The meaning of life

A very funny prank. Unfortunately it is in German, so I will try to translate the joke. This is an imitation of a search engine, where the entered search string is: "the meaning of life". So click here to access the page.

Underneath it you have got two buttons, the first one is labelled "advertisement", the second one "reality". If you click on "advertisement" you get normal search results from google. But is you click on "reality", you get a ... very interesting result: the one-sentence answer to the question: What is the meaning of life?

The answer is very funny. For the lucky German-speakers, hope you'll like it. For those of you who don't understand German, I will write the translated answer as a comment :D

Marwane El Kharbili.

Project Reality Check

A friend of mine (Jean-Michel) sent me this link. I found it very funny so I am writing this post about it, I am sure you will find it interesting too. Although the page is in German, you don't need to understand what is written, just look at the images, it's always easier :D

So the pages is entitled "advertisement against reality". You can see 100 products of all sorts, and compare the advertisement photos or the images on the packages when you buy the product, with how the product really looks like. I'm telling you, the comparison is astonishing. I realized that what I buy is not what I use, eat or wear, but what is represented in the beautiful and bright images that we are bombarded with though advertisements. This is how marketing manipulates us.

Marwane El Kharbili.

The Good Relations Annotator

I was just notified today about the release of the GoodRelations annotator tool. Now, without philosophing too much about what it is and what it can be used for, I just attached the email by Martin (Univ-Prof Dr. Martin Hepp is professor at the Bundeswehr University in Munich). I really think such pragmatic projects are the way to bring semantic web into every dayy use, at least in the corporate sector. This tool is just one of the many semantic web initiatives undertaken by martin and the researchers in his group and his network.



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We are proud to announce the release of the GoodRelations Annotator, a form-based tool that will help any business in the world to create a description of its offerings suitable for the Web of Data, and that in less than 5 minutes.

The tool is available at

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/

It creates a straightforward yet complete description of the key aspects of a typical business using the GoodRelations vocabulary and current Semantic Web standards.

The resulting RDF/XML file can be either directly published on the company's Web site or used as a skeleton for developing a more fine-grained description with price information etc.

The work on the tool has been funded by the Oesterreichische Forschungsfoerderungsgesellschaft GmbH (FFG) and the Austrian Bundesministerium fuer Verkehr, Innovation und Technologie (BMVIT) under the myOntology project in the FIT-IT "Semantic Systems" program (contract number 812515).

Martin Hepp:
http://www.heppnetz.de
http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/

Tool:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/

GoodRelations Project:
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/

Webcast (15 Minutes)
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/

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Marwane El Kharbili, this time on behalf of Martin Hepp

Thoughts about systematic literature reviews

Some time ago, I had posted a two-piece item about systematic literature reviews.
Then came the following comment by sebastian:

... I think you are discussing here planning vs. intuition. Your way of approaching the literature review is intuition. Kai is planning. Personally, I think both ways will lead to success as long as you have some checks to make sure you are on the right way.

Yeah, I will have to agree on this one, since I have been doing literatire reviews for 18 months now. The only problem is that I still think that at least one single strong systematic literature review, which is carefully planned (i.e. choices of selected literature can be justified by more than intuition, relationship to other works, relevance for the tackled topic, celebrity of the working group, recency, impact factor, kind of publication, signification of results, et...) is necessary, at one stage or the other in a PhD. The reason for this is simple, it is easier from the researcher's perspective to make a clear map of the literature when usiny a systematic approach, the complexity can then be gradually increased. It can also help spare some analysis time, since comparison dimensions are known and well-understood. The intuition-based version, requires the ability of dealing with a huge amount of information, and still keeping a clear view on the massed of information, without loosing track of the real aim of the literature review. It is the hardest variant and I would say the most dangerous. In short, intuition is extremely important in research, and most often works best, every researcher will tell you this. Systematic literature review is a top down approach where the "publication population" for a certain topic is analyzed before publications are selected, and the more intuition based one is rather bottom-up, since the classification and analysis of the literature is done based on the already selected literature. The question is whether these two approaches always bring the same results? No way to tell this for sure. But we shouldn't forget that the real goal is to make good research, to reach new goals, not to make a perfectly written literature review.

Marwane El Kharbili

Finn by Jon Clinch

I bet most of today's generation have at least one common point with generations before them. The stories and adventures of Huckleberry Finn (in the same way as tom sawyer accompanied many hours of my life) have transcended years and the book is one of these master pieces that belong to human genius. Mark Twain seemed as if he could read my mind more than a hundred years before my birth. The anger, hardness, sometimes sweet sadness and invincible spirit of freedom that flows through a child's veins sitting in the garden of his parents' house in morocco, under this beautiful eternal sun and that soooo blue sky or my dear country, are transmitted to him by a man who lived long before in a country far to the west, far far away to a child's mind.

Well, have you ever wondered what is the story behind this dark and mysterious figure of Mr. Finn, Huckleberry's father? The name of this man used to awake deep rage and fear at the same time as I was a child. But I guess I have to thank this character because he certainly helped me get under the skin of Huckleberry and intensely live his adventures as if they were mine. Jon Clinch offers us one door into the soul of this unforgettable character, that is of Finn. Jon Clinch published a book, entitled "Finn" that tells the story of Huckleberry's father, grand-father, uncle, and Finn's mistress. Even the young Huck is depicted as a child in all its complexity, just opening up and facing a full-of-fear and ugly world.

This book transports the one who still have some small piece of Huckleberry Finn in themselves into the intrigues, violent and dangerous life stories taking place near an ever-present and silent Mississippi. The book is already on my book shelf, in my virtual shelfari library.

