Siersdorfer and Sergej Sizov:
Automatic Document Organization In A P2P Environment
Advances in Information Retrieval, 28th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2006, London, UK, April 10-12, 2006, Proceedings, pp. 265-276

 
Sergej Sizov:
Automatic Generation of Thematically Focused Portals from Web Data. PhD Thesis
University of the Saarland, Dept. of Computer Science, Saarbruecken, Germany, 2005
Nominated for the Klaus Tschira Award 2006

 
Steffen Staab and Thomas Franz and Olaf Görlitz and Carsten Saathoff and Simon Schenk and Sergej Sizov:
Lifecycle Knowledge Management: Getting The Semantics Across In X-Media
Foundations of Intelligent Systems, 16th International Symposium, ISMIS 2006, Bari, Italy, September 27-29, 2006, Proceedings, pp. 1-10

 
Stefan Siersdorfer and Sergej Sizov and Gerhard Weikum:
Goal-oriented Methods And Meta Methods For Document Classification And Their Parameter Tuning
Proceedings of the 2004 ACM CIKM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Washington, DC, USA, November 8-13, 2004, pp. 59-68

 
Stefan Siersdorfer and Sergej Sizov:
Restrictive Clustering And Metaclustering For Self-organizing Document Collections
SIGIR 2004: Proceedings of the 27th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Sheffield, UK, July 25-29, 2004, pp. 226-233

 
Stefan Siersdorfer and Sergej Sizov:
Konstruktion Von Featureräumen Und Metaverfahren Zur Klassifikation Von Webdokumenten
BTW 2003, Datenbanksysteme für Business, Technologie und Web, Tagungsband der 10. BTW-Konferenz, 26.-28. Februar 2003, Leipzig, pp. 197-206

 
Sergej Sizov and Martin Theobald and Stefan Siersdorfer and Gerhard Weikum and Jens Graupmann and Michael Biwer and Patrick Zimmer:
The BINGO! System For Information Portal Generation And Expert Web Search
CIDR 2003

 
Sergej Sizov and Klaus Meier and Gerhard Weikum:
HIP: Intelligente Suche Nach Fachinformationen Für Das Handwerk
INFORMATIK 2003 - Innovative Informatikanwendungen, Band 2, Beiträge der 33. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI), 29. September - 2. Oktober 2003 in Frankfurt am Main, pp. 268-273

 
Sergej Sizov and Jens Graupmann and Martin Theobald:
From Focused Crawling To Expert Information: An Application Framework For Web Exploration And Portal Generation
VLDB 2003, pp. 1105-1108

 
Martin Theobald and Stefan Siersdorfer and Sergej Sizov:
BINGO! Ein Thematisch Fokussierender Grawler Zur Crawler Zur Generierung Personalisierter Ontologien
Informatik bewegt: Informatik 2002 - 32. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Informatik e.v. (GI), 30. September - 3.Oktober 2002 in Dortmund, pp. 146-150

 
Sergej Sizov and Stefan Siersdorfer and Martin Theobald and Gerhard Weikum:
The BINGO! Focused Crawler: From Bookmarks To Archetypes
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Data Engineering, 26 February - 1 March 2002, San Jose, CA, pp. 337-338

 
Sergej Sizov and Martin Theobald and Stefan Siersdorfer and Gerhard Weikum:
BINGO!: Bookmark-Induced Gathering Of Information
3rd International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE 2002), 12-14 December 2002, Singapore, Proceedings, pp. 323-332

 
Sergej Sizov and Anja Theobald and Gerhard Weikum:
Ähnlichkeitssuche Auf XML-Daten
Datenbanksysteme in Büro, Technik und Wissenschaft (BTW), 9. GI-Fachtagung, Oldenburg, 7.-9. März 2001, Proceedings, pp. 364-383

 
Sergej Sizov and Anja Theobald and Gerhard Weikum:
Ähnlichkeitssuche Auf XML-Daten
Datenbank-Spektrum 1, pp. 59-67

Older Publications

Older Publications

BACK: key Publications

Sergej Sizov:
Methods of Artificial Intelligence in Object-Oriented Simulation of Small-Sized Manufacturing Systems. PhD Thesis.
Institute for Informatics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St.-Petersburg, Russia, 2000

Leonid Vishnevski, Sergej Sizov:
Modelling of Variable Pitch Propeller characteristics Beyond Common Operational Limits
3rd International Conference "MorlnTech", St.-Petersburg, Russia, 1999

Sergej Sizov:
Sequential Probability Ratio Tests for Planning of Large-Scale Simulations
1st International PhD Conference of St.Petersburg, Russia, 1998

Wladimir Amphilochiev, Boris Barbanell, Sergej Sizov:
The use of Viscous Fluid Model for Simulation of the Flow of Polymer Lotions in Pipes
2nd International Conference "MorlnTech", St.-Petersburg, Russia, 1997

Albert Kruglov, Sergej Sizov:
Simulation and Modelling of Safety Aspects for Transportation Systems
Technical Report 13/175 of the Institute for Problems of Transport, Russian Academy of Sciences, St.-Petersburg, Russia, 1995

