• ... the study and exploration of novel Internet- and IT-technologies to enhance university teaching and research e.g.
• ergonomic and pragmatic human-machine-interface
• innovative technologies and revelations from the field of computational linguistics in order to create queries in natural language
• automatic indexation of tele-TASK lectures based on speech recognition
• system to personalize tele-TASK lectures with private or open annotations
• knowledge representation using Semantic Web technologies for a personalized navigation through the tele-TASK archive
• virtual lab environments for practical learning sessions-especially in the field of IT security-based on virtual machine technologies
• mining and analyzing the usage of the tele-TASK archive
• ... the continuous development and improvement of the powerful and mobile tele-TASK-system for live broadcasting and recording of lectures and presentations
• ... the development toward a learner centric tele-TASK Lecture Browser to assist the learner in the visualization and personalization (screening, search, navigation, annotation...) of tele-TASK recordings

• 3. tele-TASK-Symposium:  Von der Aufnahme zur virtuellen Bibliothek
  13. und 14. November 2008, Hasso-Plattner-Institut, Potsdam
• 2. tele-TASK-Symposium:  Vom E-Learning in der Schule zur Web-Uni
  14. und 15. Juni 2007, Hasso-Plattner-Institut, Potsdam
• 1. Symposium für e-Lecturing und tele-TASK: Grenzenloses elektronisches Lernen fr alle, Erfahrungen aus der Hochschulpraxis
  26. und 27. Januar 2006, Hasso-Plattner-Institut, Potsdam

Ongoing projects

• Live and On-Demand Teleteaching with Tele-TASK

  With the help of the new developed system tele-TASK - Teleteaching Anywhere Solution Kit - a new, drastically simplified entrance technology for on-line lectures is reached. Out of the apartment or the office each PC user with a suitable Internet connection can follow online lessons comfortably. Even an interested layman is able to access the courses. Not only content of teaching are delivered, which are presented to the students in the lecture-room by either a whiteboard or a video beamer, but simultaneously also video and audio of the lecturer. Navigation bar for accessing different parts in the recorded lecture are included. Tele-TASK supports all usual platforms, different net bandwidths, arbitrary presentation programs and needs no special software installations, configurations and no precognition of the end-users. For the first time, the system was deployed for recording, transmission and archiving of the computer science lecture. Information security in open networks. at the University of Trier in the summer semester 2002. High access numbers are expression of the perfectly problem-free and easy possibilities of using.

  tele-TASK
• tele-TASK.de - the e-learning online archive
  
  www.tele-task.de is our online archive for high quality e-learning content. The project aims at the creation and mainainance of this archive where we store our tele-TASK recordings of lectures, presentation, conference talks and symposia. The content of the archive is available for free for every web user.
  
  
  
• tele-TASK Podcasts
  
  The tele-TASK Podcast Project develops methods to automatically create iPod ready video clips out of tele-TASK lectures. The aim is to provide learners with content containing complete tele-TASK recordings - the presenter's video/audio plus the desktop video - which can be played back on mobile devices independently from internet connection and desktop PC.
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• tele-TASK Lecture Browser
  
  The tele-TASK Lecture Browser project enables learners to:

• time triggered online annotation of tele-TASK lectures
• share these annotations with others in order to enable collaboration and team learning
• search the tele-TASK archive which has been indexed by means of speech recognition and OCR techniques

• Publication of the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity - ECCC

The Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity combines the advantages of preprint servers (in particular, fast publication) and electronic journals (especially editorial selection according to qualitative points of view) at hand of the research field of Computational Complexity.  All tasks involved in the reviewing and publication process are supported by a software system developed at our department and can be adapted to the publishing process of any other electronic journal.  Since 1994 ECCC is online and more than 60 ECCC reports have been published each year.

• teachingkids.eu

  The aim of this project is to determine the benefit of using short video sequences in education. "teachingkids.eu" is a platform where students and teachers can freely watch visual learning objects, rate / tag them and upload their own videos, e.g. modified versions of existing ones. The objective is twofold: first, students are motivated to produce good presentations which respect the quality requirements of "teachingkids.eu". Secondly, students explain items or issues to other students in their own words and gestures. This helps them to set "landmarks" and to better memorize and understand the topic.

• e-Librarian Service 

  Our E-Librarian Service is able to retrieve multimedia resources from a knowledge base in a more efficient way than by browsing through an index, or by using a simple keyword search. In our E-Librarian Service, the user can enter his question in a very simple and human way; in natural language (NL). The returned results are then logical consequences of an inference rather than of keyword matchings.

