The project Haptimap started in September with a Kick-off Meeting in Lund in Schweden. The project is funded by the EU under the 7th framework programme with 6.7 Mio. EUR. The focus of the four-year project is to make geographic and location based service that are accessible for all. In addition to visualizations of maps the researchers will develop on non-visual presentation and interaction methods such as the hearing and smelling of spatial data in different stiuations. The project will be coordinated by the University of Lund in Sweden. Further partners in addition to the OFFIS - Institute of Information Technoloy are Navteq, Siemens, BMT Group, CEA, ONCE, Finnish Geodetic Institute, University of Glasgow, Queen’s University, Fundacion Robotiker, Region Soest and the City of Lund. (www.haptimap.org)

On February 19th 2008, a new working group on tangible interaction in mixed realities (in German Be-greifbare Interaktion in Gemischten Wirklichkeiten) was established as part of the German Computer Science Society (GI). Wilko Heuten from our team participated in the founding event. About 30 people from all over Germany gathered at B-IT in a pre-conference event to TEI’08. The group was interdisciplinary, including computer science, design, psychology, and pedagogic. The diversity of research projects as well as teaching programs in Germany in impressive.

End of October 2007 we had the first review meeting of the Network of Excellence Intermedia in Madrid in Spain. In this NoE we seek to progress beyond home and device-centric convergence toward truly user-centric convergence of multimedia. The project InterMedia seeks progress beyond home and device-centric convergence toward truly user-centric convergence of multimedia. The vision is The User as Multimedia Central. In this three day event we also had an Open Forum Day with guest speakers Prof. Tat-Seng Chua from NUS, Dr. Michael Berger from Siemens AG and Prof. Enhua Wu from The University of Macau.

A long friendship became a partnership: The Oldenburg OFFIS-Institute für Information Technolog and the Technology Center Computer Sciende (TZ) in Bremen both are the biggest research institutes in Information and Communication Technology in Bremen and the state of Lower Saxony. In future these wo institutes will work much closer together. With the foundation of „OFFIS-TZI“ as an registered association the cooperation of the two institutes is intensified and its visibility increased.

Niels Henze presents our paper on "AuditoryPong – Playing PONG in the Dark" at this year's Audio Mostly, the 2nd Conference on Interaction with Sound, September 27-28, which provides a venue to explore the untapped potential of audio by bringing together audio experts, content creators, interaction designers, and behavioral researchers.

On March 26, the Minister of Lower Saxony for Science and Culture Lutz Stratmann has launched „C3World – Connected Cars in a Connected World“ for a joint research group of Volkswagen and Niccimon, the Competence Center of Lower Saxony for information system for mobile usage.

Wilko Heuten presents his research on "Interactive Exploration of City Maps with Auditory Torches" at 2007's CHI conference in May. In our presentation, we show an an interactive auditory city map, which uses 3D non-speech sound to convey the position, shape, and type of geographic objects. For the interactive exploration of the auditory map, we designed different interaction methods to build a mental model of a spatial environment and allow blind and visually impaired people to access map information. We had the pleasure of Ben Shneiderman visiting our stand and exploring the city maps himself. See more about our demo and CHI 2007 under our Auditory Maps at CHI 2007 event.

The aim of the GI Dagstuhl Research Seminar "Software Development Methodologies for Mobile Applications" was to systematically analyze the state of the art in this evolving area and to identify research challenges. To achieve this goal, we invited young researchers that are either just starting off in this area or have established some expertise to contribute to this seminar. Some more informaton about the event at Seraja..

Media Informatcis and OFFIS were participating in the Dorkbots event in Oldenburg. The Edith Russ Haus for Media Arts organized the event. We presented the AuditoryPong game.

The 1st International Workshop on Semantic-enhanced Multimedia Presentation Systems (SEMPS) aims to explore how Semantic Web technologies can be applied to Multimedia Presentation Systems in order to support Internet-based delivery of user and context personalised, rich media-based Web presentations and new innovative types of online service. The workshop took place in Athens, Greece in December 2006 along with the First International Conference on Semantics And digital Media Technology (SAMT). You may also follow the event and further comments on it at our SEMPS Event Page at SEraja.

Andreas Butz is a professor in Media Informatics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich. He visited our research group on December 4h 2006. We spent the time presenting our lab demos and discussing interesting ongoing research in both our groups. In our deparment's research colloquium he gave an interesting talk on "Interaction with Computer and Media in our Environment".

Susanne Boll moderated a panel on the International Conference on Multimedia in Santa Barbara. I was discussing the topic of "Multimedia and Web 2.0: Hype, Challenge, Synergy" with the panelists Edward Chang from Google, Marc Davis from Yahoo! Research, and Patrick Schmitz from U.C. Berkeley School of Information. The panelists were discussing the potentials and challenges that the multimedia community offers to Web 2.0 and vice versa, and discussed from the different perspectives where the chances might not have been appreciated and pursued so far where the fields could be a source of inspiration for each other. For further information see also our event description at Seraja'sMultimedia EventWeb Multimedia and Web 2.0 Panel at ACM Multimedia.

Wilko Heuten presented our paper on "Interactive 3D Sonification for the Exploration of City Maps" at this year's NordiCHI 2006 Conference in Oslo. Wilko also gave a life demonstration of the system that allows an non-speech auditory exploration of city maps.

Ansgar Scherp, who has been an member of our group for some years as defended his PhD thesis with great success and graduated with distinction. The title of his thesis is "A component framework for personalized multimedia applications". We congratulate him and wish him te very best for his Marie Curie Outgoing Fellowship as post doc on the research area of emergent semantics during which he currently spends a year at UC Irvine.

