I found this page on Karriere Manager Magazin that'll tell you if what you are being paid is adapted to your qualifications, by comparing it to what the salaries on the market are. You'll have to take a test in the form of a questionnaire. The results are the analysis made of your answers by a specialized institute (which name you'll find on the page). I am pretty sure this test is only valid for Germany. I didn't take the test. First of all I don't care at all at this stage of my career, Secondly I am not ready to pay the 10 euros :D
Hope it'll be of use to some of you.
Marwane El Kharbili.
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Nov 10, 2010
Dec 22, 2008
Having a PhD Strategy (Part Two)
This is the second part of my reaction to this post by Kai, a fellow PhD Student at Blekinge TH and Ericsson AB. I had already introduced his blog and you can find the previous part in the previous post on this blog. In this post he reports among others about two other courses he has to take besides from software productivity. I will try to shortly analyze what he wrote about scientific publications and statistical methods.
About scientific publications, what interested me is that they get to study scientometrics. Scientometrics, according to Kai, are the methods used to assess the relevance and importance of journals and scientific conferences. If you have worked as a researcher you must know that not all scientific conferences, workshops, symposia, journals and all sorts of scholarly transactions are equal. They surpass each other in terms of popularity, reach, perceived quality and influence on the scientific community. Using Scientometrics, the impact factors of journals are established, which helps the researcher to select where he wants his papers to be published. as Kai simply expresses it: if you get a paper accepted on one of the journals with the highest impact factors for your community and area of research, then " this increases your reputation as a scientist in the area". But logically, the difficulty to get a paper accepted at one of these conferences grows with their impact factor.
What they learn in this course is to asses the impact factors of target journals and conferences, the major scientists (what my supervisor calls immediate research community), to come up with a strategy of publication and to make a review of papers. I guess the latter concerns papers that have been accepted at famous scholarly transactions or that have been written by members of the major scientists in the community.
Knowing the major scientists in the community is very important. First of all you get to know the most important directions of research, and you get to know the most important results already achieved. So you get a lot quicker to know the state of the art of the area you are working on. Also studying the references used by these scientists can help you know the foundations of your research area that you may want to read for a solid and fundamental understanding of current state of the art results. these scientists are the ones that publish the most articles and the ones at the most important transactions. These scientists normally also show you at which journals and conferences papers tackling related topics can be published and which ones are the most relevant.
The second course are statistical methods. Now, like every computer scientist I have had my share of statistical mathematics. Actually more, due to the emphasis put onto mathematics and the additional statistics options I took at my engineering school, the ENSIMAG, Grenoble. But this is not what Kai is talking about. He specifically says that they take a course dedicated to learn how to use statistics to evaluate and analyze data gathered during research (especially in software engineering, the use of case studies as qualitative analysis tools is widely done, as I can see it from the work of Sebastian). Such use cases and the accompanying statistical analysis can be of great use when tackling one of the last steps of a PhD, which is evaluating your results. The course is based on concrete problems, in 5 seminars.
The goal of these two posts was to give an idea about how a structured PhD at a university (at least partly) takes on the harsh project of a dissertation, and the tools PhD students get to learn and to use. In a totally industrial PhD, you have to try to go as structured as possible with the tools that you have. That means you shouldn't expect to have time, resources to learn or mentors who will teach you how to optimally get on with your PhD. You are in quite some extent an auto-didact, a multi-disciplinary researcher and necessarily one with extended curiosity. The desire to work in a highly structured way and the ability to combine several sources of information, from areas that do not necessarily have much to do with your direct area of research, is a must. being open to learn from the techniques of others and to get the best out of all who you meet or you read about can only make your PhD better.
I hope that my two small analyses have helped better explain what an industrial PhD is about. I will write some other posts about this, since I have quite some opinions to share concerning the topic.
Marwane El Kharbili
About scientific publications, what interested me is that they get to study scientometrics. Scientometrics, according to Kai, are the methods used to assess the relevance and importance of journals and scientific conferences. If you have worked as a researcher you must know that not all scientific conferences, workshops, symposia, journals and all sorts of scholarly transactions are equal. They surpass each other in terms of popularity, reach, perceived quality and influence on the scientific community. Using Scientometrics, the impact factors of journals are established, which helps the researcher to select where he wants his papers to be published. as Kai simply expresses it: if you get a paper accepted on one of the journals with the highest impact factors for your community and area of research, then " this increases your reputation as a scientist in the area". But logically, the difficulty to get a paper accepted at one of these conferences grows with their impact factor.
What they learn in this course is to asses the impact factors of target journals and conferences, the major scientists (what my supervisor calls immediate research community), to come up with a strategy of publication and to make a review of papers. I guess the latter concerns papers that have been accepted at famous scholarly transactions or that have been written by members of the major scientists in the community.
Knowing the major scientists in the community is very important. First of all you get to know the most important directions of research, and you get to know the most important results already achieved. So you get a lot quicker to know the state of the art of the area you are working on. Also studying the references used by these scientists can help you know the foundations of your research area that you may want to read for a solid and fundamental understanding of current state of the art results. these scientists are the ones that publish the most articles and the ones at the most important transactions. These scientists normally also show you at which journals and conferences papers tackling related topics can be published and which ones are the most relevant.
The second course are statistical methods. Now, like every computer scientist I have had my share of statistical mathematics. Actually more, due to the emphasis put onto mathematics and the additional statistics options I took at my engineering school, the ENSIMAG, Grenoble. But this is not what Kai is talking about. He specifically says that they take a course dedicated to learn how to use statistics to evaluate and analyze data gathered during research (especially in software engineering, the use of case studies as qualitative analysis tools is widely done, as I can see it from the work of Sebastian). Such use cases and the accompanying statistical analysis can be of great use when tackling one of the last steps of a PhD, which is evaluating your results. The course is based on concrete problems, in 5 seminars.
