Christoph Beckmann/Teaching- and Research Assistent/Computer Engineer

About

IMG 4742

Me in September 2008.

About Me

I am a end-twen-aged research- and teaching assistant at the HCI Group of the University of Bamberg and I am affilliated with the Cooperative Media Lab. I have a wide-spread field of interest in the meaning of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp), and Social Sciences.

I am strongly interested in Recommender Systems and Media Spaces, especially the bridge between computer science and social sciences for connecting groups while working and living together.

Particular Interests

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Publications

Journals and Reviewed International Conferences

Book Chapters

Misc. Publications

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Research Activities

Currently, as a research assistent at the HCI Group, I am working on the following projects:

  • DFG-Project: Recommender Systems for Group Consumption of Hedonic Media Products: Theoretic Modelling, System Development and Quality Testing. Reco Website @CML [since 04/2010, ongoing]
  • BMI-Project: TransKoop TransKoop Website [since 04/2010, ongoing]

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Teaching Activities

In the current term I am teaching the following projects/assignment sessions at the University of Bamberg:

As a teaching assistent at the BUW, I have supervised the following projects:

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Thesis

Gui What Reco

GReMo's main screen showing a
recent group recommendation.

Master's Thesis: GReMo

Recommender systems provide users with recommendations and support them when choosing between an overwhelming amount of alternatives in their everyday lives, i.e. last.fm for listening music, Amazon for buying products. These systems encompass a variety of algorithms for estimating preferences for single-users. Outstanding are collaborative filtering methods that estimate a single person's taste by the similarity in taste of other related users of the system. Users of these systems express their taste by giving ratings concerning items to the system.

GReMo: Concept and Implementation of a Mobile Group Recommender System

However, most activities or items recommended by such systems are conducted or consumed in groups, i.e. watching a movie together in a movie theatre. Consequently, the system should regard the group as a union and provide recommendations to them, instead of presenting recommendations that are dedicated to single users. This emerges several challenges addressed in this thesis, i.e. the recommendation process should consider the group's nature and its preferences.

The thesis describes the concept, implementation and development of a end-user mobile group recommender application that provides both a sophisticated group recommender interaction concept, as well as powerful merging strategies for combining individual predictions into a group recommendation. The group recommender interaction concept includes three phases: (1) negotiation preparation, (2) negotiation process, and (3) negotiation result, and is implemented in an application running on a mobile device. The merging strategies provide straightforward and group satisfaction maximisation approaches and are implemented in the group recommender system.

Supervisors

Prof. Tom Gross
Dr. Bernd Schalbe

Related

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CoLocScribe's Public Screen

Bachelor's Thesis: CoLocScribe

In spring 2008 I have received the my Bachelor's degree in Media Systems with the top-most grade of 1.0/1.0 for the Bachelor's Thesis CoLocScribe at Bauhaus-University Weimar, Germany: Defence was 16/04/2008 ~ 7.00 p.m., B11 R014

CoLocScribe: Technological Concepts and User Observation of Information Disclosure in a Mediaspace

Mediaspaces, since their first prototypes in the research field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), aim at mediating communication and providing assistance for collaboration of people working together at distributed places. Mediaspaces make of audio and video connections in order to facilitate the process of working together. However, it is still a challenge to provide an appropriate support for the absent natural communication in a mediaspace. Gesticulation, mimic, or paralanguage are self-evident in face-to-face situations, but such natural communication aspects are lacking in a mediaspace.

Additional information, provided in a mediaspace about peoples´ current working context or on working artefacts enormously contribute to the process of work in the sense of reducing the geographically affected distance and compensate for the lack of information that otherwise would be available in face-to-face settings. This provides a common understanding and the feeling of being aware of working together in a group.

This is strongly connected with information disclosure, which refers to the precise sharing of information among people. Because people want to embody themselves towards others, they want to disclose information selectively. Research on information disclosure stands for the analysis of circumstances of disclosing information to others.

This thesis presents a qualitative study for analysing information disclosure under the circumstance of co-present others in a mediaspace. Therefore a mediaspace on the base of an event-based infrastructure was built. The mediaspace, supporting video connections and providing awareness information was used by the participants of the study. Subsequently, a semi-structured interview was done and three different user types, handling information disclosure differently, were conceptualised. The three Ps as a concept will lead to further implications for further disclosure designs in mediaspaces.

Supervisors

Prof. Tom Gross
Prof. Andreas Ziemann

Related

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Student Projects

While studying at the BUW, I have done the following projects. The order of appearing is reverse chronologically.

  • SensES: Student research project in summer-term 2009
  • WiiMore: Student project in winter-term 2008/2009
  • Media Lounge: Student research project in summer-term 2008
  • Yet Another Ada File Download Utility – YAAFDU: Student project in summer-term 2008
  • CoLocScribe: Bachelor's thesis in winter-term 2007/2008
  • UbiStock: Student project in summer-term 2006
  • del.icio.us Browser: Student project in summer-term 2006
  • Network-Monitoring, Packet Capture & Analysing Tool: Student project in winter-term 2005/2006
  • Sens-ation 3: Managing Events and Context: Student research project in winter-term 2005/2006; Sens-ation 3 Website @ CML
  • PUI – Physical User Interfaces: Scenarios and Prototyping: Student project in summer-term 2005; PUI Website @ CML

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Know How

  • Programming Languages: JAVA (SE, ME), Objective-C (mainly iOS since 3.2), C++, C, SCHEME, Ada, Python, Pascal, LUA, SH
  • Web Development: PHP, Symfony, MySQL, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, JSP
  • Document Formats: XML, XML Schema, XPath, UML, RDF, OWL
  • Graphic Frameworks: OpenGL, AvangoNG
  • Platforms: Mac OS X, Windows (since 3.11), Linux (mainly gentoo and Debian)
  • Office: TEX, Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel), Pages, Keynote
  • Graphic Software: Adobe Graphics Suite (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, Lightroom), Blender
  • Tools: XCode, Quartz Composer, Matlab, Intrexx Xtreme

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Contact

HCI Group
Univeristy of Bamberg
96045 Bamberg
Germany
European Union
Phone: +49 951 863 3942

Address:

Germany
European Union

Email:

PGP Fingerprint:

Twitter: My public Twitter time line.

Facebook: My Facebook profile.

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©2007–2011 Christoph Beckmann (Last Update: 2011-10-24 19:09:16)