  Our E-Librarian Service was implemented prototypically in three different educational tools. A first prototype is CHESt (Computer History Expert System); it has a knowledge base with 300 multimedia clips that cover the main events in computer history. A second prototype is MatES (Mathematics Expert System); it has a knowledge base with 115 clips that cover the topic of fractions in mathematics for secondary school w.r.t. the official school programme. All clips were recorded mainly by pupils. The third and most advanced prototype is the Lecture Butler's E-Librarain Service; it has a Web service interface to respect a service oriented architecture (SOA).

• TASK_Moniminer
  
  TASK_Moniminer concerns on discovering the students learning interest from usage data in web-based learning environment, which is the further and auxiliary project for tele-TASK:

• Query the learning interest in a semantic way
• Elite Multimedia Lecture

• Preparation of teaching material for online access

  The virtual university should enable students to participate at university lectures without physical presence. One important task to achieve this objective is the preparation of university teaching material for online access. Changing lecture notes from being printed to HTML is only a minor task in this process. More important are visualisations of sequences and algorithms that support the learning process of the student and enable access to the lectures over the WWW. For an example see our online lecture notes for the lecture "Technical Foundations of Electronic Publishing on the WWW".

• Development and maintenance of a Research Portal Web Site : BDD-Portal.org

  BDD-Portal.org is serving as a central attraction point that links all the researchers, conferences and workshops in the area of Research related to Binary Decision Diagrams, as well as providing access to tools and benchmarks. The site aims to be such an one-stop Portal, that provides all this information and in addition permits online evaluation of BDD-based tools. Providing Heuristics online - OHO.
  The department's research is also including research on Binary Decision Diagrams for application in the Computer Aided Design process of vlsi circuits. To provide researchers a platform for testing and evaluating recent development in this area, OHO has been created and is constantly maintained.

• Development of the STACS Electronic Submission Service

  After STACS'97 (Lübeck) and STACS'98 (Paris), STACS'99 was taking place in Trier and used the Electronic Submission Service, too, which receives the submissions via email and puts them at the organisators' disposal. Again, the range of applications of the software developed is not at all limited to the example chosen (STACS).

• Publication of the web pages of the GI special interest group "Komplexität"

  The web pages of the special interest group consist mainly of a collection of current announcements - calls for papers, conference programs, open positions, links etc. - from the field of complexity theory.

• ...

People

• Team leader: Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel
• Team members:
• Diplom-Inf. Maria Siebert
• Franka Gründewald, MSc.
• Diplom-Ing. Haojin Yang
• Diplom-Inf. Matthias Bauer
• Dr. Serge Linckels
• Dr. Harald Sack
• Dipl.-Inf. Christian Willems
• Stud. Inf. Sebastian Voigt
• Former co-workers:
  • Dipl.-Inf. Andreas Groß
  • Dr. Long Wang
  • StR. Dr. Stefan Repp
• Dipl. Wirt.-Inf. Dirk Cordel
• Dipl. Inf. Volker Klotz
• Katrin Krieger, M.A.
• Dr. Naouel Karam
• Dipl. Inf. Mathias Kutzner
• MSc. Xiaobin Wei
• Dipl. Inf. Volker Schillings
• Dipl. Inf. Tonbo Chen
• Dipl. Inf. Genadij Umanskij
• Dipl. Math. Jochen Bern
• PD Dr. Carsten Damm
• Dipl. Inf. Arno Wagner
• Former students and international summer interns:
• Stud. Inf. Rico Richter
• Christoph Herold
• Marietta Sander
• Maja Milicic (Yugoslavia)
• Suchada Wachirapraditporn (Thailand)
• Herbert Kwasi Twumasi (Ghana)
• Steve Wang Kee Poon (Hong Kong)

Prof. Christoph Meinel with (f.l.t.r.) Long Wang, Naouel Karam, Katrin Krieger, Serge Linckels

Publications

• Our Handbook on WWW was published by Springer in 2004. A multimedia book presentation can be found here.
• Our conference papers on electronic publishing are listed within this list
• Our journal papers can be found here
• Our technical reports

Services

• Our archive of various tele-lectures, e.g. the tele-lectures of Christoph Meinel
• The Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity ECCC
• WWW-site of SIG Komplexität of the German Gesellschaft für Informatik GI
• The portal site for the community of reserachers on ordered binary decision diagrams and related research - www.bdd-portal.org
• The portal site of the tele-teaching project Internet-Bridge Potsdam-Beijing between University of Trier and Beijing University of Technology.

Further Activities / Projects / Coops:

• tele-TASK - Teleteaching Anywhere Solution Kid - our system for teleteaching projects and cooperations
• Internet-Bridge Trier-Beijing - our teleteaching and research cooperation with the technical university of Beijing
• Center for Electronic Publishing (Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Elektronisches Publizieren -WEP) at the University of Trier
• Reserach group Institute for Telematics
• Symposium on Electronic Publishing (Trierer Symposium Elektronisches Publizieren am 25./26. März 1999)
• Virtuelle Hochschule: LCMS