The goal of these two posts was to give an idea about how a structured PhD at a university (at least partly) takes on the harsh project of a dissertation, and the tools PhD students get to learn and to use. In a totally industrial PhD, you have to try to go as structured as possible with the tools that you have. That means you shouldn't expect to have time, resources to learn or mentors who will teach you how to optimally get on with your PhD. You are in quite some extent an auto-didact, a multi-disciplinary researcher and necessarily one with extended curiosity. The desire to work in a highly structured way and the ability to combine several sources of information, from areas that do not necessarily have much to do with your direct area of research, is a must. being open to learn from the techniques of others and to get the best out of all who you meet or you read about can only make your PhD better.
I hope that my two small analyses have helped better explain what an industrial PhD is about. I will write some other posts about this, since I have quite some opinions to share concerning the topic.
Marwane El Kharbili
Sep 19, 2008
L'amour a la marocaine...
J'ai toujours ete un facon de l'humour noir bien sombre et mechant, a la sauce ironie acide... Bon, c'est peut-etre une facon un peu extreme de voir les choses :D Mais pour en venir au sujet, il s'agit de l'amour au maroc. Vous me direz, mais l'amour...c'est une chose universelle, tout le monde doit connaitre, tout le monde doit avoir des idees similaires sur le sujet...Non, les marocains, pour ceux qui ne les connaissent pas, sont une sous-espece du genre humain qu'aucune science connue ne pourrait ni comprendre ni expliquer. Les journalistes de TelQuel, periodique que j'adore tout simplement, avec lesquels je ne suis pas d'accord sur un nombre de choses, surtout lorsqu'il s'agit de religion, avaient ecrit une chronique il y a 3 ans sur l'amour au maroc. ceux qui connaissent le style des petits gars de TelQuel ne seront pas surpris par le melange d'ironie et de serieux avec lequel ils parlent de la chose. cette ironie qui nous est bien propre nouspermet de rire de nos problemes, de nos defauts et de nos peurs sans pour autant deprimer ou penser au suicide, c'est la solution miracle qui a permis au marocains de survivre a des siecles d'histoire mouvante. Done tout cela, c'est pour vous motiver a jeter un coup d'oeil a l'article en ligne de TelQuel: Les marocains et l'amour. Bonne lecture!
Marwane El Kharbili.
Marwane El Kharbili.
Sep 6, 2008
Check your nerdiness!
On Dr. gernot Starke's blog (IT & more), I discovered a link to a page evaluating one's own nerdiness score. I decided I had no problem with that and that I would be very curious to know what my score would be. I do not think being nerdy is a bad thing, I even appreciate working with nerds. I have to say because of my background I have been in contact with many of them, but a lot less now that I have started my professional career. Nerds are actually very funny people, and most of them have very specific views on the world and on people. It is always very interesting to talk to nerds, but you certainly have got to come from the same background as them, at least to understand what they are saying and be able to discuss with them.
I will say nothing about the questions you'll get, so you'll be able to be surprised. But the questions are really asked by a nerd, although these questions are really primary class level for a real nerd, i.e. they are extremely easy and quick to answer if you have at least been a nerd or lived and spent much time around nerds :D
One thing before I tell the results, I have been trying for years to quit my short but intensive nerdy times and I really answered intuitively, as quick as possibel and most of all, honestly (means that I answered what I think and not what I know a nerd would answer). So I took the test and....my score is...:
______________________________________________
High-Level Nerd. You are definitely MIT material, apply now!!!.
______________________________________________
Lol, isn't that funny....euuh...I guess only a nerd would find this funny...ok, ok, it's not funny :D
Oh and now my score is from now on to be seen for ever on my blog, look for it!
Marwane El Kharbili.
PS: If you are really a nerd, then this website is for you: plenty of nerd tests.
I will say nothing about the questions you'll get, so you'll be able to be surprised. But the questions are really asked by a nerd, although these questions are really primary class level for a real nerd, i.e. they are extremely easy and quick to answer if you have at least been a nerd or lived and spent much time around nerds :D
One thing before I tell the results, I have been trying for years to quit my short but intensive nerdy times and I really answered intuitively, as quick as possibel and most of all, honestly (means that I answered what I think and not what I know a nerd would answer). So I took the test and....my score is...:
______________________________________________
Overall, you scored as follows:
16% scored higher (more nerdy),
1% scored the same, and
83% scored lower (less nerdy).
High-Level Nerd. You are definitely MIT material, apply now!!!.
______________________________________________
Lol, isn't that funny....euuh...I guess only a nerd would find this funny...ok, ok, it's not funny :D
Oh and now my score is from now on to be seen for ever on my blog, look for it!
Marwane El Kharbili.
PS: If you are really a nerd, then this website is for you: plenty of nerd tests.
Jul 11, 2008
ESWC - Part III
And the last part of this post series will be dedicated to something I am really fed of, and that is something you'll inevitably see in any conference or symposium yo go to: Poor presentation skills, poor speaking skills and oh my god poor slides! I have just gathered some of the (to my opinion) worst errors that are done again and again by people. Of course, most of these are young researchers but also the elderly and some of the established ones do the same errors:
Capital Error I: Slides are overloaded...this is the most common one, people try to make books fit on one single slide, this can be no good.
Capital Error II: People rarely use schemata or images to explain complex ideas. Instead, they rather have 3 slides with 15 lines of text on each..no need to say that anyone gets lost. This is why at the end of presentations you get questions that should have been clearly answered by the presentation such as: "why are you doing this?"...
Capital Error III: people just do not establish any contact with the audience, they just talk, do their thing and go. Just as some people are brilliant about writing papers (because there are precise techniques for this, that I still have to learn to get more papers accepted :D), they just do not care about presenting them well. The worst example of this is when hosts just speak for like 2 or 3 minutes (this is a lot of time believe me) while turning their back to the audience and looking at the screen. The ones who look the audience in the eyes and are able to check if people are following are not legions...
Capital Error IV: Slides are mostly hardly readable, either because the font used is too small, because slides are overloaded, because figures are too big and complex or because there are none, sometimes figures are not even explained. Imagine one attendee seeing a new slide with a super revolutionary graphic popping up and the host explaining things without making any reference to any part of the graphic. I know this too well because I used to make the same error in my papers, but now I am at least explaining my figures explicitly. Unfortunately I found no clear guide out there telling you how to write a good paper, it seems like some dark secret science that only professors are giving up to their best PhD students..when they have time.
