Stephan Karpischek defended his thesis on mobile barcode scanning and quality of product master data

Stephan Karpischek is, after Irena Pletikosa, the second the PhD student this week and my fifth in total successfully defending his thesis. Congratulations, Dr. Stephan Karpischek!
As his co-referee Sanjay Sarma from MIT could not attend in person, Stephan defended his thesis in a sophisticated conference room at ETH where we had high-quality connection to MIT. The quality of video and sound was amazing and prove that some travels can be indeed eliminated by these technologies.
Stephan outlined four contributions of his thesis: the implementation of the open-source mobile barcode scanning app my2cents.mobi [1], the proof of incorrect master data yielding lower usage of mobile apps [2], the introduction of a
method to measure correctness of product names and its application to public master data sources [3]. Additionally, Stephan also did
some remarkable analysis of user behavior of mobile bargaining [4] and developed one of the most renown Swiss apps [5] , Swisspeaks. However, both results did not really fit any more in his thesis "Mobile Barcode Scanning Applications for Consumers" (will be available in a couple of months here).
 In the Q and A section of his defense Stephan prove that roughly 2% of today's master data available in online data pools amazon, google, afili.net etc. are wrong, dillute the brand image and could yield financial losses. This result provides a fact-based justification of the GS1's emerging Trusted Source service [6] which aims at providing brand-owner approved master-data. He also gave a perspective of a future master-data monitoring service that brand-owners could use to measure their appearance and abuse of their barcodes by other parties on the network...
Stephan, it has been a great pleasure to working with you and I really enjoyed the inspiring discussion with you. I wish you good luck in your new job!

[1] S. Karpischek, F. Michahelles, E. Fleisch, my2cents – enabling research on consumer-product interaction. Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. Springer, 2011, [doi:10.1007/s00779-011-0426-9].
[2] S. Karpischek, F. Michahelles, my2cents - Digitizing consumer opinions and comments about retail products, Internet of Things 2010 Conference (IoT2010), 29 November - 1 December 2010, Tokyo, Japan.
[3] S. Karpischek, F. Michahelles, E. Fleisch, The Not So Unique Global Trade Identification Number - Product master data quality in publicly available sources (Extended Abstract). 14th International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC'12), 7 - 8 August 2012, Singapore.
[4] S. Karpischek, D. Santani, F. Michahelles, Usage Analysis of a Mobile Bargain Finder Application. 13th International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies (EC-Web 2012), 3 - 7 September 2012, Vienna, Austria.
[5] S. Karpischek, C. Marforio, M. Godenzi, S. Heuel, F. Michahelles, SwissPeaks - Mobile augmented reality to identify mountains, Let's Go Out: Research in Outdoor Mixed and Augmented Reality.  Workshop at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2009 (ISMAR 2009), 19 October 2009, Orlando, Florida, USA.
[6] GS1 Trusted Source of Data, Project Report, GS1, July 2012 [pdf]

Dr. Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, well done!

Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj has defended her PhD thesis on "Evaluation Framework for Social Media Brand Presence" (the thesis will online here in a few months from now). Irena started in 2009 with her first project about using Facebook to connect things [1]. She really got fascinated by social media and started publishing quite an impressive series of papers investigating the content users share on Facebook brandpages [2],  emotions and motivation of users to engage on such pages, effectiveness of moderator activities to increase number of fans [3,4,5], detection of trending topics on Facebook [6],  and an evaluation framework [7] summarizing her findings as best practices for practitioners (two more are under review). It is a bit ironic that Facebook has been down since her defense, I'm glad she didn't plan for a demo;)


It was again fascinating to see how single papers which appeared to be rather diverse and unrelated in the beginning, could be put together into a comprehensive and coherent thesis deriving both lessons for literature and practitioners of social media. After Mikko Lehtonen, Felix von Reischach and Erica Dubach, Irena is the fourth student receiving a PhD from our lab (the next candidate is due in a couple of days!).

I'm glad Irena will stay in our lab and start forming her own group on social media-related research within the next months.

Congralutions to your great work! Good luck, and thank you very much for the opportunity to working with you, Irena!