Leonid Vishnevski, Sergej Sizov:
On distinctions of pitch propeller design
Anniversary Conference "A.N. Krylow and the Modern Seafaring", 4591, St.-Petersburg, Russia, 1995

Evgeni Novikov, Sergej Sizov:
On Special Aspects of the Computation of Racked Suction Channels for Hydraulic Jet Propulsion
Inter-Academic Conference of St.-Petersburg, 29128, Russia, 1995

Viktor Korzhev, Sergej Sizov:
Computation of the Hydrodynamic Load for Oscillating Profiles in Irregular Streams
International Conference AquaProp, St.-Petersburg, Russia, 1995

Albert Kruglov, Sergej Sizov:
Analysis of Perspective Directions for Non-Conventional Transportation Systems
Technical Report 13/151 of the Institute for Problems of Transport, Russian Academy of Sciences, St.-Petersburg, Russia, 1994

Key Publications

Recent Roles

General Chair of ESSIR 2011 - 8th European Summer School on Information Retrieval

Co-Director ACM SIGWEB - Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia and the Web (publicity Europe)

WebScienceTrust network - co-investigator, Chief Editor of the "Handbook of Web Science" (Springer)

PhD Committee member at the Dept. of Computer Science, University of Koblenz

Workshop/Conference organization

Program Chair des CLEF Cross-lingual Expert Search (CriES) Pilot Challenge at CLEF 2010

Program Chair des International Workshop on Recommendation and Collaboration (ReColl'08, in conjunction with IUI 2008)

Program Chair des International Workshop on Collaborative Knowledge Management for Web Information Systems (WE.Know'07, in conjunction with WISE'07)

See also..

• Editorial activities for journals, conferences, and workshops
• Projects: coordinator and co-investigator of several projects
• Lectures + seminars: teaching, professional education offers, etc.

Recent Talks

  WSDM 2010:
GeoFolk: Latent Spatial Semantics in Web 2.0 Social Media

  Hypertext 2009:
Social Recommender Systems for Web 2.0 Folksonomies

  FGIR 2008:
Thematically Focused Search in Web 2.0 Folksonomies

  PrOPr 2007:
Provenance in Semantic Web Applications

  LWA 2007:
Know the Right People? Recommender Systems for Web 2.0

  ECIR 2006:
Automatic Document Organization in a P2P Environment

  ECCBR 2006:
Problem Resolution: from Individual Cases to Systematic Expert Knowledge

  Text mining, Ontologies and NLP in Biomedicine:
Automatic Learning and Populating Ontologies from Web Data

Editorial: Journals

• Reviewer of the Journal of Web Semantics (JWS), 2008-2011
• Editorial Board of the Semantic Web Journal, 2011
• Reviewer of the Journal of Information Technology & Tourism (JITT), 2010-2011
• Reviewer of the Journal on Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM), 2010-2011
• Reviewer of IEEE Internet Computing, 2010
• Reviewer of ACM Transactions on the Web (ACM TWEB), 2008-2009
• Reviewer of the International Journal of Metadata, Semantics, and Ontologies (IJMSO), 2007-2010
• Reviewer of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2009
• Reviewer of the International Journal on Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS), 2009
• Reviewer of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), 2006

Editorial: Conferences

• PC Member of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008-2010)
• PC Member of the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008-2011)
• PC member of the 19th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2010)
• PC Member of the International Conference on Ontologies, Databases, and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE 2007-2009)
• PC member of the International Conference on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing (3PGCIC 2010)
• PC member of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML/PKDD 2009)
• PC Member of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery (ICKD 2009)
• PC Member of the IEEE International Conference on P2P Computing (P2P 2009)
• PC Member of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval (KDIR 2009)
• PC Member of the International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2007-2009)
• PC Member of the 16th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS'08)
• PC Member of the International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (SAMT'07)
• PC Member of the Multi-Conference on Computer Science in Economics (MKWI'08)
• PC Member of the 13th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS'07)
• Peer Reviewer for the 16th Intl. Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems (ISMIS'06)
• PC Member of the 1st Intl. Conference on Semantics and Digital Media Technology (SAMT'06)
• PC Member of the 12th Intl. Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS'04)
• PC Member of the 29th Intl. Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB'03)

Editorial: Workshops

• PC Member of Springer post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Mining Ubiqitous and Social Environments" (MUSE 2010)
• PC Member of the Workshop on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web (URSW) 2007-2010
• PC Member of the 4th Intl. Workshop on Databases, Information Systems and Peer-to-Peer Computing (DBISP2P) 2006-2008
• PC Member of the Semantic Search Workshop (SemSearch), 2008-2011
• PC Member of the International Workshop 'Bridging the Gap between Semantic Web
• and Web 2.0' (SemNet'07) at the 4th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC'07)
• PC Member of the IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC'06), Workshop on Distributed Agent-based Retrieval Tools (DART'06)

EU Evaluations

• Expert Evaluator of the 6th EU Framework Programme (Priority 2 - Information Society Technologies, Call 5), 2005

Current Projects

WeGov: STREP of the 7th EU Framework Programme: analysis and support of political discussions in social media (detection of political trends and opinions, content summarization, moderation of political discussions) Role: co-investigator, project coordinator