Capital Error V: also, the stance usually taken by people, if they are not forced to stand somewhere because of a microphone for example, is not always the best. People sometimes hide completely the screen to half the audience, look the hole time on their laptop to read their slides (litterally) or something else.
Anyways, this was no inventory of bad presentation errors, this was simply what I noted while attending the conference. But it made me aware that I must have lots of things I may not be conscious about neither that I have to learn in order to achieve my goal of becoming a good presenter one day. So I will start looking for some resources on the net and watch carefully the videos of presentations by experienced people. I would also appreciate any help guys , you are welcome to help out here.
Marwane El Kharbili
Capital Error I: Slides are overloaded...this is the most common one, people try to make books fit on one single slide, this can be no good.
Capital Error II: People rarely use schemata or images to explain complex ideas. Instead, they rather have 3 slides with 15 lines of text on each..no need to say that anyone gets lost. This is why at the end of presentations you get questions that should have been clearly answered by the presentation such as: "why are you doing this?"...
Capital Error III: people just do not establish any contact with the audience, they just talk, do their thing and go. Just as some people are brilliant about writing papers (because there are precise techniques for this, that I still have to learn to get more papers accepted :D), they just do not care about presenting them well. The worst example of this is when hosts just speak for like 2 or 3 minutes (this is a lot of time believe me) while turning their back to the audience and looking at the screen. The ones who look the audience in the eyes and are able to check if people are following are not legions...
Capital Error IV: Slides are mostly hardly readable, either because the font used is too small, because slides are overloaded, because figures are too big and complex or because there are none, sometimes figures are not even explained. Imagine one attendee seeing a new slide with a super revolutionary graphic popping up and the host explaining things without making any reference to any part of the graphic. I know this too well because I used to make the same error in my papers, but now I am at least explaining my figures explicitly. Unfortunately I found no clear guide out there telling you how to write a good paper, it seems like some dark secret science that only professors are giving up to their best PhD students..when they have time.
Capital Error V: also, the stance usually taken by people, if they are not forced to stand somewhere because of a microphone for example, is not always the best. People sometimes hide completely the screen to half the audience, look the hole time on their laptop to read their slides (litterally) or something else.
Anyways, this was no inventory of bad presentation errors, this was simply what I noted while attending the conference. But it made me aware that I must have lots of things I may not be conscious about neither that I have to learn in order to achieve my goal of becoming a good presenter one day. So I will start looking for some resources on the net and watch carefully the videos of presentations by experienced people. I would also appreciate any help guys , you are welcome to help out here.
Marwane El Kharbili
Jul 7, 2008
ESWC - Part II
I know this is a very strange post here, since it had to be written one month ago now, as I was still at the ESWC conference in teneriffe. But the things being what hey already are, I have decided to still publish it.Here is the content:
"Now a week after I left Teneriffe, here is the rest of my report about the conference. Here I will tell a bit about the interesting talks I have heard, the demos I have seen and the poster sessions where I could ask deeper questions about some tools such as Nepomuk, WSMX and the WSMT.
First of all many presentations were about searches in triple stores. If one knows that the semantic language that is most widely used is still RDF, one can understand that. Ususally, the most simple things are the best accepted by people, and scientists are no exception. So RDF triples are stored in repositories and retrieving and querying information is all about searching these triple stores. So no wonder that there were several tracks precisely tackling this and other related issues. Pure semantic web is not really my area of predilection, even if I always keep an eye on the advances reached in this field. I didn't visit those talks.
What I was very much interested into however, was everything that has something to do with sws (semantic web services) in a first place, and with inference engines in a second place. For inference engines...I'll make it short, I only got one 10 minutes long presentation in the demo session of day two of the conference about some probablistic extension to an existing OWL-DL inference engine....the idea seems nice bt you ain't becoming an expert by listening to such shorties..I guess my journey deep into inference engines is going to take me some time and cost me lots of energy, since I will have to learn it alone (as always). But I would really appreciate any help guys, really :D
I attended several talks about semantic web services which essentially explain the advances made in the main tools currently existing with the WSMO framework. Those tools were also presented during the demo session that took place in the first 2 days of the conference from 19:00 till 20:00. I had the opportunity to talk to many developers on those research tools and I particularly liked the new things done in the new WSMX environment, in the WSMT tool (Web Service Modeling Toolkit) concurrent of the WSMO Studio and the service discovery functionalities of the Maestro tool. In the SUPER research project, we use the WSMO studio as a platform for implementation and also for modeling our ontologies in WSML.
I also attended talks which present new ontologies. The two that I liked most were the business process analysis ontology (by colleagues from the SUPER project) and the a software model that takes an MDA approach to the SDLC by the guys over at the SAP CEC in Dresden. I ask some questions to the host of the first talk and decided that I would read both papers. The reason for this is simple, everybody in research is by nature curious about a lot of things, but nobody has the time to cover even an infinite part of the things that sound interesting. So researchers are particularly selective about what they read. It is publish or perish but the reverse side of the medallion is "Read it in the morning if you''ll need it in the evening". I want to first have an idea about how to write a good paper to present a new ontology (and conferences are particularly selective when it comes to ontologies because there is just an explosion of them) and an unpublished ontology is not recognized by anybody in the community. The second reason is that I have very similar ideas to the ones presented in the second ontology but right now, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is not my focus, I am concentrating on BPM. However, the MDA ideas and concepts developed by this community are always similar to those needed in the more software oriented BPM community.
I must also say that I was very much impressed by the demos of the tools coming out of the nepomuk project, which seeks to develop a semantic desktop. the reason for this is that tese guys just decided to illustrate all their concepts by integrating many of them into the newest release of the Gnome system, a desktop layer for Linux distributions. I watched and discussed some of the tools with the guys and I think it is really the bedtest for future development software inresearch on social semantic desktops and interfaces in general. Or you guys will have to do at least as good as the nepomuk guys.
