Category Archives: Teaching

Presentation on “Visual Information Retrieval”

Tomorrow Iā€™m an invited speaker at Graz University of Technology in the course on “Applications of Knowledge Management” of Markus Strohmaier. Iā€™ll talk about Visual Information Retrieval featuring the Semantic Gap and a round-up of low level features and indexing strategies. Looking forward to this event as I really like these overview presentations šŸ˜€

Best of compiler construction

In general one should not post errors of other … but well I just give the best answers, no questions, no names … and of course: itā€™s a good laugh šŸ˜€

Notation for describing graphs is not quite clear to some people. I also miss the mother nodes: […] nodes in the dependency graph are depending on father nodes, sister nodes and brother nodes […]

Asking for advantages and disadvantages of a certain approach I got within the same answer: […] advantage: program is faster, disadvantage: program would be slower […]

Please note that I assume that these answer come out of the stress of the people writing the test and not the missing knowledge.

Games implementation week for high school students

Today an activity week for high school students at Klagenfurt University ended. The high school students chose a topic and worked a week on an implementation. Due to the success of our computer games course there was a topic on computer games. The two university students, Christian and Daniel, who instructed and helped the high school students throughout the whole week, did a very good job and several impressive arcade games were implemented within the week.

For me it was great to see what interested high school students can manage in one week. Iā€™ll remember and tell students in my course about it šŸ™‚

Finding duplicate code …

I recently found myself in a scenario, where I tried to figure out how implementation clusters have been implicitly created within a group of students. All of them were given a task (with 4 sub tasks) for a whole semester. Everyone was meant to do the task alone, but collaboration was allowed. However I needed to know who helped whom and - of course - who helped whom with source code.

A colleague had a similar problem and he pointed me to PMD CPD (= PMD Copy & Paste Detector) . This tool works lightning fast and has a GUI šŸ™‚ Also its open source -> respect!

Links:

  • http://pmd.sourceforge.net/cpd.html

Compute Games Course @ Klagenfurt University: Project Presentations

The computer games course at Klagenfurt University comes to an end tomorrow and all the studentsā€™ projects will be presented. The very best project (voted for by the audience) gets an XBox 360, sponsored by Microsoft. Iā€™m very happy to announce also an industry talk of Stefan Berger, Product Manager of JoWood (11am-12am). The event takes place from 9.30 am to ~5 pm in HS 1 at Klagenfurt University. Feel free to join the audience.

Links:Ā 

  • Detailed program (scroll down a bit)
  • JoWood

Computer games lecture update: Industry talks

As already blogged we offer this semester a course on computer game development at Klagenfurt University. Now three industry talks are confirmed:

  • Stefan Berger fromĀ  JoWooD Productions Software AG will talk about game development projects discussing aspects of conceptual work, project management specifics in game dev industry, resources, marketing and QA.
  • Andreas Olipitz from OSIOS Online Platforms GmbH will talk about multiplayer games on the browser platform. OSIOS develops such a multiplayer game: Project Deep Space.
  • Microsoft will also send a speaker and has sponsored an XBox for the best student project.

All the talks as well as the presentation of the students projects will take place on June 20, 2008. If you are somewhere around Klagenfurt and you like to join us (without being enrolled) drop me a mail in advance šŸ™‚

Courses in Summer Semester 2008

Semester started yesterday and therefore also the courses. This semester Iā€™m lecturer and coordinator for 3 courses:

  • Multimedia Information Systems - My very own course focusing on Multimedia Retrieval and content based analysis. Takes place 2nd time now, was quite a success the first time: Students and me were satisfied with the agenda of the course and the project results. Find more about it here.
  • PR Compiler Construction - A practical course on the basics of compilers to support the compiler construction lecture. There is also a tutorial helping with the implementation tasks of the practical course. Find more information here.
  • Computer Games - A first try with my colleague Horst Pichler to create a new course on computer game development bringing together the knowledge of the faculty. While we only had 30 free places in the course and the first lesson will be next week we expect ~ 90 students, which is quite a lot for not mandatory courses in Klagenfurt. Find out more here.

Learning how to program with Scratch

At the CSKGOI workshop Ian Eslick presented ScratchTalk, a system which creates programs from natural language input. It is based on Scratch, which is an animation framework with a visual program language. Scratch has been developed at the MIT and is used to teach kids how to program. It is rather easy to create a small side scroller game with easy graphics so I think I might give it a try in my teachings (e.g. in ā€œIntroduction to computer scienceā€ for students from social science).