[personal rave & rants]
I’ve been traveling around for the last month or so and finally it came to an end. I’ve been in grenoble, Japan, Geneva, Zurich (okay - that’s home). I was supposed to blog for a while but kinda… forgot. Actually, I was busy with lots of things in particular I’m struggling with clearly defining a topic for my phd thesis and write a proposal according to it. The problem is that I don’t find a small enough topic that I could develop, because I have too many interest, and I always come up with new ideas and topics I could (I would like) to work on and I don’t want to title my thesis as “the world: models and evaluation” or “everything about mobile, interaction, web, physical computing etc.: theory and practice”.
It’s especially not very easy for me to totally get rid of my previous life, where I was working in interaction with robots, as I’m personally fond of that topic. So I always seem to try to include some adaptive, learning, physical interaction thingies, and so on. Additionally, I’m spending lots of time trying to keep up with new things about mobile devices, embedded systems and sensor networks, physical computing, interaction design, and… my human life too.
The hardest challenge for now in my opinion is to find a topic that both satisfies my academic me (that is my personal interests of my group at ETH - ubicomp in general with many many different aspects of it) and my professional me at SAP where we have a clearly defined project (SOCRADES) that is concerned with integrating physical devices (shop-floor machines in a manufacturing plant) with high-level business oriented application as for example enterprise resource planning (ERP) or supply chain management (SCM) software, which is basically what SAP does. The main idea is that big companies would profit a lot from bridging their IT systems and business process with the real world, and having quasi “real-time” visibility in the whole supply chain (to inform the process of things like “does my supplier have parts I need right now or should I ask somebody else” or “is there blue paint left”). This is just a little example, but *many* processes could become much more flexible and efficient if they incorporate such information (which means, you know… $$$).
More to follow, especially that makes me think that I’m supposed to document my work more in detail soon (and update my projects/research page because it’s like ooooold).