Marwane El Kharbili
"Now a week after I left Teneriffe, here is the rest of my report about the conference. Here I will tell a bit about the interesting talks I have heard, the demos I have seen and the poster sessions where I could ask deeper questions about some tools such as Nepomuk, WSMX and the WSMT.
First of all many presentations were about searches in triple stores. If one knows that the semantic language that is most widely used is still RDF, one can understand that. Ususally, the most simple things are the best accepted by people, and scientists are no exception. So RDF triples are stored in repositories and retrieving and querying information is all about searching these triple stores. So no wonder that there were several tracks precisely tackling this and other related issues. Pure semantic web is not really my area of predilection, even if I always keep an eye on the advances reached in this field. I didn't visit those talks.
What I was very much interested into however, was everything that has something to do with sws (semantic web services) in a first place, and with inference engines in a second place. For inference engines...I'll make it short, I only got one 10 minutes long presentation in the demo session of day two of the conference about some probablistic extension to an existing OWL-DL inference engine....the idea seems nice bt you ain't becoming an expert by listening to such shorties..I guess my journey deep into inference engines is going to take me some time and cost me lots of energy, since I will have to learn it alone (as always). But I would really appreciate any help guys, really :D
I attended several talks about semantic web services which essentially explain the advances made in the main tools currently existing with the WSMO framework. Those tools were also presented during the demo session that took place in the first 2 days of the conference from 19:00 till 20:00. I had the opportunity to talk to many developers on those research tools and I particularly liked the new things done in the new WSMX environment, in the WSMT tool (Web Service Modeling Toolkit) concurrent of the WSMO Studio and the service discovery functionalities of the Maestro tool. In the SUPER research project, we use the WSMO studio as a platform for implementation and also for modeling our ontologies in WSML.
I also attended talks which present new ontologies. The two that I liked most were the business process analysis ontology (by colleagues from the SUPER project) and the a software model that takes an MDA approach to the SDLC by the guys over at the SAP CEC in Dresden. I ask some questions to the host of the first talk and decided that I would read both papers. The reason for this is simple, everybody in research is by nature curious about a lot of things, but nobody has the time to cover even an infinite part of the things that sound interesting. So researchers are particularly selective about what they read. It is publish or perish but the reverse side of the medallion is "Read it in the morning if you''ll need it in the evening". I want to first have an idea about how to write a good paper to present a new ontology (and conferences are particularly selective when it comes to ontologies because there is just an explosion of them) and an unpublished ontology is not recognized by anybody in the community. The second reason is that I have very similar ideas to the ones presented in the second ontology but right now, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is not my focus, I am concentrating on BPM. However, the MDA ideas and concepts developed by this community are always similar to those needed in the more software oriented BPM community.
I must also say that I was very much impressed by the demos of the tools coming out of the nepomuk project, which seeks to develop a semantic desktop. the reason for this is that tese guys just decided to illustrate all their concepts by integrating many of them into the newest release of the Gnome system, a desktop layer for Linux distributions. I watched and discussed some of the tools with the guys and I think it is really the bedtest for future development software inresearch on social semantic desktops and interfaces in general. Or you guys will have to do at least as good as the nepomuk guys.
Marwane El Kharbili
Jun 4, 2008
ESW2008
Written on the 03.06.2008:
I am in Teneriffe since a couple of days now and taking part in the ESWC (European Semantic Web Conference 2008) where I have presented a paper on policy-based enterprise compliance management on monday at the SBPM08 (Semantic Business Process Management) workshop. It is dead season here so there are really only a few people and the weather is on the opposite to what one may think, mild and nice, not very hot, around 20°C. I didn't have time to see around the island during the conference since there are just too many interesting things here at the conference to see, in fact, there are too much for my passionate mind to even follow. what I like here about the food is that you get fish, a lot of fish everywhere, in fact, in many restaurants you only get fish! I flew in to teneriffe two days before the conference and went as a backpacker to the north of the island where mass tourism is a lot lss present, but where the island is just a lot more beautiful to see. And I can confirm that. In a future post I will tell about my mini-backpacker trip and let you know the best places and tricks.
The conference is really big, and there are quite a lot of people from various backgrounds and organizations, so I took on the task of networking a bit and have had several interesting discussions with mainly scientists, which open my mind to some new things. I also talked to some business people from companies simply attending the workshop because they are interested in following up with what the community is currently doing. I also helped out a little by assisting the brits during one panel session and making sure everybody who had a question could get a microphone on time.
On the first day I have presented my paper at the workshop and got some reactions from the other scientists, but I have noticed that many people are not familiar with the problem of compliance management. Policies and business rules are also a big source of questions, since people with background in formal languages and logics are specialized in quite very different sectors. The same goes for artificial intelligence folks. One of the talks that most interested me was one colleague from the university of Gent in belgium whose work is on supporting business modelers in eliciting and managing requirements in order to exploit them in business process modeling.
On the second day, I have listened to talks about one company called Garlik that was created quite recently by one british professor and profesisonals from the banking sector. Garlik basically made use of and extended semantic web technologies in order to extract data about any person on the web and make sure that your privacy is protected and that nobody steals your identity.
some other talks were even more interesting, particularly the one by ricardo yates from yahoo research about the virtuous circle of the semantic web and how yahoo understood the problems created by the web of data and designed and implemented solutions (which are not yet available as standard yahoo products) for allowing us to get to a personalized and semantically enhanced search on the web. you would basically get personalized search results based on what the web knows about you.
I am going to avoid talking about the concrete knowledge that I got from the conference for now since it helped me to get to know about a lot of work I was not aware of before, and get to know some potentially future close research collaborators from two diffreent institutions. I will get back to these more detailed aspects in future posts on my personal blog.
