Learn Project Management in 15 Minutes

This is the title of the free offer by Bar de Baas, the owner of my preferred project management website, SoftwareProjects.Org, actually the only one I have selected the RSS feed of and bookmarked because of the quality of the content. The title sounds like one of those hit and flashy larketing slogans for cheap books. But this shouldn't drive you in an error, underestimating the author and hos website might be a big one. The page to learn project management in 15 minutes contains three videos that'll introduce you to the conceptions of the author about project management. Bas de Baar also has several books to the topics and many many posts on the topic on his dedicated website. I am sure you'll enjoy some pretty entertaining and informative views on project management.

Marwane El Kharbili

Stevens Institute of Technology joins IDS Scheer's Innovation & Education Network

Not much to say, listen to this interview of Prof Michael zur Muehlen on Stevens Institute of Technology being one of 2 canadian intitutions part of the currently 8-members strong IDS Innovation & Education network.


Source: http://howe.stevens.edu/index.php?id=124

Marwane El Kharbili

IBM Buys ILOG

Sandy Kemsley was again faster than me and reported on the press releases by IBM and ILOG saying that IBM will buy ILOG for 340$ million. One independant BRM vendor is not independant any more. The difference between the acquisition of YASU by SAP and the one of ILOG by IBM is that ILOG is one of the leaders in BRM and has a big number of partnerships in the industry and with BPM vendors in particular.

Marwane El Kharbili

Some Python IDEs

Following a discussion with some colleagues about python, I decided to write a short article about it. I have the feeling not many Python fans are around, honestly I can't understand it, but again this judgment is highly subjective, since I pretty much like everything about the language, including the syntax and tabs interpretation, all available data structures, the flexible object orientation, dynamic typing, readability, the many libraries to do pretty much anything, the possibility to embed components written in other languages such as C and TKinter. And if you are not convinced, have a look at Zope, Plone and Peak. If you've been using internet in the last 10 years, you can't have missed on these.

One of the main critics of one of my colleagues was that he didn't know of a suitable IDE for developing python programs. that annoyed me somewhat since I know of many, which are even both free and open-source, at least in some versions. My preferate IDE was alway SPE's Python IDS. You can download it here. I have been developing on SPE for 3 years now, although not much in later time because of lack of time. SPE offers you pretty much everything you expect from an IDE, no need to list them all. Just download it, install it and test some scripts and classes. You can even try to quickly write some graphical user interfaces using TKinter or WxWidgets. Here is a website where you can get started although I personally have started using the official page, which documentation I find very well done. And hop, another link to a repository of open source software written in python repository. Python is fun!

Marwane El Kharbili.

10 research Positions open

At the HPI in Potsdam in Germany, there are 8 positions for PhD students and 2 Postdocs that are open now. You'll find the detailed announcement here:

http://kolleg.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/

mention is given of the approached topics and the salary.

Good luck to whom it may be of interest.

Marwane El Kharbili

ESWC - Part III

And the last part of this post series will be dedicated to something I am really fed of, and that is something you'll inevitably see in any conference or symposium yo go to: Poor presentation skills, poor speaking skills and oh my god poor slides! I have just gathered some of the (to my opinion) worst errors that are done again and again by people. Of course, most of these are young researchers but also the elderly and some of the established ones do the same errors:

Capital Error I: Slides are overloaded...this is the most common one, people try to make books fit on one single slide, this can be no good.

Capital Error II: People rarely use schemata or images to explain complex ideas. Instead, they rather have 3 slides with 15 lines of text on each..no need to say that anyone gets lost. This is why at the end of presentations you get questions that should have been clearly answered by the presentation such as: "why are you doing this?"...

Capital Error III: people just do not establish any contact with the audience, they just talk, do their thing and go. Just as some people are brilliant about writing papers (because there are precise techniques for this, that I still have to learn to get more papers accepted :D), they just do not care about presenting them well. The worst example of this is when hosts just speak for like 2 or 3 minutes (this is a lot of time believe me) while turning their back to the audience and looking at the screen. The ones who look the audience in the eyes and are able to check if people are following are not legions...

Capital Error IV: Slides are mostly hardly readable, either because the font used is too small, because slides are overloaded, because figures are too big and complex or because there are none, sometimes figures are not even explained. Imagine one attendee seeing a new slide with a super revolutionary graphic popping up and the host explaining things without making any reference to any part of the graphic. I know this too well because I used to make the same error in my papers, but now I am at least explaining my figures explicitly. Unfortunately I found no clear guide out there telling you how to write a good paper, it seems like some dark secret science that only professors are giving up to their best PhD students..when they have time.

Capital Error V: also, the stance usually taken by people, if they are not forced to stand somewhere because of a microphone for example, is not always the best. People sometimes hide completely the screen to half the audience, look the hole time on their laptop to read their slides (litterally) or something else.

Anyways, this was no inventory of bad presentation errors, this was simply what I noted while attending the conference. But it made me aware that I must have lots of things I may not be conscious about neither that I have to learn in order to achieve my goal of becoming a good presenter one day. So I will start looking for some resources on the net and watch carefully the videos of presentations by experienced people. I would also appreciate any help guys , you are welcome to help out here.