WeKnowIt: Integrated Project (IP) of the 7th EU Framework Programme ("Emerging, Collective Intelligence for personal, organisational and social use"). Project budget 8.3 Mio EUR, 9 international partners. Role: co-investigator, coordinator of several work packages

MULTIPLA: DFG (German Research Foundation) research project "Multi-Ontology Learning: Crossing the Boundaries of Domains and Languages" - collaborative generation of thematically focused multi-lingual domain ontologies from Web data. Role: co-investigator, project coordinator

ROBUST: Integrated Project (IP) of the 7th EU Framework Programme: Large-scale dynamic analysis of risks and opportunities in social media (community health indicators, content mining, optimization of policies) in B2B, B2C and C2C settings. Role: co-investigator, contributor

Archive

Over last years, I was involved in many other research projects and industrial projects. Following archive pages summarize my project experience:

Research projects (archive)

Industrial projects (archive)

International experience (archive)

Contact Details

Dr. Dr. Sergej Sizov University of Koblenz  -  UKob Institute for Web Science and Technologies  -  WeST Assistant Professor University Street 1 Dept. of Computer Science  - FB4 Building B, Room B-112 (campus map) 56070 Koblenz Germany Phone: +49 261 287 2736 Fax: +49 261 287 2721 Email: sizov@uni-­koblenz.de Getting around Interactive Map, Google Maps Geo: 50.362938 7.558973

Office Hour

Wed 14-16 in B-112 and on appointment (email).

Transportation

Koblenz has a very central position in central Europe and in Germany and can be easily reached by plane (including many low-cost airlines, such as Ryanair, Germanwings, Air Berlin, easyJet), by train (the majority of international long-distance trains in Germany pass through the Rhine valley and Koblenz), and by car (three highways, part of the European highway network).

Arrival by plane

Airport Frankfurt International (FRA): Major international airport about 115 km from Koblenz. All international airlines. Many direct trains to Koblenz, travel time app. 70 min (25 EUR), car ride from the airport app. 60 min.

Airport Cologne-Bonn (CGN): International airport about 100 km from Koblenz, major hub of low-cost airlines Germanwings and AirBerlin. Excellent connection to Koblenz by direct trains, travel time 60 min (14 EUR) car ride from the airport app. 60 min.

Airport Frankfurt Hahn (HHN): International airport 65 km from Koblenz, major Ryan Air hub in Europe. Direct coach link to Koblenz, travel time 70 min (15 EUR) or by car, travel time 40 min.

Airport Dusseldorf International (DUS): International airport 130 km from Koblenz. Many international airlines. Many direct trains to Koblenz, travel time app. 90-120 min (23 EUR), car ride from the airport app. 75 min.

Arrival by train

Deutsche Bahn (German Railways): Koblenz is located at the IC/EC track that connects the major cities from north to south in Germany. Many international long-distance trains (including EuroCityNight) to Cologne, Frankfurt, Hannover, Hamburg pass through Koblenz. Direct trains to the airports Frankfurt, Frankfurt-Hahn, Cologne-Bonn, Dusseldorf are available. A dedicated bus link (Bus #20) connects the main station with university campus (15 min).

Use the journey planner of German railways with destination "Koblenz HBF" (Koblenz main station). It is possible to buy tickets online. From Koblenz main station, you can take a bus or taxi to your hotel/hostel or to the Campus. The taxi rank and the large bus station are located in front of the main entrance.

Arrival by car

Major car rental companies have offices in all mentioned airports. In general, all non-residents (including non-EU nationals) are permitted to use the driving license (issued by their local authority) during the first 6 months of stay in Germany. Moreover, EU/EWR driving licences are accepted without any temporal limitation. In some cases, care rental companies may require an authenticated translation of the original driving license, in order to ensure your eliglibility. This is often the case if the driving license is partly written in the national language and/or does not clearly indicate categories of vehicles. For instance, Russian "international" driving licenses are known for this kind of questions. Last but not least: Make sure you drive alive! Drive on the right!

For GPS navigation, please use the following target address: 56070 Koblenz, intersection Oberweiher - Universitätsstrasse (50.362318,7.557238). This will bring you to the main entry of the Campus. Parking lots can be found in front of the main entry on the left (quite small), on the right (larger), the way down to the Moselle river on the left side (large) and also - just few steps away - under the big Moselle bridge (huge). Just follow the corresponding signs for parking. All mentioned parking lots are free of charge. Parking lots in the street Oberweiher above the Campus are for short-stay parking (Disc Parking max 2h). Warning: parking outside designated spaces is not allowed, the traffic wardens inspect our parking areas daily.

Getting around in Koblenz

Koblenz maps: Interactive Map, Google Maps

Campus maps: Interactive Map, Google Maps

The taxi from the city center or the train station to the Campus (8-9 min) costs app. 10 EUR. We recommend to explicitly ask for 'University Campus Metternich' (Metternich is a district of Koblenz). Many years ago, the Campus was located on the opposite side of the city, and some mature taxi drivers may mix up destinations. Taxi services: Bani (+49-261-12600) or Taxi Koblenz (+49-261-33055).