Marwane El Kharbili
I am in Teneriffe since a couple of days now and taking part in the ESWC (European Semantic Web Conference 2008) where I have presented a paper on policy-based enterprise compliance management on monday at the SBPM08 (Semantic Business Process Management) workshop. It is dead season here so there are really only a few people and the weather is on the opposite to what one may think, mild and nice, not very hot, around 20°C. I didn't have time to see around the island during the conference since there are just too many interesting things here at the conference to see, in fact, there are too much for my passionate mind to even follow. what I like here about the food is that you get fish, a lot of fish everywhere, in fact, in many restaurants you only get fish! I flew in to teneriffe two days before the conference and went as a backpacker to the north of the island where mass tourism is a lot lss present, but where the island is just a lot more beautiful to see. And I can confirm that. In a future post I will tell about my mini-backpacker trip and let you know the best places and tricks.
The conference is really big, and there are quite a lot of people from various backgrounds and organizations, so I took on the task of networking a bit and have had several interesting discussions with mainly scientists, which open my mind to some new things. I also talked to some business people from companies simply attending the workshop because they are interested in following up with what the community is currently doing. I also helped out a little by assisting the brits during one panel session and making sure everybody who had a question could get a microphone on time.
On the first day I have presented my paper at the workshop and got some reactions from the other scientists, but I have noticed that many people are not familiar with the problem of compliance management. Policies and business rules are also a big source of questions, since people with background in formal languages and logics are specialized in quite very different sectors. The same goes for artificial intelligence folks. One of the talks that most interested me was one colleague from the university of Gent in belgium whose work is on supporting business modelers in eliciting and managing requirements in order to exploit them in business process modeling.
On the second day, I have listened to talks about one company called Garlik that was created quite recently by one british professor and profesisonals from the banking sector. Garlik basically made use of and extended semantic web technologies in order to extract data about any person on the web and make sure that your privacy is protected and that nobody steals your identity.
some other talks were even more interesting, particularly the one by ricardo yates from yahoo research about the virtuous circle of the semantic web and how yahoo understood the problems created by the web of data and designed and implemented solutions (which are not yet available as standard yahoo products) for allowing us to get to a personalized and semantically enhanced search on the web. you would basically get personalized search results based on what the web knows about you.
I am going to avoid talking about the concrete knowledge that I got from the conference for now since it helped me to get to know about a lot of work I was not aware of before, and get to know some potentially future close research collaborators from two diffreent institutions. I will get back to these more detailed aspects in future posts on my personal blog.
Marwane El Kharbili
May 28, 2008
Another argument for internal controls
I stumbled on this post on the SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) life blog about implementing controls and Segregation of Duty (SoD). Although the post is quite old (19.05.2007), I felt it contained important points that I wanted to report on.
First of all the post gives another argumentation for the need for controls (for me, the need for policies can be justified in a similar way). The authors reports on experience with controls and SoD. He observes two problems in companies:
so these are two points coming from the reality of the business. Although most companies starting to struggle with compliance management do so because of the legal pressure applied on them, taking such concerns int o account will eventually make its place, when companies understand the value they get out of internal controls because they allow them to actively manage risks and avoid unexpected failures of business processes.
Marwane El Kharbili.
[1] Explaining Segregation of Duties. SOX Life Blog Post. http://www.insidesarbanesoxley.com/soxlife/2007/05/explaining-segregation-of-duties.asp.
First of all the post gives another argumentation for the need for controls (for me, the need for policies can be justified in a similar way). The authors reports on experience with controls and SoD. He observes two problems in companies:
- An employee having too much responsibilities can be tempted to diminish the quality of his work, either by frauding the realization of his tasks because of improper supervision or by simply not being ready to deliver the performance that is expected from him. Not being able to discover and control these discrepancies is certainly a big leak in a company's internal procedures. This point related to SoD controls.
- The second problem according to [1] is that there is a inherent risk in companies, and that is of continuously forgetting about the most important things to do and concentrating on the most urgent things to do. He makes a parallel between our own lives and companies. We tend to give a higher priority to urging tasks that have to be done and neglect what is really important, although we know that it is. Example: I know that it is important to control the quality of the development of an application that is being developed in India by providing and testing adequate test data. the problem is that at the same time, I have to deliver reports to the management about project planning and expenses for development projects for the region. I will eventually forget about the first task and accept the delivered product because of no time to test it. The same thing happens to companies when it is about designing internal controls.
so these are two points coming from the reality of the business. Although most companies starting to struggle with compliance management do so because of the legal pressure applied on them, taking such concerns int o account will eventually make its place, when companies understand the value they get out of internal controls because they allow them to actively manage risks and avoid unexpected failures of business processes.
Marwane El Kharbili.
[1] Explaining Segregation of Duties. SOX Life Blog Post. http://www.insidesarbanesoxley.com/soxlife/2007/05/explaining-segregation-of-duties.asp.
May 22, 2008
Selection of Upcoming Conferences!
Once again, I will list here 3 conferences that I think are a no-miss for anyone wanting to stay ahead of the game. I included here the links to the programs so that you can have a quick idea about the content of the talks and make your decision for what is most relevant to you this year:
Marwane El Kharbili.
- The 2008 Semantic Technology Conference: May 18-20, San Jose California. Have a look at the program here. One sentence about this, so that you get an idea about the content. People like Deborah L. Mc Guinness and Elisa F. Kendall are holding the Ontology 101: An Introduction to Knowledge Representation, Ontology Development, and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). One cool feature of the website, you can use a scheduler to make your own program and include it into your calendar. On the website you can also like me download the "Semantic Wave 2008 Report: Industry Roadmap to Web 3.0 & Multibillion Dollar Market Opportunities", a 30 pages report on an industrial strategy to make semantics a real life business.
- The International Business Rules Forum, October 26-30, 2008, BUENA VISTA Palace, Orlando, Florida. Note the interesting pre-conference tutorial program, which you can consult here. Examples are: "Developing a Business Process Architecture and Program of Change", by Roger Burlton (Founder Process Renewal Consulting Group Inc.), and "SOA and Business Rules - Building a Powerful, Flexible Application Platform", by Michael Krouze (Chief Technology Officer and Director of Management Consulting Services, Charter Solutions). Finally, you may not miss this, " Business Rules from A-Z: What You Need to Know", by none other than Ronald G. Ross (Principal & Executive Editor, Business Rule Solutions, LLC, and www.BRCommunity.com)
- Last but not least is the international wirtschaftsinformatik conference, this year under the motto: "Business Services: Concepts, technologies, Applications". This year's edition will take place in Vienna, from the 25-27 february 2009. So you've got quite some time to register. The linked page os in German.