In this kolloquium the topic was discussed "Capturing Lectures – experiences of lecturere and students"Capture (german) of the presentation and discussione in Realmedia report on the radio Deutschlandfunk in the series Campus and Career (in German.)

ICCHP Conference 2006 Mirko Horstmann from the University of Bremen presented the paper on "Automatic Annotation of Geographic Maps" at the International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs in Linz on July 14, 2006. The paper presents the results of a cooperation of TZI, Bremen and OFFIS, Oldenburg.

„Ada Lovelace Memorial Celebration“ 2006 Susanne Boll gave the Ada Lovelace Memorial Lecture on „Informatik für alle Sinne – Navigation und Orientierung zum Hören und Fühlen“ (Informatics for all senses - navigation and orientation that can be heard and felt). Friday, June 30, University of Hannover, Germany.

In May the Kick-off meeting of our EU project POPEYE (Professional Peer Environment Beyond Edge Computing) was held in Paris. POPEYE focuses on supporting dynamic spontaneous collaborative group working environments with autonomous coordination and knowledge management support.

	Poster CombiTag at PerGames 2006

The Pervasive Games Workshop addresses the design and technical issues of bringing computer entertainment back to the real world with pervasive games and is helf in conjunction with PERVASIVE. At the 2006 workshop Dublin we presented our Poster "CombiTag - playing multimedia memory in our physical environment". Interesting event, interesting papers, interesting persons met!

Presentation of an acoustic game

The program of the annual meeting of the university professors of the German Computer Association, April 9-12, 2006 was dedicated to "Human-Centered Engineering/Ambient Intelligence". Susanne Boll presented our research work on "Non-intrusive Auditory and Haptic User Interfaces for Navigation and Orientation".

This year, Niccimon (the competence center of Lower Saxony for information systems for mobile usage) organized WPNC for the third time. Right after CeBIT 2006 the workshop bring together research and industry from the fields of information and communication technology. This year our former student Jason Martin is presenting our paper on "Dynamic GPS-position correction for mobile pedestrian navigation and orientation"

We attended the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME) July 6 -8, 2005, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and presented our paper on "Night Scene Live - a multimedia application for mobile revellers on the basis of a hybrid network, using DVB-H and IP Datacast". For more information about the conference see the ICME 2005 conference Web site.

Susanne Boll gave an invited talk at CIVR on "Image and Video Retrieval from a User-Centered Mobile Multimedia Perspective", July 20, 2005, Singapore For further information about the conference see the CIVR 2005 conference Web site.

At Multimedia 2005 we saw an interesting set of papers, posters and demos in the fields of multimedia analysis, processing, and retrieval, Multimedia networking and systems support, Multimedia tools, end-systems, and applications. Susanne Boll presented our demo on "xSmart - Context driven smart authoring of multimedia content" For more information about the conference see the ACM Multimedia 2005 conference site. Also see this event at Seraja's Multimedia EventWeb ACM Multimedia 2005

	Silvia Pfeifer(l) und Susanne Boll

Dr. Silvia Pfeiffer from CSIRO ICT Centre, Australia visited our group and gave a presentation at 4. Juli 2005: "In the Continuous Media Web project www.annodex.net standards and technology have been developed to make audio-visual content a first class citizen on the Web. A HTML-equivalent markup language to enable such hyperlinking from a media resource to other Web resources has been introduced: the Continuous Media Markup Language (CMML).

Mobile position aware systems combined with modern wireless technologies are getting more and more important. When developing systems of this kind, problems in various fields of information and communication technology need to be solved. The workshop shall give an overview of state-of-the art approaches and systems. In this context the expert talk will focus on the upcoming ultra-wideband technology.March 17/18, 2004, Hanover, Germany.

For more details on the workshop see the WPNC workshop site

S. Boll (Universität Oldenburg, DE), T.-S. Chua (National University of Singapore, SG), N. Dimitrova (Philips Labs. - Briarcliff Manor, US), R. Jain (Georgia Institute of Technology, US) March 1-4, 2005, Dagstuhl Castle, Germany. More information under the Dagstuhl seminar page

8. Workshop des GI-Arbeitskreises "Mobile Datenbanken und Informationssysteme"

28.02.2005 im Rahmen der BTW 2005 in Karlsruhe.

Weitere Einzelheiten finden Sie auf den Workshopseiten

Ansgar Scherp presented our paper on "Paving the Last Mile for Multi-Channel Multimedia Presentation Generation" on the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling at 12-14 Jan 2005 in Melbourne, Australia. For more information about the conference see the MMM2005 conference Web page

Invited Talk, Informatik Kolloqium of the Technischal University of Brunsvick, Germany, 10. Januar 2005

Further information on the talk under (in German)here (in German).

Part of the SPIE Annual Symposium Electronic Imaging.

The goal of this new conference is to provide an international forum for presenting recent research results on multimedia for mobile devices, and to bring together experts from both academia and industry for a fruitful exchange of ideas and discussion on future challenges. January 16-20, 2005, San Jose, CA, USA. For more information on the conference and the program see the conference web site

M. Dunham (SMU - Dallas, US), B. König-Ries (Univ. Karlsruhe, DE), E. Pitoura (Univ. of Ioannina, GR), P. Reiher (Univ. California - Los Angeles, US), C. Türker (ETH Zürich, CH) October 24-29, 2005, Dagstuhl Castle, Germany. Susanne Boll participated in this interesting Dagstuhl seminar. More information about the seminar and its topics can be found under the Dagstuhl seminar page

Mobile Systems based on state-of-the-art wireless technologies and all-new terminals are getting more and more important. When developing systems of this kind, problems of various fields of IT and communications technology need to be solved. In the scope of the workshop an overview shall be given about state-of-the art approaches and systems.

March 26, 2004, Hanover, Germany.

For more details on the workshop see the WPNC workshop site