Taking a bus from the city center or from the train station to the Campus takes 12-15 minutes and costs 2,45 EUR for a single journey. A variety of special fares (e.g. 1-day ticket, group ticket for 5 people) are also available. Buses to/from the campus are: #3 (from city center), #15 (from main station/city center) and #20 (from main station, this is the fastest link). Complete Timetables (Campus bus stops are "Winninger Strasse" or "Oberweiher/Uni"). Please consult Interactive Map, Google Maps for detailed information about available bus stops.

For regional bus connections around Koblenz, you should check the VRM Web site. Many destinations can be reached by regional trains. The cheapest way to explore Rhineland is one-day Rhineland ticket which is valid on almost all buses, coaches, and buses in Rhineland-Palatinate and in Saarland. This ticket is available in Internet, from ticket vending machines in train stations, and on the bus from bus driver.

Travel Info

Entry permission:

In many cases, non-EU nationals are required to obtain the entry permission (Schengen Visa) for Germany. Please consult the advices of the German Federal Foreign Office for further information regarding your country and visa requirements.

Weather:

Due to an unique and favourable geographic location (Rhine valley, surrounded by low mountain ranges of Westerwald, Eifel, and Hunsrueck), Koblenz is known for very good weather conditions all over the year. The average air temperature in August/September is rather moderate with ca. 17-18°C, but the last summer 2010 also had very hot weeks over 30°C. For detailed information, check timeanddate.com

Time Zone:

Germany is located in the CET/CEST time zone (UTC+1/+2). This means UTC/GMT +2 hours during the summer DST and UTC/GMT +1 hour in the winter time. For more information, look at timeanddate.com.

Money:

The German currency is Euro (EUR). Currency exchange desks can be found at all international airports. Lokal bank offices offer currency exchange as well (for safety reasons, they reluctantly exchange big amounts of cash). ATM machines offer cash withdawal by credit cards and Maestro (in almost the cases this service is not free of charge, you should ask your bank about cash withdrawal fees). To estimate exchange rates, play around with Yahoo! currency converter. A full-featured ATM service can be found in a small "Sparkasse"-house at the main Campus entry.

Larger shops and restaurants accept all major credit cards and Maestro as well. Common supermarkets (Aldi, Lidl, Rewe, Norma, Plus) accept Maestro but NOT credit cards. Small shops and pubs may have no electronic payment facilities on site. Tip is accepted but not mandatory, 10% is the common value. Travel cheques are not really common and not widely accepted. Visitors from non-EC countries can benefit from Tax-Free Shopping in Germany.

Tourism office:

Koblenz Touristik provides a very detailed and well structured Web portal for Koblenz visitors. Highly recommended!

Electricity:

German mains power system offers 230 V 50 Hz AC, common outlets (i.e. plugs and sockets) are SchuKo (symmetrical plug with side grounding contacts), sometimes also the simpler Europlug (2-pin plug without grounding contacts). Travel stores at all airports and local electronics stores in Koblenz (e.g. MediaMarkt, Saturn, Expert, ProMarkt) offer a broad range of adaptors at reasonable prices. Devices designed for lower voltage levels (e.g. 110V hairdryers) also require a suitable upstream transformer!

Communication:

Major telecommunication providers in Germany are German Telekom and Vodafone (900 MHz) as well as O2 and E-Plus (1800 MHz). It is recommended to check in advance the roaming conditions for in/out mobile calls. Possible alternatives are Skype/VoIP and callback services (e.g. Bellshare, flat2flat, Flexsys, Sparruf, to name a few). In parallel, the network of public telephone stations is shrinking - at the moment, there is no public telephone box on the Campus.

Mobile internet via UMTS (WWAN aka 3G) has already reasonably good support in Koblenz, Vodafone D2 seems to have the best coverage. Stable HSDPA is available in the city center, EDGE almost everywhere. It is recommended to check in advance your data roaming conditions, many providers do not support roaming at high HSDPA speeds, and volume prices are also quite different.

The Campus offers dedicated W-Lan access vor visitors, which is available for our visitors on request, free of charge. As an alternative, you also can authenticate your W-Lan access via Eduroam, which is fully supported in our University. The bakery and coffee shop "Hoefer" in front of the Campus offers its own W-Lan access for free (!). Wired internet will be available in lecture halls.

Post office:

There is no public post office and no letter box on the campus. However, there is a full-service Retail Outlet in the REWE shop nearby.

Shops:

The supermarkets REWE, Norma, Edeka and Aldi are located next to the Campus. A big shopping mall "Löhr Centre" can be found in the city center, it is co-located with main bus interchange.

A huge (one of the largest in Germany) shopping areal with numerous outlets and stores is located in Mülheim-Kärlich near Koblenz. To get there, take the regional Bus #357 from one of the central bus stops in the city (consult VRM Web site for bus stops, timetables and fares). In this case, don't miss also a nice public swimming pool Tauris nearby (Bus #354).

Koblenz Touristik provides further shopping ideas in and around Koblenz.