Marwane El Kharbili.
May 19, 2008
What does iLOG do?
In this article by Simon holloway (Senior Analyst, Bloor research) on iLOG. I am not going to copy paste the post or try to analyze it, since there is nothing to analyze. Simon Holloway gives an overview on the activities of iLOG, which simply answers the question: "What is really the business of iLOG"? iLOG is a french company with headquarters in both France and the USA. iLOG is mostly known for their business rules management product JRules.
I appreciated the structured description of the various business iLOG is at the front of: operations research optimization, constraints programming, business rules management (with three tools, one for Java, one for C++ and one for .NET), and the one I didn't know about, which are visualization products. after the recent acquisition of another company, iLOG now have a set of supply chain management products. Simon Holloway notes that with such a line of products, iLOG have now a solution and not just a set of products as until now. Last point are the many industrial partnerships iLOG has, among others with Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle. So iLOG with their 800 employees are up on quite some fronts.
Marwane El Kharbili.
I appreciated the structured description of the various business iLOG is at the front of: operations research optimization, constraints programming, business rules management (with three tools, one for Java, one for C++ and one for .NET), and the one I didn't know about, which are visualization products. after the recent acquisition of another company, iLOG now have a set of supply chain management products. Simon Holloway notes that with such a line of products, iLOG have now a solution and not just a set of products as until now. Last point are the many industrial partnerships iLOG has, among others with Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle. So iLOG with their 800 employees are up on quite some fronts.
Marwane El Kharbili.
May 15, 2008
Securiy Requirements Engineering PhD & PostDoc
I wanted to make some advertisement for a double vacancy at the department of computer and information science at the NTNU (Trondheim, Norway). One position is a PhD position and the second one is a Post-Doc position. Both positions are ensured for 3 years (August 2008 - July 2011) and comprehend work on a new project, the ReqSec project. The projects seeks to come up with a methodology and tools for security requirements engineering.
The topic of security engineering is ons that I am interested a lot into, and I believe that we are are far behind on security issues from a software engineering point of view. One of my probable future directions of research (which I had talked about with my professor even before starting my PhD) is security modeling for business process management. the motivation: Security requirements do not solely appear on the lowest layers of software development, many types of security concerns get their requirements and partial specifications from the business and strategic layers of an enterprise model.
The ITMEE faculty of the Trondheim university is a leading university in computer science of which I know from personal experience. Some of my classmates at the ENSIMAG in Grenoble, went to the university of Trondheim in the same year I went from Grenoble to Karlsruhe. Several research institutes in applied mathematics and computer science also exist in Trondheim, some of them private. I don't know much about Norway or Trondheim itself but I guess if you're into nordic charm and love mountains, forests, Fjords and the see you should be happy there. Like Morocco, Norway is a kingdom too.
N.B.: [IT @ NTNU] Faculty of Information Technology, Mathematics and Electrical Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway.
Marwane El Kharbili.
The topic of security engineering is ons that I am interested a lot into, and I believe that we are are far behind on security issues from a software engineering point of view. One of my probable future directions of research (which I had talked about with my professor even before starting my PhD) is security modeling for business process management. the motivation: Security requirements do not solely appear on the lowest layers of software development, many types of security concerns get their requirements and partial specifications from the business and strategic layers of an enterprise model.
The ITMEE faculty of the Trondheim university is a leading university in computer science of which I know from personal experience. Some of my classmates at the ENSIMAG in Grenoble, went to the university of Trondheim in the same year I went from Grenoble to Karlsruhe. Several research institutes in applied mathematics and computer science also exist in Trondheim, some of them private. I don't know much about Norway or Trondheim itself but I guess if you're into nordic charm and love mountains, forests, Fjords and the see you should be happy there. Like Morocco, Norway is a kingdom too.
N.B.: [IT @ NTNU] Faculty of Information Technology, Mathematics and Electrical Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway.
Marwane El Kharbili.
May 6, 2008
Google App Engine
I just wanted to drop a line here about the recent release of the Google App Engine. If you are curious to know what it is then have a look at the introduction to the application environment here. Google App Engine ist "Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure", quote from the project's documentation home. The goal is the following: you as a user develop your application that should run on the Google App Engine runtime environment. For this you can use the development environment that is delivered by google for that purpose. For the moment it only supports Python but is destined to be extended to other programming/Scripting languages. I personnaly am a great fan of python, which I have bee using for 4 years now, and it's number 2 for after JAVA. But the language I would love to see is ruby, another language I am a big fan of. After the application has been developed you can run it on the net using the Google App Engine (from the appspot.com domain) or use Google Apps to serve the application from your own domain [source: project's documentation home]. Google App Engine provides you with a scalable infrastructure for your project to run:
Finally I would like to put some attentions on sebastian's blog article, where he reports on attempts to use the GAE (Google App Engine) and draws some conclusions about the use of it from a practical point of view. Note that it is in German.
Marwane El Kharbili
- dynamic web serving,
- persistent storage with transactions, automatic scaling and load balancing (500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month [source: project's documentation home])
- APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts
- and a local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your computer [source: project's documentation home].
Finally I would like to put some attentions on sebastian's blog article, where he reports on attempts to use the GAE (Google App Engine) and draws some conclusions about the use of it from a practical point of view. Note that it is in German.
Marwane El Kharbili
May 2, 2008
Have you got a PhD Blog too?
I had previously registered my blog on PhDWeblogs.net. The idea behind this is to make the blog accessible to people also doing a PhD or just simply having interest in research, who do not necessarily share the same interests I have in computer science and economics. Last week I stumbled upon this other website, which looks like way more accessible and better done: http://www.wissenschafts-cafe.net/. Apart from having an very appealing name, the site covers several disciplines and offers a number of services to bloggers. You can enter a description and a link to your blog, and make it accessible from the website to other people interested in what you are doing. I even got the hard bloggin' scientist sticker of the website's creator on my blog.
