Inzwischen erreicht das Thema Precision Farming (oder Präziser Ackerbau bzw. Teilflächenspezifische Bewirtschaftung) auch die Massenmedien. In der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung vom 10.05.2008 ist auf Seite 20 ein Artikel mit der Überschrift Mit GPS in die Ackerfurche erschienen. Die vor allem wirtschaftlichen Vorteile von PF beim Pflügen, Düngen und bei der Aussaat werden klar herausgestellt. Auch die Möglichkeiten von Satellitenfotos werden erwähnt und die damit zu erzielenden teilweise beträchtlichen Kosteneinsparungen sind nicht zu verachten.

Hinzugefügt am 19.05.2008 Ähnlicher Artikel, etwas emotionaler, in der Wirtschaftswoche.

I feel as if I had just returned from AI-2007 (at least the expenses were paid just recently by the University) and there’s the deadline approaching for AI-2008, again held at Peterhouse College, UK.
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Ich bin ja mittlerweile leider schon einiges von Uni-Verwaltung und Behörden gewohnt. Allerdings ist es tatsächlich sehr kompliziert, beispielsweise eine Aufenthaltsgenehmigung zu bekommen, wenn man Nicht-EU-Ausländer ist. Hier der Fall: eine hochqualifizierte Gastwissenschaftlerin hat es auf Einladung unserer Arbeitsgruppe hin für elf Monate an unsere Universität verschlagen. Damit beginnt eine Odyssee, die nicht notwendig sein müßte.

Lektion 1: Bürokratischer Zirkelschluß Nun benötigt sie hier in Deutschland natürlich ein Bankkonto, um beispielsweise ihre Miete bezahlen zu können. Um das Bankkonto zu bekommen, möchten alle Banken eine Aufenthaltsgenehmigung. Um diese Aufenthaltsgenehmigung zu bekommen, braucht sie eine Krankenversicherung. Um die Krankenversicherung zu bekommen, braucht sie ein Bankkonto, von dem die Beiträge abgebucht werden können. Sehr schön, oder?

Lektion 2: Paragraphenreiterei Für die Aufenthaltsgenehmigung braucht die Ausländerbehörde den Nachweis einer Krankenversicherung. In diesem Nachweis muß explizit aufgeführt sein, daß der Versicherungsnehmer all die Leistungen erhält, die einem gesetzlich Versicherten nach §11 Abs.1-3 SGB V zustehen. Leider gibt es aber (so mein Verständnis) inzwischen EU-Rechtsprechung, die in diesem Fall entweder das SGB beinhaltet oder zumindest gleichwertig ist. Somit bestätigen die Krankenversicherer immer nur dieses EU-Recht. Nach telefonischer Auskunft der Krankenversicherung (KV) ist das aber äquivalent und somit unverständlich, warum das Amt auf diesem einen Satz besteht. Nun könnte man ja denken, daß sich die Ausländerbehörde damit zufriedengeben würde und auf die telefonische Auskunft der KV vertraut. Aber nein, es führt tatsächlich kein Weg hinein, sondern wir müssen uns jetzt damit beschäftigen, von der KV eine Bestätigung zu erhalten, daß die gesetzlichen Bestimmungen für die Aufenthaltsgenehmigung erfüllt sind. Damit wird uns an der Uni wertvolle Zeit gestohlen und den Beschäftigten bei der KV ebenso.

Sarkasmus an: Die Bürokratie kommt damit den wirklich arbeitenden Personen ziemlich in die Quere und stiehlt einfach Zeit. Könnten diese Verwaltungsangestellten nicht einfach sich den ganzen Tag lang Briefe schreiben? Von mir aus auch bei gleichem Gehalt? Damit wäre der arbeitenden Bevölkerung schon deutlich geholfen. Sarkasmus aus

Nachtrag am 16.05.2008: Es hat letzten Endes doch noch alles geklappt, aber es war immer noch deutlich zu viel Aufregung notwendig. Ich bekam aber auch einen sehr freundlichen Anruf von der lokalen Ausländerbehörde und eine kompetente Mitarbeiterin hat mir verständlich erklärt, worum es eigentlich bei den Krankenversicherungen und deren Bestätigungen geht.

Scientific American just posted an interesting article on Science 2.0, which is namely describing the use of Web2.0-techniques in scientific work. Well, I’ve somehow done that transition already with this blog. There’s also, for larger research groups, the wiki technique to enable closer collaboration. There have been earlier attempts from the MIT, called Open WetWare, which is used to

promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering.