You can check the website for the book here. You will get much information about Huckleberry, Mark Twain, about the book itself and the author Jon Clich.

Marwane El Kharbili.

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

Having a PhD Strategy (Part One)

This is my reaction to this post by Kai, a fellow PhD Student at Blekinge TH and Ericsson AB. I had already introduced his blog.
In this post he reports about his (at the time he wrote the post) next steps for the PhD, He lists three courses he has to take at the university and explains ho he wants to approach the PhD Thesis.

Kai explains that he is going to do what is called a "Systematic Literature Review" (SLR. A systematic literature review is different from a normal Literature Review (LR) in the following points:

1. Allows to analyze the current state of knowledge about a whole scientific Area, such as Software productivity (Kai's example) or Compliance Management (my example).
2. It is easier to see what has been done in an area and what hasn't been done yet.
3. It is easier to argue why a PhD Student took a certain direction, and why this direction of research will bring outcomes which are useful to the scientific community.
4. It also easier to motivate the use of certain methods, tools or approaches.
5. it typically covers a way wider scientific scope than a normal SOTA (State Of The Art) review since it doesn't seek to focus on a certain problematic as an efficiency criteria.

But the main difference resides in the following quote from Kai's blog:

• "Systematic means that one has to document search strategy (keywords, search strings, scientific databases), paper selection criteria, paper evaluation criteria, how to synthesize the findings of the identified studies and so forth."

So the main and real difference to a normal SOTA is the strategy. Strategy in the sense that you'll have to select what you are looking for, in terms of setting keywords and search strings, and where to look for references. Moreover, the selection of papers returned has also got to be documented in the strategy. the final part of the strategy being the specification of the LR's results analysis and synthesis. I imagine the last point means that you would have to define a set of dimensions/axes on which you would want to project the results of your research, in order to get what is relevant for you from the LR. One of the main deliverables after this Systematic LR is a taxonomy of the domain of research and solid material for one (or maybe even) several papers. These papers are an important way of synthesizing results of an SLR because they are a way of consolidating the SLR results along one or several axes of research and because they are of high utility to other researchers. Thus, quality SLR papers have their place in highly regarded research Journals. They are also an archived and extensible knowledge basis of the domain. An SLR also makes it easier for the PhD student to later write related sections in research papers, so the big overhead of conducting an SLR can become a good investment.

I was surprised. I had never heard of the clear specification of a Literature Review (LR) strategy. of course you have always your own strategy when conducting one, but it is only "in your head" and your are the only one who knows what you are really looking for. In addition, no one would bother to describe an LR´s strategy because it would not be of a direct use for the expected outcome of the LR. So I was very intrigued. I think that in the scope of a PhD Thesis, dressing strong, clear and most importantly far-reaching fundamentals for the dissertation is a requirement for the thesis. That's why I am really convinced of the utility of a Systematic Literature review (SLR).

The most interesting in this is that I have noticed my non-intended attempt at the beginning of my PhD to do the same for my Thesis. For example, my attempts to have a taxonomy of the domain were in the form of complex mind-maps. Unfortunately , Minds Maps do not scale wekll with complex research domains, you will need a structured approach using several mind maps on several layers of the same domain and use hyperlinks between the mind maps. But I thought (mostly due to comments from colleagues and my entourage) that I shouldn't go for it because it is just a waste of time and that I should focus a lot more on certain topics. Knowing my tendency to tackle a lot wider range of reources to solve one problem (which I call the Sponge Effect (SE) which I will come to later in this Blog), in an attempt to let no information escape my research I thought I had to stop it. But this is not the main reason.

The real reason is that doing a PhD in 3 years necessitates extremely focused work on getting results for a well defined problem. The main fear of a PhD student is not to be able to fully understand the problems he has to deal with and to need a lot more years to conduct his research than intended. This is the real reason why my working method has been to cluster the domain I am working on in sub-domains, and studying one of these sub-domains fully in order to achieve some results for this sub-domain. My strategy is to examine the results I get from my research on this first target sub-domain in comparison to the other sub-domains afterwards. And thus to be able to get a more global overview on my first intended target PhD Domain by criticizing, completing, correcting and extending initial results. Whether 3 years are enough for this, I really doubt. But hope keeps alive :D

Marwane El Kharbili

Big players and their IDEs

Just an observation that hit me here as I was analyzing the restructuration and integration of BEA products into Oracle's FUSION platform. IBM started and contribute significantly to the Eclipse project. Even websphere is available in a light version called community edition, free of course. Oracle's Jdeveloper is free. Oracle contributes to Eclipse. Oracle took BEA's WebLogic Workbench and integrated it with its own contributions to eclipse forming the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. The strategy of Oracle being what it is, this pack of tools is free, to the great delight of developers who can try out technologies and compare. Sun has since a long time a very good IDE (the famous Netbeans) that may be built on a different strategy than Eclipse but that is not that less popular than Eclipse and has some arguments for it. Microsoft has express editions of its visual studio .net IDEs and tools. SAP has no free tool available.

This is just one observation to whom it my be interesting, I just wish SAP would make some tools they have developed internally freely available, especially in the Enterprise SOA & BPM category. Let's wait, hope and see.

Marwane El Kharbili

Vote for a cause on Tripadvisor.com

Vote for a cause on tripadvisor.com and help them donate one million dollar to a world cause!
I have just fulfilled my duty as a human being and cituzen of the world and voted for my preferate NGO, so do the same. You even get a small 9 pages long green holiday trip booklet by email.

Link: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Causes.

Marwane El Kharbili

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.