Have fun!
Marwane El Kharbili.
Have fun!
Marwane El Kharbili.
Apr 15, 2008
I am an evening man
On this website, I have found an article about the two different kinds of people. There are morning people and evening people. The page introduces these and contains three curves. One curve showing the medium performance curve (for the hypothetic "normal" person), the performance curve for an evening man, and a curve for the morning man. The evening man reaches his peak of productivity at around 22:00 O'Clock! The morning man on the opposite at around 08:00 O'clock. Somehow, this doesn't surprise me at all...
So the website advises the following to the evening man. Important and complicated tasks should be done during afternoon. The peak of productivity being between 14:00 and 18:00 at around 16:00. Routine tasks should be done in the morning, to get started. complex tasks should be always prepared the day before, during the evening. I already came up to the point where I put most of these tips in use, since I had to cope and find ways of optimizing with my unorthodox working methods since high school.
A morning man should be at work pretty early and profit from the time where most colleagues are not yet there to do complicated tasks. I know of some colleagues I had in the numerous companies I worked in (in several countries) who come to work before seven. The only question I have is how do they do with children, do they drop them at school at 06:30? Routine tasks should be done during the afternoon. The morning man has an overall decreasing productivity curve over the whole day. The earlier the better for him. Towards mid-afternoon, it is the end, he'd better go home :D
So I am clearly an evening man. This explains quite a lot of things to me. For example, my strong tendency to stay late at night is shown on the graphic. my only questions is where did they get the figures from? I would be very curious to know the whereabouts of the study. That could help a lot of people.
Marwane El Kharbili.
So the website advises the following to the evening man. Important and complicated tasks should be done during afternoon. The peak of productivity being between 14:00 and 18:00 at around 16:00. Routine tasks should be done in the morning, to get started. complex tasks should be always prepared the day before, during the evening. I already came up to the point where I put most of these tips in use, since I had to cope and find ways of optimizing with my unorthodox working methods since high school.
A morning man should be at work pretty early and profit from the time where most colleagues are not yet there to do complicated tasks. I know of some colleagues I had in the numerous companies I worked in (in several countries) who come to work before seven. The only question I have is how do they do with children, do they drop them at school at 06:30? Routine tasks should be done during the afternoon. The morning man has an overall decreasing productivity curve over the whole day. The earlier the better for him. Towards mid-afternoon, it is the end, he'd better go home :D
So I am clearly an evening man. This explains quite a lot of things to me. For example, my strong tendency to stay late at night is shown on the graphic. my only questions is where did they get the figures from? I would be very curious to know the whereabouts of the study. That could help a lot of people.
Marwane El Kharbili.
Mar 10, 2008
What is the difference between SOA, EA, BPM, Enterprise 2.0...?!
Such questions may be asked to you if you work in these fields and are often speaking to people about "revolutionary" technologies. Whether you are evangelizing SOA, selling BPM, conducting EA inventory projects or communicating on Enterprise 2.0 internally, you have surely encoutered many lost eyes looking to locate themselves in this armada of new buzz-words. And not being at ease whan trying to answer the question: "What is the difference between X and Y" may not be a very good sign to give to your client/collaborators.
This post by Joe McKendrick emphasizes this and reminds us of the actual goal all these technologies are longing for: make processes more efficient, shorten time to market, increase ROI on IT, etc... Everything that would allow your client to achieve their business goals following their selected strategy. One thing Joe notes aside is the obvious misunderstanding of what BPM is (well he relevates that many people are confusing BPM and SOA and seeing them as being to 90% the same thing) by confusing it with SOA. this is something I can confirm through my experience and what I hear and read in the community about BPM. vendors, consulting companies and consultants sell BPM as being the technology, not the business discipline. This of course applies if you have a workflow engine that you sell as a BPM engine, but you ain't doing no BPM really. I won't diverge in a troll about BPM Vs. BPM (for the moment :D).
Enjoy the post by Joe McKendrick.
Marwane El Kharbili
This post by Joe McKendrick emphasizes this and reminds us of the actual goal all these technologies are longing for: make processes more efficient, shorten time to market, increase ROI on IT, etc... Everything that would allow your client to achieve their business goals following their selected strategy. One thing Joe notes aside is the obvious misunderstanding of what BPM is (well he relevates that many people are confusing BPM and SOA and seeing them as being to 90% the same thing) by confusing it with SOA. this is something I can confirm through my experience and what I hear and read in the community about BPM. vendors, consulting companies and consultants sell BPM as being the technology, not the business discipline. This of course applies if you have a workflow engine that you sell as a BPM engine, but you ain't doing no BPM really. I won't diverge in a troll about BPM Vs. BPM (for the moment :D).
Enjoy the post by Joe McKendrick.
Marwane El Kharbili
Feb 17, 2008
Ontologies: State of the Art, Business Potential, and Grand Challenges
The title of this article is the title of the book I want to talk about. Yet another short book notification. The book is written by Martin Hepp, Pieter De Leenheer, Aldo De Moor and York Sure, all of them famous researchers in the field of knwoledge management and ontologies (not restricted to). This book introduces ontologies and discusses a number of parameters important for an ontology management project. The authors go on by clarifying the apports of ontologies on the basis of which they extract choices to be made in ontology design. the book concludes by showing what future developments can be expected in the field of ontologies.
These are informations about the book:
Series: Semantic Web And Beyond Computing for Human Experience. Volume 7
ISBN: 978-0-387-69899-1.
SpringelrLink: http://www.springerlink.com/content/k0r366152j2681n5/
A reference book probably , for reasearchers and practitioners of ontology design and management. Enjoy the read!
Marwane El Kharbili
These are informations about the book:
Series: Semantic Web And Beyond Computing for Human Experience. Volume 7
ISBN: 978-0-387-69899-1.