Marwane El Kharbili

ESWC - Part II

I know this is a very strange post here, since it had to be written one month ago now, as I was still at the ESWC conference in teneriffe. But the things being what hey already are, I have decided to still publish it.Here is the content:

"Now a week after I left Teneriffe, here is the rest of my report about the conference. Here I will tell a bit about the interesting talks I have heard, the demos I have seen and the poster sessions where I could ask deeper questions about some tools such as Nepomuk, WSMX and the WSMT.

First of all many presentations were about searches in triple stores. If one knows that the semantic language that is most widely used is still RDF, one can understand that. Ususally, the most simple things are the best accepted by people, and scientists are no exception. So RDF triples are stored in repositories and retrieving and querying information is all about searching these triple stores. So no wonder that there were several tracks precisely tackling this and other related issues. Pure semantic web is not really my area of predilection, even if I always keep an eye on the advances reached in this field. I didn't visit those talks.

What I was very much interested into however, was everything that has something to do with sws (semantic web services) in a first place, and with inference engines in a second place. For inference engines...I'll make it short, I only got one 10 minutes long presentation in the demo session of day two of the conference about some probablistic extension to an existing OWL-DL inference engine....the idea seems nice bt you ain't becoming an expert by listening to such shorties..I guess my journey deep into inference engines is going to take me some time and cost me lots of energy, since I will have to learn it alone (as always). But I would really appreciate any help guys, really :D

I attended several talks about semantic web services which essentially explain the advances made in the main tools currently existing with the WSMO framework. Those tools were also presented during the demo session that took place in the first 2 days of the conference from 19:00 till 20:00. I had the opportunity to talk to many developers on those research tools and I particularly liked the new things done in the new WSMX environment, in the WSMT tool (Web Service Modeling Toolkit) concurrent of the WSMO Studio and the service discovery functionalities of the Maestro tool. In the SUPER research project, we use the WSMO studio as a platform for implementation and also for modeling our ontologies in WSML.

I also attended talks which present new ontologies. The two that I liked most were the business process analysis ontology (by colleagues from the SUPER project) and the a software model that takes an MDA approach to the SDLC by the guys over at the SAP CEC in Dresden. I ask some questions to the host of the first talk and decided that I would read both papers. The reason for this is simple, everybody in research is by nature curious about a lot of things, but nobody has the time to cover even an infinite part of the things that sound interesting. So researchers are particularly selective about what they read. It is publish or perish but the reverse side of the medallion is "Read it in the morning if you''ll need it in the evening". I want to first have an idea about how to write a good paper to present a new ontology (and conferences are particularly selective when it comes to ontologies because there is just an explosion of them) and an unpublished ontology is not recognized by anybody in the community. The second reason is that I have very similar ideas to the ones presented in the second ontology but right now, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is not my focus, I am concentrating on BPM. However, the MDA ideas and concepts developed by this community are always similar to those needed in the more software oriented BPM community.

I must also say that I was very much impressed by the demos of the tools coming out of the nepomuk project, which seeks to develop a semantic desktop. the reason for this is that tese guys just decided to illustrate all their concepts by integrating many of them into the newest release of the Gnome system, a desktop layer for Linux distributions. I watched and discussed some of the tools with the guys and I think it is really the bedtest for future development software inresearch on social semantic desktops and interfaces in general. Or you guys will have to do at least as good as the nepomuk guys.

Marwane El Kharbili

Reaction on EDM/BPM

This is my reaction to the post by James taylor on his blog "Smart Enough Systems" entitled:
Here's why to use decision management not just process management. I have been reading the blog since quite a long time now and must acknowledge that I haven't read the book yet, althoug I have only heard good things about this book. Now to the matter, it is about Enterprise decision Management (EDM) (in extenso BRM= Business Rules Management) and Business process Management (BPM). Please read the post by james first otherwise my answer will be hard to understand. Now here is my reaction:

Thanks for this post and the comments on the ARIS blog. I just wanted to insist on the fact that the synergy between BRM and BPM can only help optimize the business itself and that the community at this stage is not anymore trying to motivate the use of BRM in processes anymore (everybody now sees this and that explains the flourishing of posts on the blogosphere about BRM), it is rather trying to develop concrete methodologies or at least approaches to support such a synergy. Business rules are used all the time in business processes (and not simply in workflows, I insist on this point and will get back to this later). It is just unmanageable to have them all completely or at least partly hard-coded in processes. Moreover, this leads to inconsistencies in the processes themselves, either through inconsistencies in the definition of the business rules, or because of a lack of efficient BR management techniques/tools to make sure changes to the business processes and/or to the rules are done while keeping the business process working correctly. This is even more critical when having a real process-oriented organization (of which there are more and more) which actually really deploys executable versions of its business processes, here, there is even less place for inconsistencies.

The second point I wanted to insist on is that BRM suffers from the same problems (although to less extent) that BPM suffers from. People understand under BRM either the language used to formalize rules or the underlying BRE (business rules engine) responsible for the interpretation and enforcement of the rules. BRM is (a lot) more than that, be it just because of all the methodological aspects it contains. If BRM is to be eficiently allied to BPM, it is going to be done on a methodological and paradigma layer, and not on any technological or system layer. It was in fact a comment to James' post that rminded me of this observation. As a parallel, BPM suffers from the fact that many people link it to a concrete BPMS, vendor, or worse, to workflows. typically, the most interesting and complex rules involve enterprise artifacts, humans, etc. that have nothing to do with workflows.

I will get back to this matter in future posts, but I think the post by james and the one by Kai-Uwe give quite a good idea about what the question really is about.

Marwane El Kharbili.