Handicapped access:

ESSIR offers full access for disabled attendees on the entire campus: elevators in all buildings, stairs-free pathways and ramps, dedicated restroom facilities. On request, people with disabilities can access the Campus by car and use dedicated parking lots directly in front of particular buildings. Koblenz operates only low-floor buses with improved disabled access, dedicated places for wheelchairs, and call buttons for boarding assistance. Deutsche Bahn (German Railways) offers systematic and comprehensive support for passengers with disabilities.

Local attractions:

• A MUST: Rhine boat trip to the magnificent Rhine valley at the Loreley - Unesco World Heritage with wineyards, numerous medieval castles, and Rhine of course. Very recommended: take the old paddle steamer RMS GOETHE of Köln-Düsseldorfer shipping lines, the oldest ship on the Rhine. Recommended segment of Rhine: between Bingen and Boppard (return by train is possible). Koblenz Touristik provides nice tour recommendations and a detailed overview of shipping lines.
• Castle of Marksburg near Koblenz, the most famous medieval castle of the Rhine valley which has never been destroyed (unlike many others).
• Wine: Rhine and Moselle are famous for excellent wines, especially white Riesling. Small villages and towns along the river valleys offer numerous opportunities for wine tasting. Avoid central, large restaurants (full of Japanese tourists) and have a lookout for a besom on the wall of a small wine-grower shop - it shows that his small wine pub is open! It is often called "Besenwirtschaft" or "Straussenwirtschaft".
• Hiking and bike tours: Rhineland has the best infrastructure in Germany! Many ideas and tour suggestions for the surroundings of Koblenz can be found at portals Traumpfade and Radwanderland. These sites are mostly in German, so do not hesitate to ask us if you are interested and need some help! Koblenz Touristik provides addresses of local bike rental shops and some tour recommendations.
• The world-largest cold geyser in Andernach near Koblenz. Trip includes the visit to the interactive geyser museum, a short boat trip on the Rhine to the near nature reserve where the geyser is situated, and of course a geyser eruption (50- 60m high !!!).
• Volcano museum "Lava-Dome" in Mendig near Koblenz. We are situated in the area of high volcanic activity (hotspot area) which results in numerous volcanoes, volcanic seas, lava streams and hills surrounding Koblenz. The trip includes a visit to the interactive museum, guided tour with descent into lava mine, and explanations of old stonemason handicraft in Mendig.
• During panoramic flights you can enjoy the valleys of Rhine and Moselle in a very special and unique manner.
• Further interesting options include: medieval castles of Rhine and Moselle, waterski, climbing, aerobatic flights and gliding, slate mines, chamber concerts, etc. etc. - do not hesitate to contact us if you are interested!

Smoking:

In Germany, smoking is not permitted in public rooms (including all Campus facilities, city shops, restaurants and pubs, with quite few exceptions). Smoking is also quite expensive: one cigarette packet costs 4.50 EUR and taxes are expected to grow further in near future. Cigarette vending machines can be found in front of the campus entrance (age verification by Maestro chipcard of by driver license), you may also buy cigarettes in kiosks, petrol stations and some shops around, but NOT on the Campus.

Impressum

EN: This Web Site is managed by

Dr.Dr. Sergej Sizov
University of Koblenz-Landau
Dept. of Computer Science
Institute for Web Science and Technologies
University Street 1
56070 Koblenz
Germany

Phone: +49-261-287-2712
Fax: +49-261-287-2721
Email: webmaster [..] west.uni-koblenz.de

Administrative Contact

Please check the Contact web page and Webmaster corner for my detailed contact information.

DE: Inhaltlich verantwortlich fü diese Webseite ist

Dr. Dr. Sergej Sizov
Universität Koblenz-Landau
Fachbereich Informatik
Institut für Web Science und Technologien
Universitätsstr. 1
56070 Koblenz
Germany

Tel: +49-261-287-2712
Fax: +49-261-287-2721
Email: webmaster [..] west.uni-koblenz.de

Kontaktinformationen

Besuchen die Sie Contact-Seite und die Webmaster-Ecke für meine detaillierten Kontaktinformationen.

Disclaimer

EN: The contents of this Web site have been carefully checked. However, I cannot guarantee the absolute correctnes, completeness, and recency of all informations provided. I do not have any control over external linked Web sources. Insofar, I cannot ensure the liability of them, especially there is no guarantee that the external contents is correct and up to date. The views expressed on external Web sites are purely those of the respetive writer or content provider and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of Dr. Dr. Sergej Sizov, the Institute for Web Science and Technologies, or its staff members.

DE: Trotz sorgfältiger Prüfung übernehme ich keine Garantie, dass die Angaben auf dieser Webseite vollständig, korrekt und aktuell sind. Die Inhalte der externen Webportale, die von meinen Seiten ggf. verlinkt werden, liegen ausserhalb meines Einflusses. Die Korrektheit und Aktualität der extern verlinkten Inhalte kann nicht garantiert werden. Informationen, die dort angeboten werden, haben keinerlei Verbindung zu den Inhalten meiner Webseite. Meinungen und aussagen externen Web-Quellen können unter keinen Umständen als offizielle Position von Dr.Dr. Sergej Sizov, des Instituts für Web Science und Technologien oder dessen Mitarbeiter gewertet werden.