SpringelrLink: http://www.springerlink.com/content/k0r366152j2681n5/
A reference book probably , for reasearchers and practitioners of ontology design and management. Enjoy the read!
Marwane El Kharbili
Why do we lie?
After I read this article on Live Science , I have asked myself if the conclusions of the article did corespond to my opinion on why and how people lie at work. The article says of course that everybody lies, in different manners however. "It's tied in with self-esteem," says a university professor asserting that "as soon as people feel that their self-esteem is threatened, they immediately begin to lie at higher levels."
Reasearchers conducted research specific for the workplace. This research showed that employees lie more to their colleagues than they do to outsiders and that it's always tied with our self-estime and always being able to look good in front of everybodyLying is thus a question of image and self-protection, showing oneself and letting the others know that one does things well and even better than the others. The article concludes by saying: "Honesty is the best Policy!".
I personnally also think that people lie, the degrees of which can vary stringly depending on the situation, the position and the person itself. people can lie about the length of a meeting, about the quality of work, about results achieved in selling a product when talking to other colleagues from sales, lie when discussing why the technology they are using should be better that the one currently used in other products because they didn't know about the othertechnology, about the real price their car cost them or about their ability to repair their sink or their bike by tehmselves :D
Anyway I really advise you to read this article on Live Science, well written, kept quite short and presenting Research results.
Marwane El Kharbili.
Reasearchers conducted research specific for the workplace. This research showed that employees lie more to their colleagues than they do to outsiders and that it's always tied with our self-estime and always being able to look good in front of everybodyLying is thus a question of image and self-protection, showing oneself and letting the others know that one does things well and even better than the others. The article concludes by saying: "Honesty is the best Policy!".
I personnally also think that people lie, the degrees of which can vary stringly depending on the situation, the position and the person itself. people can lie about the length of a meeting, about the quality of work, about results achieved in selling a product when talking to other colleagues from sales, lie when discussing why the technology they are using should be better that the one currently used in other products because they didn't know about the othertechnology, about the real price their car cost them or about their ability to repair their sink or their bike by tehmselves :D
Anyway I really advise you to read this article on Live Science, well written, kept quite short and presenting Research results.
Marwane El Kharbili.
Feb 14, 2008
BPM basics for dummies
Although the discipline exists since more than 20 years (the IDS Scheer for example was founded in 1984 by Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. mult. August-Wilhelm Scheer), interest in Business Process Management has been increasing dramatically in the industry. The fact that all major players have brought up BPM strategies in recent years is a clear sign for that. But still are many people asking about BPM and thinking about getting fit in using BPM, although fear of new technologies and the buzz syndrom may slow down adoption in most cases (think about SOA). Many experts that most of the potential of BPM has still to be uncovered.
So it might not sound very strange that even Software AG, one of the major software providers in the world, after having acquired WebMethods (completed in june 2007), one of the biggest Business Process Integration software providers, have just made a book available. The book is entitled "BPM basics for dummies", and is destined to narrow adoption barriers of the technology. However the book is mainly treating the subject from the integration and software point of view, and not from the business point of view. The book is rather an introduction to BPM related technologies and a treats the topic more from the perspective of BPM Suites. Sections of the book proceed to a custom definition of BPM, then distinguish functional goals and what the added-values of BPMS are, then give discuss management and technological architectures that go with BPMS.
You can get the book on the corporate site of Software AG, all you need to do is register. The book is planned to be translated to French, Spanisch and German in April 2008. The book was written by Dr. Kiran K. Garimella (VP of BPM Solutions atSoftware AG), Michael J. Lees (Director of BPM Product Marketing at SoftwareAG) and Bruce D. Williams (SVP & GeneralManager of the BPM Solutions Group for Software AG). The most intriguiing and amusing in the book is the "for dummies" layout. It makes reading very easy-going and flowy. Most of all it remindedd me of one of the first books I read about computer science as I was a teenager "HTML for dummies" :D But those times are over.
My verdict: if you are solely intersted in implementing BPM someday, and looking for a detailed presentation of the way one of Business Process Management Suites' providers look at technical BPM and its IT implementation, then here is a compact, easy-to-read and very interesting small book (78 pages). The book can be easily read by newbies to BPM. But you shouldn't limit yourself to this book of course, rather think about how getting to know what BPM can really bring up your organization's corporate strategy, governance and processes to, while staying independant from implementation platforms.
Marwane El Kharbili.
So it might not sound very strange that even Software AG, one of the major software providers in the world, after having acquired WebMethods (completed in june 2007), one of the biggest Business Process Integration software providers, have just made a book available. The book is entitled "BPM basics for dummies", and is destined to narrow adoption barriers of the technology. However the book is mainly treating the subject from the integration and software point of view, and not from the business point of view. The book is rather an introduction to BPM related technologies and a treats the topic more from the perspective of BPM Suites. Sections of the book proceed to a custom definition of BPM, then distinguish functional goals and what the added-values of BPMS are, then give discuss management and technological architectures that go with BPMS.
You can get the book on the corporate site of Software AG, all you need to do is register. The book is planned to be translated to French, Spanisch and German in April 2008. The book was written by Dr. Kiran K. Garimella (VP of BPM Solutions atSoftware AG), Michael J. Lees (Director of BPM Product Marketing at SoftwareAG) and Bruce D. Williams (SVP & GeneralManager of the BPM Solutions Group for Software AG). The most intriguiing and amusing in the book is the "for dummies" layout. It makes reading very easy-going and flowy. Most of all it remindedd me of one of the first books I read about computer science as I was a teenager "HTML for dummies" :D But those times are over.
My verdict: if you are solely intersted in implementing BPM someday, and looking for a detailed presentation of the way one of Business Process Management Suites' providers look at technical BPM and its IT implementation, then here is a compact, easy-to-read and very interesting small book (78 pages). The book can be easily read by newbies to BPM. But you shouldn't limit yourself to this book of course, rather think about how getting to know what BPM can really bring up your organization's corporate strategy, governance and processes to, while staying independant from implementation platforms.
Marwane El Kharbili.
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