[1] Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, Goekmen Cetin, Stephan Karpischek, Florian Michahelles: Influence of Facebook on Purchase Decision Making, What can the Internet of Things do for the Citizen (CIoT) Workshop at The Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2010), Helsinki, Finland, May 2010 [PDF].
[2] Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, Florian Michahelles: Understanding Social Media Marketing: A Case Study on Topics, Categories and Sentiment on a Facebook Brand Page, In Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments (MindTrek '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 175-182. DOI: 10.1145/2181037.2181066. URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2181037.2181066. [PDF]
[3] A Case Study of the Effects of Moderator Posts within a Facebook Brand Page, Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, Florian Michahelles, In: Datta, Anwitaman, Shulman, Stuart, Zheng, Baihua, Lin, Shou-De, Sun, Aixin, Lim, Ee-Peng (eds.) Social Informatics. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2011, Volume 6984/2011, 161-170, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-24704-0_21. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24704-0_21 [PDF]
[4] Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, Erica Dubach Spiegler, Florian Michahelles: The Effect of Post Type, Category and Posting Day on User Interaction Level on Facebook, Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust (PASSAT '11), 2011 IEEE Third International Conference on and 2011 IEEE Third International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom '11) , pp.810-813, 9-11 Oct. 2011. DOI: 10.1109/PASSAT/SocialCom.2011.21. URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6113221&isnumber=6113084 [PDF]
[5] Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj: Usability Testing of a Facebook Brand Page, World Usability Day 2011 Slovenia, Kranj, Slovenia, 10th November 2011. [PDF]
[6] Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, Florian Michahelles: Monitoring Trends on Facebook,Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing (DASC), 2011 IEEE Ninth International Conference on, pp.895-902, 12-14 Dec. 2011. DOI: 10.1109/DASC.2011.150. URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6118886&isnumber=6118342 [PDF]
[7] Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, Florian Michahelles: Understanding the User Generated Content and Interactions on a Facebook Brand Page, , International Journal of Social and Humanistic Computing (IJSHC) Special Issue "Contemporary Social Media Topics in Business and Public Organizations", Inderscience Publishers, 2012. [PDF]

Doktorandenseminar ETH Zurich/Univ. St. Gallen

I just spent two full days at our group's (Elgar Fleisch) Doktorandenseminar. Each Ph.D. student had to present his current state of research. After three talks per session we did feedback walk-arounds such that each participant had the chance to comment - quite thrilling. I presented (slides) my understanding of research and tried to provide some lessons about publishing.
The event was very inspiring - despite spending time in the same office space we're still not of aware of all the projects going on...

Definitely a highlight were the lessons learned from Mikko Lehtonen (he just defended recently), he recommended to seek for a practical problem (motivation), start with an overview paper, circulate between own concepts and related work, design EU project reports as papers, define your stake in projects, write down your conclusions, copy from overview paper, copy from your papers - and the thesis is done! He obviously enjoyed Jakob Badram's Fish model presented at Ubicomp 2007's doctoral consortium.

There is no better way of getting a condensed view about what's going on in the brains of our twenty-something Ph.D.s and getting their views about my research in return!

Ph.D. defense of Mikko Lehtonen

Yesterday Mikko Lehtonen successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis about applying low-cost RFID against anti-counterfeiting. He derived from related research of security systems that a security budget should rather be invested in the continuity of checks than achieving a close to 100% detection rate - a way of good-enough security. Additionally, he presented three technical measures, namely TID [1]. synchronized secretes [2], and probability-based trace reasoning [3], that provided also milestones on a roadmap describing a migration path for introducing technical measures against anti-counterfeiting.
The consecutive discussion with Elgar Fleisch and Friedemann Mattern focussed much on the validity of the assumption of detection may supercede protection and was questioned by the example of credit-cards coming with security chips lately.

Despite his nervousness Mikko was brave enough to embedded a "surprise" slide explaining the two prevention strategies of protection and deterence - some may call it embarrassing, others just finnish humor...

[1] Lehtonen, M., Ruhanen, A., Michahelles, F., Fleisch, E.: Serialized TID Numbers – A Headache or a Blessing for RFID Crackers? In 2009 IEEE International Conference on RFID, Orlando, Florida, April 27-28, 2009, pp. 233 - 240.
[2] Lehtonen, M., Ostojic, D., Ilic, A., Michahelles, F., : Securing RFID Systems by Detecting Tag Cloning. In proceedings of H. Tokuda et al. (Eds.): 7th International Conference, Pervasive 2009, Nara, Japan, May 11-14, 2009. LNCS 5538, pp. 291–308.
[3] Lehtonen, M., Michahelles, F., Fleisch, E.: How to Detect Cloned Tags in a Reliable Way from Incomplete RFID Traces. In 2009 IEEE International Conference on RFID, Orlando, Florida, April 27-28, 2009, pp. 257 - 264.