New Directions in ICT Conference April 24th, 2002 Telematica Institute, Enschede Trip Report by Lloyd Rutledge This conference was set up by the TI with invited speakers AND invited guests. Being a lady of clout, Lynda was invited to attend. Being a lady with better things to do, she asked if I could attend in her place. They answered "No, no substitutes", but then a few days before the conference sent me an information packet anyway, so off I went. Almost everyone there had a suit and tie. Almost all exceptions were women. (Me? I wear my tie on the *inside*. Maybe they do to when they aren't giving conferences.) TI gives a very business conference, suits, nice catering, fresh flowers. Fresh salmon for lunch (no CWI krokets in Newton Hall). Filled in the image of an institute that puts a Dutch business face on research. It was well organized and orchestrated. The first session was about 7 lesser experts giving 10 slideshows on their view of new directions, including CWI's own Han la Poutre (agents) and our TI buddy Daan Velthaus (media indexing and retrieval). The three main session were each one greater expert giving his view. Colin Harrison of IBM Zurich did e-learning. Reinhard Opperman of Fraunhofer did UI. Per Brand of the Swedish Institute of CS did distributed systems. Following these was a general discussion session, which had these themes: - the world is getting more complex - we must hide as much complexity from each as possible individual but putting processes elsewhere - "There's no replacement for the teacher", though there's still heaps of room for the computer The final session was everyone splitting off into theme-based groups. Mine was "Content Engineering", with talks by Mettina Veenstra and Daan Velthaus. They discussed their GigaportCE stuff. Big project. Mostly stuff we've seen before for many years, as one attendee from IBM said during quesioning, but then maybe TI is happily and usefully a packager of research for business rather than "new" research. Which isn't to say that Mettina isn't interested in new research. We had some chats during the day about a proposal her group is writing for an as-good-as-already-accepted project funding some of them and, starting in June, half of me. People Mettina works with, Soren, a post-doc, and Martin, a student, also get funded. I'll talk on the phone this coming Friday about the proposal. For the rest of the week that I return from Hawaii, I can help them wrap it up. Basically, Soren writes up how he, Martin and me all get to research what we want and in the end it can be packaged up with the right e-learning-friendly buzzwords. Fortunately, we all want to research more or less the same stuff. Soren wants to meta-package media objects for applicability to all potential generated presentation. Martin is a student of Paul de Bra's.