Modules/Courses taught at Münster
Courses since Summer 2013
Please check the lab teaching page and LearnWeb.
Winter 2012
Summer 2012
- Location-Based Services
- Introduction to Programming Location-Based Services
- HCI and Usability Engineering
- Study project on Flashmob Toolkit
- Introduction to Research Methods and Skills
Winter 2011
- Einführung in die Geoinformatik
- Introduction to Research Methods
- Study project on Alternate Reality Game Engine
- Study project on Open Floor Maps
Summer 2011
- Advanced Research Methods and Skills (seminar)
- Human Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering (lecture/seminar)
- Implementation of an Indoor Navigation System (project)
- GIS Grundkurs (practical, in German)
Modules taught at Newcastle
2006-2011
- CSC1015: The IT Professional in Today's Society
- CSC2512: Information Handling
- CSC3203: Artificial Intelligence for Games
- CSC3503: Graphical Interfaces
- CSC3095: Project and Dissertation
- CSC8501: Programming for Games
- CSC3503: Advanced Graphical Interfaces
MSc and PhD topics
I am always looking for students wanting to do a MSc or a PhD under my supervision. My research page should give you a good idea about my expertise and interests; we also maintain a list of open topics at the lab. If there is anything on that page that you find interesting, drop me a line and we can have a chat.
Useful links
Here are a number of links that point to some pages providing information about how to read and write research papers.
- a guide to how to present a research paper
- how to read a research paper
- a great article on how to write a good 'systems' paper
- a paper on how to evaluate UI systems research
- what is good academic/scientific practice?
The second link only talks about reading a physical piece of paper. There are of course many more sites talking about how to do research etc. - this site has a large list of links in this area.
Of course you can apply the system suggested by the author to PDFs and annotation software as well. In fact, regardless of whether you print out papers or read them on the screen, I would strongly recommend to keep a list on your computer. I use BibDesk and Skim for this purpose.
There are three sites that I recommend for searching for academic papers:
- Google Scholar is Google's search engine tailored to academics; it's fast and comprehensive and provides citation counts. In my experience, it tends to overestimate the number of citations and might also return a lot of irrelevant papers.
- Citeseer has been around for a long time. It is a bit less slick than Google and not as comprehensive - and it can be slow. It does however have a more accurate citation count (in my experience).
- DBLP is specialised on computer science but it is fantastic to browse conferences or all the papers a specific author has written. Not as complete as either of the other two it is however were well structured and easy to navigate.
- Open Access Search Engines is a (small) directory of search engines that specifically look at open access outlets, which are becoming more important (which is a very good thing!).
There are quite a few other sites, which you may also find helpful. Here are a few more examples that others have recommended in the past:
- Confsearch has some similarities to DBLP
- Academic Research @ Microsoft
- arnetminer provides a neat overview of various sources and bibliometrical values
- Youtube isn't really the best place to go look for references but this video gives a good overview of how (not) to deal with other people's work ;)
Besides the Library, there are also electronic libraries you can access online (at least from the Campus Network):
- ACM Digital Library: one of the biggest digital libraries in Computer Science
- IEEE Digital Library: the 'other' big digital CS Library
- Ye olde author home page: most researchers in CS have a home page, where they provide PDFs of their papers
Not really teaching related but ...
... worthwhile watching nevertheless (e.g. when you hit the why-o-why question or are in the midst of writing up):
- Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Speech 2005: it's not so much about Apple but more about life (and death)
- Randy Pausch's last lecture: achieving your childhood dreams
- Nice little cartoon about how ideas can be 'bred': somewhat commercial (pitch for a book)
- Interesting spin on how to create (programs)
- How to be successful in 3 mins
- Personal Kanban (time management)