Category: Science

ARABIC PAPYROLOGY SCHOOL (APS) – an interactive introduction to the reading of Arabic documents. Provided by the University of Zurich.

Obviously, reading Arabic is much easier than reading Chinese.

academic ranking of world universities

according to this study, the university of zurich is ranked among the top 50 universities in the world (pdf), top 10 in europe, and as number 2 in switzerland (following eth). criteria were only “scientific” ones: number of nobel prize winners, number of very frequently cited researchers, number of in “nature” or “science” published papers, number of papers listed on the “science citation index expanded” and on the “social sciences citation index”. they also calculated performance per researcher employed at the institution.

well, nice to hear.. despite of “never believe statistics you didn’t fake yourself” ;). if we assume that these guys did their job right, then these results are somewhat surprising indeed. for example there are quite many universities i would have expected to be ranked better, based on their reputation. e.g.

6. massachusetts institute of technology (mit, usa)
25. swiss federal institute of technology (eth, switzerland)
60. technological university of munich (tum, germany)
61. carnegie mellon university (usa)
80. purdue (usa)

to name a few. somes i would have expected in worse positions (mostly american universities). possible explanations there are many.. one can be found here (#6). i suppose if they would include better balanced measures (see e.g. #8), then this ranking would be significantly different anyway.

a thing which is of greater concern to me atm is the fact that within the same university, even within the same study course (“cs/it & business”), standards can differ significantly. just two days ago, a couple of friends and yours truly experienced that final marks can vary a lot, depending on what elective subject you choose/chose (mild vs. demanding professor) and whether you had the luck to study according to new regulations (“aps” – shorter studies and higher marks in average) or according to the old regulations (“po-95” – longer studies and lower marks in average -> the latter except for those few who chose “multimedia” and/or “information management” [= “mis” for u.s. readers] just before the according chair holders became “emeritus” about 1.5 years ago ;)

another hot topic currently discussed is the transition to “m. sc.” studies. in fact, our studies are harder than most u.s. “m. sc.” studies, yet we don’t have this “recognition” (at least on the paper) so far. don’t get me wrong – i’m the last one who’d care about titles, rankings and such. but as most others obviously do, there’s no other choice than taking it seriously too (unless i’d intend to spend the rest of my life as a yogi meditating the whole day long.. which wouldn’t even be that bad, actually ;))

so: always be prudent in how you judge people ;)

bbc news: scientists create ebola vaccine

amazing. perhaps a chance for hiv and other viruses too?

according to unipublic, prof. dr. burkhard stiller has just been appointed as a full professor for “distributed systems and communications” at ifi/unizh.

prof. dr. harald c. gall was appointed as an extraordinary professor in software engineering by the unizh/ifi. his current home page looks promising.

mindmanager X5 Pro for the semantic web?

if we’re talking about the “semantic web” as basically just another “non-intelligent” tool for intelligent people, then tools such as mindmanager (as any other content editing/linking tool) might indeed be helpful for building it (why shouldn’t it be? ;)

my take is (as stated earlier), that this kind of “semantic web” is possibly fine for the next say ten years or so. it’s a rather pragmatic view of the “semantic web” but as a matter of fact this view suffers from an old-fashioned approach which will never allow the “semantic web” reach a higher level than that of just being a tool. (there are many problems with the current approach such as the frame-of-reference, categorization, generalization, adaptation, symbol grounding problems, lacking emergence etc.)

if however we are interested in making things intelligent, a new approach is needed. this approach should try applying some of the principles of “new ai” (brooks, pfeifer et al.) in “virtual worlds” (true “new ai” advocates may shudder when reading this ;). i have some ideas how to start with this.

a good starting point for anybody interested in this field is “understanding intelligence“.

meanwhile there are 500 courses from 33 academic disciplines online at mit ocw. i’ve taken a glance at some courses’ lecture notes: very good stuff, thanx mit!

i’d wish every university followed this shining example.

some hours ago i’ve attended the grand opening of the center for corporate responsability and sustainability at the university of zurich. a great, very up-to-date initiative well suiting the universality of the unizh.