According to the SciAm article, people publish almost all of their work in progress online, like How-Tos, intermediate results from experiments, publication discussion and so on. This is also my philosophy of working in research. It’s not publish or perish but to get into discussion or high-level arguments, receiving early feedback and promoting useful ideas and hints to other researchers.

At the moment I’m still collecting ideas for data mining of agricultural data. It looks as if it’s going to be research and experimentation with supervised learning methods on those data and, in the process, describing the data flow from the wheat field to the machine learning task and back to the field. The next paper deadline is for the AI-2008, again held at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, UK. I’ll have to sort out the content first, though.

As recent as of March 28th, another paper of my/our work on the agriculture data got accepted. The conference is the Industrial Conference on Data Mining 2008, which will be taking place not far away in Leipzig, Germany. Based on the results and the information from those conferences, I might try to submit advanced work at BCS AI-2008, which will again take place at (frosty) Peterhouse College in Cambridge, UK. I won’t be there for long, though, as offspring is already on his/her way.

Two papers of mine have been accepted recently. Both describe the process of data mining with neural networks for agriculture data. Therefore I’m quite confident that  this will be my PhD thesis‘ major point of interest. The two conferences, which also provided worthwile and in-depth reviews, are IPMU 2008, in Málaga, Spain and IFIP AI 2008 in Milano, Italy. Of course, papers have to be redacted and my presentation will have to be prepared, but it’s encouraging nevertheless.

I’m back from a research trip to Melbourne, Australia, that emanated from a successful grant application with the DAAD/GO8 under their cooperation scheme. Mine was the first trip to make and I visited the research group headed by Saman Halgamuge at the University of Melbourne. Actually, I had been working with them during my undergraduate studies for half a year in (southern hemisphere) summer 2004/2005. We made some arrangements concerning the exchange of students and research staff for 2008/2009 and my next visit is about to take place in March 2009. Of course, we (i.e. Mimi and I) also did some sightseeing and bushwalking in/on nearby Tasmania — I’m fond of that island, and it was the second time that I’ve been there. However, the time lag is ten hours at the moment, not to mention the delta T of around 30K between Magdeburg and Melbourne.

Having returned on Monday, I went back to work on Wednesday because I definitely wanted to see/hear Christian Borgelt’s lecture on Frequent Pattern Mining. The topic is quite interesting and the subtopic of Frequent Graph Mining, applied to chemical molecules, really has been worthwile to me since I’ve always been very interested in chemistry and also had chosen it as my subsidiary subject during my undergraduate studies.

There are quite a few deadlines for publications approaching in January and I will submit another paper detailing some of the recent accomplishments on the agriculture data there. One of the conferences is ICDM 2008, held in Leipzig, Germany. It targets industrial applications of data mining and I felt the paper fit in there quite nicely.

I have also received more data sets from Martin Schneider at Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg which will have to be mined. There are quite a lot of interesting tasks to be performed on those data — that requires thorough planning. I probably won’t be able to do that planning until my return from the organizational business trip to Melbourne, starting a cooperation project between our research group and the one that I worked with in 2004/2005.

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The latest experiments with the sports science data always turned out outrageously high errors which most of the time missed the scale of the original attribute by orders of magnitude. After conducting some experiments which returned negative conclusions like:

• the error is too high, therefore the network cannot be trained on these data or
• there is some tendency to overfitting when the network size and the learning rate increase, but the error is way too large anyway,

I presented the examples to the sports science people which were also quite surprised about the error’s order of magnitude. When returning back to my office, I had the sudden idea what I had actually shown in the graphs — after taking the sqrt of the mse I ended up with what I had actually wanted to show in the plots: the absolute error, i.e. the absolute of the difference between the predicted result from the network and the actual result. It’s somewhat embarrassing, anyway, but at least I know the cause of the high-error issue.

For the plot below I also got some advice from the sports science people to take out some redundant data (four columns out of 24 are more or less sums of three others each). Now the error is in a region that is more reasonable when a min/max of 841/1004 are expected for the target attribute. The plot shows error vs. the size of the first and second hidden layer of the feed-forward network, respectively.

I’ve returned from the Specialist’s Group on Artificial Intelligence of the British Computer Society’s meeting at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, UK. The event was quite worthwile, where undoubtedly the best speaker was Max Bramer himself. On Monday he gave a talk to PhD students on „How to survive a viva“. Since he often has been and will be an external supervisor or reviewer of PhD students‘ theses, he told us what he thinks is important in the thesis, how to write it, what and what not to do and so on. His talk was riddled with hilarious real examples of what he saw in thesis drafts or even final theses. That event, even featured as a free event to PhD students, was actually included for the first time at the conference before the main conference began on Tuesday.
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