Webmaster's corner

This Web site provides complex semantic annotations of its content using microformats (hCard, hCalendar) , Dublin Core meta attributes (DC and DCTERMS), as well as Geotags (geo, ICBM). Some dynamic features are implemented in JavaScript and may not work in restrictively configured browsers. The recommended screen resolution is 800x600 or more.

The content is HTML 4.1 / CSS level 2.1 compliant and has been checked with W3C link checker, W3C CSS validator, and W3C HTML Validator in HTML 4.01 Transitional mode. All integrated microformats have been checked with hCard Validator and Optimus validator. All published Web pages have been systematically tested with Firefox 3.6 and Internet Explorer 8 and checked on BrowserShots.org for appearance in other browsers. If you experience any problems viewing our site in your particular browser, please let us know.

References

The prototype design of this Web site is provided by Free CSS Templates under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Panoramic views of Koblenz are kindly provided by the Koblenz Tourism Office: Copyright © Koblenz-Touristik. The webcam service is kindly provided by the German Federal Institute of Hydrology with suport by the Administration "Burgen-Schlösser-Altertümer" of Rhineland-Palatinate and by the Landesmuseum Koblenz.

Getting around

Over my years in Koblenz with 20+ locally organized project metings, 3 conferences, and one summer school, I've collected a couple of useful hints for incoming visitors. If you are planning a trip to Koblenz, the following pages might be of interest for you:

Venue: where is Koblenz?!

Transportation: getting to Koblenz from anywhere.

Travel Information: travel advices, recommendations, warnings, and useful links.

Koblenz - Germany's most beautiful "corner"

Koblenz is a wonderful old Roman town with modern infrastructure and a young spirit. The University of Koblenz offers a fully equipped modern campus with comprehensive congress facilities, convenient hotels nearby, surrounded by a beautiful, UNESCO world heritage landscape of the Rhine valley, historical attractions like medieval Rhine castles, and a convenient infrastructure for travel from all over the world, including four international airports, excellent railway connections, and several highways.

Koblenz is situated in the picturesque landscape of the Rhine and Moselle (UNESCO world heritage), known for excellent wines, romantic medieval castles, Loreley and Goethe. The town owes its name to the Romans who named the castle "castellum apud confluentes" - this means "castle at the confluence of the rivers".

A variety of cultural offers (sightseeing, museums, boat trips on Rhine and Moselle), outdoor activities (hiking, bike tours) and a certain portion of nightlife with several attractive locations in the historical city centre make Koblenz an ideal location for our summer school. Due to a favourable geographic location (Rhine valley, surrounded by low mountain ranges of Westerwald, Eifel, and Hunsrueck), Koblenz is also known for very good weather conditions all over the year.

The University of Koblenz is located on the newest, fully developed university campus in Germany.

Insights

Koblenz views: Attractions, WebCams (by Koblenz Tourism Office).

Koblenz maps: Interactive Map, Google Maps

Campus maps: Interactive Map, Google Maps

Current Teaching Offers

My current teaching activities (winter term 2010/2010) include:

Block course Web Programming at the University of Applied Sciences in Koblenz

Seminar "Web 2.0 - Basics and Opportunities", professional education for executive personnel of DEBEKA insurance corporation

Lectures "Internet Communication and Web 2.0" (professional education in media competence) for the State Media Agency.

Teaching Archive

Over the last years, I was involved in many teaching activities - lectures, seminars, special courses, tutorials, professional education..

Teaching archive

Theses

I offer a broad range of themes in the field of Web Science as topics for Master theses. Subproblems in particular themes can also be considered for Bachelor theses and Internship theses.

Agile research management

Mentoring and supervision of my Master and PhD students is organized by the principle of "agile research management". The core idea is to adopt some common software development techniques (known as agile development) for the research domain. A nice recent article "SCORE: Agile Research Group Management" explains it works in practice. The core component of our agile research is the special interest group FourCats.

Take a look into the nice article The Care and Maintenance of Your Advisor to learn more about your duties as a graduate or PhD student in my group.

Themes of interest

• Multi-modal Understanding of Social Media
• Event Detection in Social Media
• Periodic Events in Social Media
• Semantic Models for Social Media
• Mining cross-graph Linked Open Data
• Trend Detection in Linked Open Data
• Collaboration Clouds in Research Communities
• Multi-Lingual Retrieval for Linked Open Data
• Understanding Community Dynamics in Social Web
• Parallel Algorithms for Social Web Analysis
• Stream-Oriented Data Processing for Linked Open Data
• Social network analysis for research collaboration networks

Further topics for Bachelor, Master and Internship theses from our institute can be found on the WeST Offers web site.

Industrial projects (archive)

Federnwerke J.P. Grueber (2000): simulation and optimization of the material flow in the manufacturing of hot-formed springs, integration and risk analysis for new manufacturing technologies. Role: Coordination of the consulting project, supervisor for 3 staff members.

Deutsche Grove (1997-2000): simulation, analysis, and inter-divisional optimization of the material flow in the manufacturing chain of crane parts in Wilhelmshaven, Germany. Role: scientific coordination of the project, member of the advisory board, supervisor for 2 staff members and 4 Bachelor students (University of Applied Sciences Wilhelmshaven, Germany).

Rheinhard-Nieter Hospital Wilhelmshaven (1999): Optimization of the technical hospital services. Role: Project coordination, scientific advisory, supervision for 4 Bachelor students (University of Applied Sciences Wilhelmshaven, Germany).

Frisian brew-house Jever (1999): simulation and optimization of the storehouse logis-tics. Role: Scientific advisory, coordinator and supervisor for 3 staff members, 2 Bachelor students and 6 trainees (University of Applied Sciences Wilhelmshaven, Germany).

DaimlerChrysler Aerospace Airbus (1997-1999): Planning and optimization of the material flow in the manufacturing of small-sized construction elements. Modelling the changeover to the modern technology of high-speed cut. Role: Scientific coordination and supervision for 5 staff members and 3 Bachelor students (University of Applied Sciences Wilhelmshaven, University Oldenburg).

Jade-Weser-Harbor (1998-1999): simulation and planning of logistics for the new container terminal at the north sea in the harbour of Wilhelmshaven, Germany. Role: Head of the scientific workgroup, supervisor for 3 staff members and 4 bachelor students (University of Applied Sciences Wilhelmshaven, University Bremen).

Refinery of Wilhelmshaven (1998-1999): simulation and optimization of actions for better fill rate of available tank capacities and tanker bridges. Role: Scientific leadership, supervision for 2 staff members and 5 Bachelor students (University of Applied Sciences Wilhelmshaven).

Jos. L. Meyer GmbH (Meyer dockyard) (1997-1998): simulation and analysis of logistics in the area of panel assembly (manufacturing of flat construction elements). Role: head of the consulting project, supervisor for 4 staff members and 3 Bachelor students (University of Applied Sciences Wilhelmshaven).

Atlas Weyhausen (1997): Optimization of the material flow in the area container assembly. Role: coordination of the academic project, supervisor for 2 Bachelor students (University of Applied Sciences Wilhelmshaven).

Hüppe Form GmbH (1996): Optimization of internal logistics in the manufacturing of room partitioning elements. Role: scientific consultant.

See also: Research projects

Research projects (archive)

WeGov (2010-2013): STREP of the 7th EU Framework Programme: analysis and support of political discussions in social media (detection of political trends and opinions, content summarization, moderation of political discussions) Role: co-investigator, project coordinator

WeKnowIt (2008-2011): Integrated Project (IP) of the 7th EU Framework Programme ("Emerging, Collective Intelligence for personal, organisational and social use"). Project budget 8.3 Mio EUR, 9 international partners. Role: co-investigator, coordinator of several work packages

MULTIPLA (2009-2011): DFG (German Research Foundation) research project "Multi-Ontology Learning: Crossing the Boundaries of Domains and Languages" - collaborative generation of thematically focused multi-lingual domain ontologies from Web data. Role: co-investigator, project coordinator

ROBUST (2010-2013): Integrated Project (IP) of the 7th EU Framework Programme: Large-scale dynamic analysis of risks and opportunities in social media (community health indicators, content mining, optimization of policies) in B2B, B2C and C2C settings. Role: co-investigator, contributor

X-Media (2006-2010): Integrated project (IP) of the 6th European Union Framework Programme. Large international project in the area of knowledge management for complex distributed systems. Project budget 13 Mio EUR, 15 international partners from 7 European countries. Role: Area Coordinator for "Knowledge Sharing and Reuse", Leader of the work package "Dynamic Knowledge"(at the University Koblenz-Landau, Germany).

Handicraft Information Portal HIP (2003-2005): Development of the thematically focused Web exploration framework for the German chamber of small trades. Role: scientific and administrative supervisor of the project, coordination of 8 staff members (Saarland University, University of Applied Sciences Saarbruecken, German Chamber of Small Trades), Germany

BINGO! (2000-2005): Conceptual design and development of the thematically focused Web exploration frameworks BINGO!. Role: Academic and administrative supervisor for 3 staff members, 6 diploma students, and 4 trainees (Saarland University, Germany)

SOP (1997-2000): Project "Simulation and Optimization for Production Management", funded by the European Regional Development Fund (EFRE) in Wilhelmshaven, Germany. Objective: simulation-based optimization of flexible manufacturing systems (research and technology transfer). Project budget ca. 300 K EUR, 2 academic and 10 industrial partners. Role: principal investigator and academic coordinator of the project.

See also: Industrial projects

Measures of success

Are we doing good research? The researcher's success is hard to measure directly, but there are some - quite reliable - indicators: regular contributions to high-quality, competitive conferences and journals, high citation rates in the target community, awards and academic distinctions. A number of reliable online sources can be used to find out "who is who" in computer science:

• DBLP: the comprehensive bibliography of Computer Science
• Google Scholar: an excellent search mechanism for scientific publications
• CiteSeerX: search and citation analysis

Some portals also provide suitable rankings for authors, conferences, or publicationsb:

• Microsoft Academic Search (aka MS Libra): online rankings for authors, conferences, and publications in different thematical domains of Computer Science
• CORE: pre-compiled rankings of conferences/journals (semi-automatic process of score assignments)
• Publish or Perish: computation of impact metrics from bibliometry (such as Hirsch h-index), based on realtime results returned by Google Scholar

Paper rejected?

Most probably the paper was not good enough. Keep up, major revision, resubmission, got through! But maybe the contribution was just too much ahead of time? In this case, you are in good company! The common peer reviewing system does not easily accept too innovative, controversal ideas (btw, the underlying mechanism is explained - in a more general sense - in our CIKM'04 paper "Goal-oriented Methods And Meta Methods For Document Classification And Their Parameter Tuning", see Publications). Less formally, there is a nice article on this phenomenon, coined "We are sorry to inform you". Read and relax a bit before the next submission deadline.

Teaching archive

University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany (2006-2010)

• 2011 Core course "Semantic Web" (lecturer, planned)
• 2010 Special course "Web Retrieval" (lecturer)
• 2009 Special course "Introduction to Web Science" (lecturer)
• 2007-2009 Core courses "Database Systems" (lecturer)
• 2006-2009 Core courses "Information Retrieval" (lecturer)
• 2006-2007 Special courses "Web Mining" (lecturer)

• 2009 Seminar "Advances in Web Science" (organizer)
• 2007 Seminars "Web 2.0" and "Provenance and Trust" (organizer)
• 2006 Seminar "Peer-to-Peer Information systems" (organizer)

• 2008-2010 Member of the doctorate committee in the Dept. of Computer Science
• editor of the new doctoral promotion order of the faculty

• supervisor of 2 diploma theses, 2 bachelor theses, 4 master theses; coordination of 8 PhD students

Other recent teaching activities (2010-2011)

• 2011 General Chair of ESSIR 2011 - European Summer School on Information Retrieval, August-September 2011, Koblenz, Germany (upcoming)
• 2010 Lectureship "Web Information Systems" at the University of Applied Sciences in Koblenz
• 2010 Seminar "Web 2.0 - Risks and Opportunities in Corporate Environments" (professional education for executive personnel of DEBEKA insurance company, Koblenz, Germany)
• 2010 Lectures "Internet Communication and Web 2.0" for the State Media Agency. (professional education in media competence for school teachers and school interest groups)
• 2010 Lectures "Social media in a nutshell" for secondary school in the "Kinder-Uni" lecture series (children education program at the Koblenz University).

Saarland University, Germany (2000-2006)

• 2005 Core course "Information Systems" (teaching assistant, lecturer)
• 2004-2005 Seminars "Peer-to-Peer Information Systems" (supervisor)
• 2004 Core course "Information Systems" (teaching assistant)
• 2003 Special course "Selected Topics in Web Information Retrieval and Mining" (teaching assistant)
• 2001-2003 Seminars "Intelligent Search for Information Systems" (supervisor)
• 2002 Core course "Information Retrieval und Data Mining" (teaching assistant)
• 2001 Core course "Database Systems" (teaching assistant)
• 2000 Core courses "Information Retrieval", "Information Systems" (teaching assistant)

• supervisor of 8 diploma theses (master level) and 2 bachelor theses

University of Applied Sciences Wilhelmshaven, Germany (1998-2000)

• 1999 - 2000 Special courses "Simulation and Optimization" (lecturer)
• 1998 Core course "Informatics for Industrial Engineers" (lecturer)

• supervisor of 12 diploma theses (master level)

International experience

2009: research stay at Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain, in the context of EU FP7 Integrated Project WeKnowIt

2011: research stay at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, in the context of EU FP7 Network of Excellence NET2

2006-2010: networking and research activities in 5 EU FP6/FP7 research projects, collaboration with partners from 12 countries

Special Interest Group on Web Science, aka fourcats

This is an inofficial name of our special interest group on Web Science. Why four cats? Well, we could call us just "focus group ABC" - but "fourcats" sounds, uhm, less official.

FourCats Web site

Not yet firmly convinced? Well, then you may think that this name is inspired by several second-order associations with Web Science in the style of Antoni Gaudi:

The Gaudi way of understanding fourcats

First of all, in many European languages "four cats" is a metaphor for "a few people". For example, Els Quatre Gats is the name of a famous pub in Barcelona, which was since 1896 a meeting point of progressive artists for interdisciplinary discussions (e.g. first inofficial exhibition of young Picasso was there). Similarly, we are a small interdisciplinary group: one postdoc, four PhD students, and 2-3 graduates. We meet in a quite informal atmosphere, and discuss issues around Web Science.

The mentioned pub "Els Quatre Gats" is located not far away from the quarter of Yahoo! Research Barcelona, which is our partner in many research activities related to Web Science.

The name "four cats" is a pun for "forecast", which indirectly links to our predictive models for multi-lingual retrieval, detection of small comunities and events in social media, and thematically focused retrieval of multimedia art objects in Social Media. Hmm, isn't "four cats" also an anagram for "focus art"?..

P.S. Well, when we talk about artists and Picasso, why not also about Paris? Indeed, we do. The meeting point of French bohemians was the Parisian cabaret Le Chat Noir (i.e. The Black Cat), seriously. Like Els Quatre Gats, it also exists until now.